Open Access (OA) Week wrapped up in October but you can support Open Access all year long!  SPARC defines Open Access as “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” It can be accomplished via publishing and/or self-archiving. Open Access allows your research to be discovered more quickly and broadly, raising its visibility and moving science forward.

Here are a few actions you can take to make your research more open:

• Consider copyright policies when you are selecting a journal to publish in. Sherpa Romeo is a resource that can help you compare copyright and OA policies between journals.
• Deposit your manuscript/preprint to a repository such as Minds@UW or bioRxiv, making it publicly available.
• Share your data and code. Visit the data sharing essentials page from Research Data Services (RDS) for more information.
• Register for your ORCID Researcher Identifier to make your research more discoverable

The Libraries also provide support for using Open Educational Resources (OER) for instruction and will share more information prior to the start of the Spring 2022 semester.

Questions? Contact a UW-Madison Science & Engineering Librarian at AskSEL@library.wisc.edu

Links for more information:

SPARC: https://sparcopen.org/open-access/

Minds@UW: https://minds.wisconsin.edu/

bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/

data sharing essentials:  https://researchdata.wisc.edu/data-access-2/

ORCID Researcher Identifier: https://researchguides.library.wisc.edu/c.php?g=1098577&p=8011941