October is not just the month when we see ghosts, goblins, and witches. “Open in order to…” is the theme for the 2017 International Open Access Week taking place from October 24 to October 29. This week-long event is a global, community-driven time for all interested individuals to support and recognize the benefits of making scholarly research openly available. The organizers wanted this year’s theme to prompt us to move beyond talking about openness in itself and focus instead on what openness enables.
On a related topic this month, there has been much dialogue on various discussion lists about ResearchGate, a social networking site where researchers can post the full text of their published works (often downloaded from subscription-based scholarly journals) online. The problem with many of these uploaded papers is that often this action is an infringement of the copyright agreement that individual authors have made with their publishers. ResearchGate also scrapes material online and then invites authors to claim and upload these papers to the site. As a result of these activities, the newly formed “Coalition for Responsible Sharing”, whose members include the American Chemical Society (ACS), Brill, Elsevier, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, has moved forward to take legal action and has sent millions of takedown notices to have unauthorized content removed from ResearchGate. In addition, on October 17, subscribers to ACS journals received an email letter from them, outlining their intent to address the unlawful distribution of research articles from this site.
Researchers want to share their papers freely online – this is just part of the scientific process of expanding and increasing the current body of knowledge and moving discovery forward. With International Open Access Week upon us, we as librarians wish to start the conversation and build awareness of how many publishers are now supporting an open system for communicating scholarly research.
This week we have selected five open access publications to feature by MSK authors and will showcase one each day as a Today’s Science Sparks on the library website. You can also browse the Today’s Science Sparks’ archives to find other open access articles. The MSK Library supports the principles of open access to scholarly research literature as a means to accelerate scientific discovery and improve patient care.
Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services