Mark your calendars, International Open Access Week is just around the corner. This year’s theme is “Community over Commercialization,” providing an opportunity to emphasize and discuss approaches to open scholarship that best serve the interests of the public and the academic community.
The MSK Library promotes Open Access in several ways by:
- adding relevant open access journals to our current list of eJournals;
- managing the SKOAP fund which financially supports MSK authors for article processing charges;
- providing a curated listed of open access initiatives, resources, tools, directories, and repositories;
- and sharing information about open access specific to the needs of the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) community.
In April 2022, we published an online report entitled “Research in Review: An Analysis of MSK Publications 2016-2020.” A section was devoted to open access showing the number of papers by MSK authors to fully open access journals was increasing steadily over the report period. (See report, page 14)
Synapse is another way we bring attention to open access publications. Visitors to the site can discover which open access journals MSK authors publish in by locating in the citation record the orange button (e.g., Synapse record). Synapse is our public-facing and authoritative bibliographic database highlighting the intellectual output of all our researchers.
Throughout this week, the MSK Library will be featuring open access publications by MSK authors and will share one each day (Monday to Friday) as a Today’s Science Sparks on the Library Website. If you are curious about past Today’s Science Sparks, you can browse the Archives.
In support of Open Access if you find a Today’s Science Sparks that has been marked as Open Access, feel free to click on the Tweet icon next to the highlighted paper to easily share this publication on Twitter.
Finally, should you like to get involved during open access week, you can follow the conversation on Twitter, as well as lend your voice in support of open scholarship. Do not forget to include the official hashtag — #OAWeek.
If you have any questions about Open Access, don’t hesitate to contact me!
Donna Gibson
Director, Library Services