The Ninth International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30. This event and this year’s theme encourages all interested individuals to move from discussing what Open Access is, to taking action and making a conscious commitment to work in an environment that promotes and makes research transparent and accessible to all.

Open Access week began in 2007.  It continues to be an important event aimed at raising awareness of the benefits of an open access environment, as well as, demonstrating the value open access content provides to interested readers (from both the research community and the general public). The open access model has the potential to increase the exposure of research work and augment the overall advancement of scholarly communication around the World.

The MSK Library supports the principles of open access to scholarly peer-reviewed literature as a means to accelerate scientific discovery and improve patient care.

In honor of Open Access Week, I would like to bring attention to several past Director’s Reflections blog posts that touch on this topic and other scholarly communication themes:

• Adding “Kudos” to Your Scholarly Communication Toolkit
  *Use Kudos to help increase the visibility of your scholarly research publications.
• Sci-Hub: Serving Up Scholarly “Pirated” Journal Articles
  *Learn why accessing this resource is not such a great idea.
• So You Want to Publish a Research Paper: Reflections on Predatory Publishers
  *Review a few tips in how to identify a predatory publisher.
• Altmetrics: Is it Gaining Traction as a Measure of Research Impact?
  *Understand how online attention metrics (Altmetrics) can play a role in increasing your paper’s visibility.
• ORCID@MSK – New Library Service Supporting Researchers’ Scholarly Workflow
  *Don’t have your ORCID iD? — this post will share the benefits of registering for this unique author identifier.

In closing, I would like to mention a global initiative that was launched in the first quarter of this year. A great example of “Open Access in Action”, OA2020 “aims to accelerate the transition to open access by transforming the existing corpus of scientific journals from their current subscription system to open access.”  Visit the site to learn more or review their mission statement found in this key document entitled, Expression of Interest.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services