October 25-31 is OA Week 2021. For those who are new to open access, you can find a description of what it is and why it’s important here. TLDR: open access works are free to access and licensed in a way that allows for reuse.
This blog post is part of our Open Access Week series. The theme this year is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”. This year we are celebrating OA Week by highlighting some of the OA infrastructure that UT Austin supports.
The first thing we’d like to showcase here on the OA blog is the brand new Open Access LibGuide. LibGuides are an easy to use platform that point users towards the best resources for a given subject or topic, and UT Libraries have over 1000 guides! Many institutions have open access LibGuides and there are lots of online resources about open access, but we heard from our faculty that they wanted to see UT specific resources and information. We hope this new OA LibGuide will give researchers a useful overview of what OA is, why it’s important, what resources are available at UT, and how people can make their own work more open.
An astute observer will notice that all our LibGuides are licensed with a CC-BY-NC license. This means the guides themselves are open access, and others can reuse portions of the guide or the entire guide. They can customize guides for their own needs or use them as is. Other librarians will frequently use content from LibGuides to create something new for their campus, and faculty can use the content to help supplement course materials for their classes.
Stay tuned tomorrow to learn more about how UT Libraries is supporting a more equitable scholarly publishing system. You can also check out this interview about open access that Colleen Lyon did with Colleen Cressman from Harvard University.
