Open Access is an international movement that has the goal of making peer-reviewed published scholarship available free of charge to the public and to the global scholarly community.
For additional reading about open access in general we recommend Wikipedia's well-referenced Open Access article.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has released a "Landscape Analysis" by publishing industry analyst Claudio Aspesi, examining recent shifts in scholarly publishing, particularly away from content provision, towards data analytics.
KU Libraries and the Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright are pleased to offer programs in support of Open Access Week, an international event to advance and celebrate openness in the academy.
Last March, Congress authorized $5M to support Open Educational Resources, to be administered by the Department of Education.
The newest iteration of the Babson Report, officially "Opening the Textbook: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2017" created a stir in the closing weeks of 2017.
16,977
The number of researchers to date that have signed the pledge not to publish, review, or serve on editorial boards for Elsevier journals
94
The number of scholarly communities in KU ScholarWorks
72,328
The number of times that the most popular KU ScholarWorks item, Greetings from the Teklimakan: a handbook of Modern Uyghur, has been downloaded since 2007
2009
The year that the KU Open Access Policy was approved by the Faculty Senate
8,991,295
The number of times that items in KU ScholarWorks have been downloaded since 2007
241
The number of works by undergraduate students in KU ScholarWorks
722
The number of dissertations and theses in the Pre-1923 Dissertations and Theses collection.
The KU Faculty Open Access Policy (revised and passed the faculty senate on February 11, 2010) is a mechanism that asserts the rights of KU faculty to provide broad, free access to their journal publications to colleagues around the world.
Under the policy, KU faculty can exercise these rights by retaining enough copyrights and once rights are retained provide KU with the necessary bibliographic information and a copy of the publication. KU then provides efficient and effective access to these publications by means of KU ScholarWorks. If a publisher requires a faculty member to opt out of the policy for a specific article, the author may submit an Open Access Policy Waiver Form.
