Every October, libraries, societies, publishers, and authors around the world gear up to celebrate International Open Access Week. Begun in 2007 as Open Access Day, Open Access Week is now an annual opportunity to discuss and explore issues related to information access. This year’s theme, Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion, focuses on the need for action on equity and inclusion, and underscores the urgency of continuing to center this work. As the default for systems is increasingly to be open, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing  frameworks that are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community. Read more in Nick Shockley’s blog posting.

In 2019, Galter commemorated Open Access Week with an overview of personas. This year, we provide a round-up of information on the many paths to and aspects of “openness” in everything we do.

Through the services provided by liaison librarians and Galter DataLab, Galter Library staff provide consultation and support on various scholarly communication and research data management issues, including Open Access (OA). Librarian-curated GalterGuides highlight, flesh out, and provide tips on OA-related topics:

• The NIH Public Access Policy guide describes NIH Public Access Policy and compliance, including the process for obtaining PMCIDs. This includes information about the law that mandated NIH Public Access Policy as well as Policy FAQs.
• The Open Access Publishing guide provides information on identifying OA journals, making use of open repositories, and finding university-related discounts for OA publishing. The Additional Open Access Resources tab leads to directories and organizations, as well as sources of information about Open Education Resources and Open Science.
• The Open Access Health Resources guide connects researchers with OA resources in medicine, including directories, databases, publishers, journals, books, grey literature sources, as well as reference and training resources.

Galter Library has been working collaboratively with partners to advance open access through repositories and other digital resources with the design of a next-generation repository and data index system that will help scientists across the clinical and translational spectrum to locate tools, data, and expertise to enhance their research process.

While the migration to the new system is still being planned, Feinberg School of Medicine users are encouraged to continue depositing scholarly output in DigitalHub, our current institutional repository for the research and scholarly output of Feinberg. Various types of scholarly publishing output and products, ranging from preprints and conference presentation slides to systematic review protocols and more, when deposited, can be openly shared with colleagues both at Northwestern and beyond.

The DigitalHub GalterGuide provides information and tips on content, collections, copyright, and—especially key during International Open Access Week—visibility. We encourage every person, either individually, or as a member of a team, center, or institute effort at Feinberg School of Medicine to create and maintain their scholarly outputs in DigitalHub. By choosing the Open Access option for your deposits, you make your research equitably and globally accessible, thereby facilitating the potential for further collaborations and scientific progress.

For more assistance with using DigitalHub, contact DigitalHub@northwestern.edu.