UF department heads are calling for free public access to online journal articles.
Open Access Week, which is being held on college campuses across the country, will last until Friday with events promoting free access to online academic journals.
Three events have been scheduled to promote the push toward open access, including a seminar in the Reitz Union on Tuesday, where speakers from various UF departments and colleges came to discuss the benefit of free access to online journal articles.
On Thursday, the Faculty Senate will be discussing the possibilities of open access journals. There will also be a webcast workshop about open access law journals at the Levin College of Law at 9:30 a.m.
“The advantage of open access is it gets the research out there very quickly, freely available to readers,” said Isabel Silver, director of academic outreach at the Smathers Libraries. “It’s available to anyone, anywhere at any time.”
More than 90 countries worldwide are participating in Open Access Week.
One of the downsides of open access, according to UF graduate student Daniel Spade, is that the cost of free public access to these articles falls on the authors.
UF’s Open Access Publishing Fund helps authors cover the increased publishing costs.
Spade was the first student to receive funding from UF for open-access publishing.
“I think it’s a positive change in the way that academic papers and research papers are being published,” Spade said. “Your research findings are able to reach more people, and I think it’s truer to the spirit of academic science.”
