Jump-starting Open Access Week at Your Library

Open Access Week is coming up fast– do you know what your library is doing to celebrate? Now in its sixth year, the annual event is a wonderful opportunity to educate students, staff, and faculty on issues regarding open access and sustainable scholarly communications, and to publicize IR services that promote and support these initiatives.

Want to jump on the OA Week train but not quite sure where to start? Not a problem! Look no further than these Digital Commons subscribers for some great ideas about how to celebrate open access at your library:

April Younglove and the librarians at the Wallace Center at RIT plan to celebrate the week with a kickoff introductory event, interactive website session, and daily Open Access quiz questions with prizes, among other things. Kathleen Spring of Nicholson Library at Linfield College will be posting a short piece about open access and how it relates to DigitalCommons@Linfield on the library social media channels and blog, which she hopes will eventually be featured on the college website’s homepage. And Micah Vandegrift of Florida State University is planning on organizing an “Uploadathon,” which he hopes will inspire at least one faculty member from each department to upload at least one article to their DigiNole Commons IR during Open Access Week.

We’re excited to see our Digital Commons community planning such fun, innovative activities!  If you are planning OA Week activities on your campus that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about them—e-mail us at outreach@bepress.com.  For more information about Open Access Week and ideas on how your library might participate, check out our blog post about last year’s event.