International Open Access Week is October 24-30! This year’s theme is Open For Climate Justice. This year’s theme seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

So, what is Open Access? The basic idea of open access is that it makes copyrightable works available without all of the access barriers associated with the “all rights reserved” model. These can take the form of price barriers and permission barriers (1). These barriers affect communities’ abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the world. Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities and our response to them.

But how does Open Access benefit you?

• More exposure for your work; wider collaboration and interdisciplinary engagement: Open Access maximizes the research visibility of your article or journal and helps disseminate your articles more quickly and widely. It makes the content available to those who can’t access research behind a paywall. Research is immediately available without any barriers, and scholars and researchers can build upon this work without any restrictions. Open access enables scholars to work on their research collaboratively on a global scale and helps researchers connect more easily with each other, leading to greater recognition.
• Increase research impact and citations: SPARC found that there was a citation advantage to articles available through open access.
• Maintain control: Open Access helps researchers retain the copyright to their work and at the same time ensure people worldwide can access and reuse their research for free. Click here to learn more about retaining your rights.

You are interested in publishing Open Access, but how do you start?

• Find the open access journals in your subject area by searching the Directory of Open Access Journals. You can also contact your Subject Specialist to help identify the best open access journals in your area to save you time.
• You can look into MU’s institutional repository, MOSpace, as a place to share your work or explore subject-oriented repositories.
• If you are a reviewer or editor, make sure to read the Open Access policies of those journals or publishers.
• Visit our Open Access guide for a more in depth look into the different parts of open access.

(1) Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How to Make Your Work Openly Accessible