Open Access Week, a global event now entering its eighth year, is an opportunity for the academics and researchers to continue to learn about the potential benefits of open access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make open access a new norm in scholarship and research. (from the Open Access Week website)

This week, the Dalhousie Libraries will be doing a blog post a day on different topics related to open access, as well as hosting two events.

Dalhousie Researchers and Open Access Publishing

Researchers worldwide are actively publishing in open access journals as well as adding their work to various repositories such as arXiv, SSRN, PubMedCentral or DalSpace. One third of the world’s peer-reviewed journals are now fully open access. These 10,000 journals provide access to more than 1.7 million articles.

Dalhousie researchers’ work can be found in many different open access journals. The Web of Science focusses on high-impact journals and of those journals, it indexes a limited number of highly regarded open access journals. Unfortunately, since Web of Science includes only a fraction of the world’s social science and humanities journals, it does not give the full open access picture for those disciplines. Since Web of Science does include many STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) journals, it can offer us a glimpse into Dalhousie researchers’ contributions to open access publishing.

According to the Web of Science database, since 2000 most of the open access work of Dalhousie researchers appears in these journals:

• PLOS One
• Canadian Family Physician
• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• International Journal of Qualitative Methods
• Journal of the Canadian Dental Association
• Current Oncology
• BMC Evolutionary Biology
• Journal of Psychiatry Neuroscience
• Nucleic Acids Research
• Biogeosciences

Growth in the number of open access articles authored by Dalhousie researchers:

Some of Dalhousie’s most honoured scientists are regularly publishing in open access journals. They include faculty members from the departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Computer Science Physics and Atmospheric Science, Biology, Computer Science, Family Medicine, Geriatric Medicine Research, and Psychiatry.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post which includes an interview with Dr. Randall Martin of the Physics and Atmospheric Science whose work appears in open access journals.

The Dalhousie Libraries will be hosting two events for Open Access Week:

Differing Perspectives on Open Access: a panel discussion
Thursday, October 23/4–5:30 p.m.
Room 224, Student Union Building

Open Access at MIT Press: OA in a large university press
Friday, October 24/1 p.m.
Room 2616, Killam Memorial Library