At IUPUI we work for Open Access every week of the year. So, when OA Week rolls around, it’s a good time to reflect on why we’re doing this and on the fruits of our labor.

Why We Work for Open

Are you stuck with a corporate publisher that doesn’t actually care about research? What if the whole editorial board quit?

That’s what happened at the Journal of Informetrics.

Have you heard about Pressbooks? Piloted by IU through the Unizin consortium, Pressbooks gives faculty and staff the freedom to create customized, free or low-cost online course materials for IUPUI students. Why would someone want to do that? Well …

In November, an article that I wrote with two of my colleagues was published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2169). The article reports some of the results of a wide-ranging survey of faculty attitudes regarding issues in scholarly communication.

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Brandon Board, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. [J.O.]

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Kacie Hardin, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. [J.O.]

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Julie Burchfield, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. Julie also made a related infographic, available from: https://create.piktochart.com/output/25097275-open-access-scholarworks. [J.O.]

Last year I wrote a post comparing ResearchGate with our institutional repository for generating downloads of openly shared manuscripts. In short, the repository beat ResearchGate by 84% in download counts for the works that I have shared on both sites. If I want people to find and read my articles, I’m not wasting my time with ResearchGate.

The libraries are proud of the scholarship produced by the IUPUI campus. In fact, with the institutional repository, IUPUI ScholarWorks, we've been working since 2004 to find ways to increase readership for works created by our faculty, staff, and students.

Have you ever posted a published journal article to a lab website, ResearchGate, or Academia.edu? If so, there's a chance that you'll be receiving a copyright takedown notice in the future. Most subscription journals require authors to sign exclusive rights over to the publisher; so, even if you're the author and the publisher didn't pay you to write it, you don't own it.