Open Access Week 2021

October 26, 2021 By Allison Symulevich
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This year Open Access Week is from Oct. 25-31, 2021.  The theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.”

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, organizes Open Access Week each year.  It started as Open Access Day in 2007 and has grown into an international week-long event. 

This year’s theme is intended to coincide with UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science, which emphasizes equity and openness in the sciences: 

Open Science should embrace a diversity of knowledge, practices, workflows, languages, research outputs and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of the scientific community as a whole, diverse research communities and scholars, as well as the wider public and knowledge holders beyond the traditional scientific community, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and social actors from different countries and regions, as appropriate.  

— UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, Page 7, citing Open Access Week blog post

Did you know you can pay some publishers a fee to have your work published open access for all the world to see?  Both hybrid journals, i.e. journals with OA and non-OA articles, and full OA journals can have OA publishing fees.  We at USF have an internal grant through the USF Publications Council to help with publication costs.  You can also consider writing a publication fee into grant proposals.   

Open access articles expand the reach and discoverability of articles, providing a worldwide audience.  This goes along with OA Week’s theme this year of building structural equity.  Further, some studies have shown an open access citation advantage, meaning open access articles are cited more often than those behind paywalls.  USF Libraries have open access journals and monographs hosted on Digital Commons @ University of South Florida, our institutional repository.  To find open access journals and hybrid journals, you can use tools like scimago, which ranks journals and notates the ones that offer open access options. 

For additional information about Open Access Week events around the world, visit the International Open Access Week website.  Let’s celebrate open access to information and knowledge! 

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