News: It's Open Access Week!

Open Access Week 2014 begins today.  Its aim is to promote "Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research."  So what exactly is Open Access (OA)? Literature that is OA is defined as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." The primary target of the Open Access movement is the peer-reviewed research that is reported in scholarly journals. Articles in these journals cannot be accessed without a subscription and/or cannot be widely shared due to copyright restrictions.

To overcome these barriers, authors can make their articles open access by either
1) depositing their work in an open access archive or repository (“green OA”), or
2) publishing in an open access journal (“gold OA”).

I plan to discuss these and other OA concepts this week, and introduce a new resource that hopefully will benefit the forced migration research community.

In the meantime, you can find additional information in these very useful materials compiled by Peter Suber, a leading open access advocate:

• A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access 
• Open Access Overview (the longer version of the above) 
• Open Access (the site for Suber's definitive book, with updates)

Tagged Publications and Events & Opportunities.