Open Access Week

From October 23 to 29, the University Libraries are celebrating International Open Access Week 2023. Open Access (OA) is a global movement to make academic research articles, books, and data available online at no cost to readers and, increasingly, at no cost to authors.  

This year’s OA week theme is Community over Commercialization. When scholars in the US and EU refer to OA publishing, they often think of publishers charging authors fees to make their work freely available online. Those author fees are prohibitively expensive for anyone without substantial funding. A typical article processing charge (APC) is $3,000, while a book processing charge (BPC) may reach $10,000. Today, however, there is a growing movement away from the APC and BPC. Leading university presses and scholarly societies are moving towards collective action funding models rather than commercially profitable individual author fees.  

Each day this week, the Libraries will highlight one OA resource or initiative, with an emphasis on cooperatively funded approaches to OA. Look out for posts about OA publishing at Mason, OA options for the humanities and social sciences, the growing importance of OA monographs, and the latest information about the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s 2022 memo on public access to federally funded research. 

For more information about Open Access publishing at Mason, please contact your subject librarian or reach out to Emilie Algenio, Open Educational Resources and Scholarly Communications Librarian, at ealgenio@gmu.edu.