Open Access

Each year in October, we celebrate International Open Access Week. This year’s theme, "Who Owns Our Knowledge," asks us to reflect on not only who has access to education and research but on how knowledge is created and shared, where it has come from, and whose voices are recognized and valued.

The University Libraries support open access through education and administration of ThinkIR, UofL's instutitional repository, where UofL researchers can deposit their work and make their scholarship freely available online. The Libraries have also made several "read and publish" agreements that enables UofL researchers to publish open access with no or low APCs.

Ask Us About Open Access

Table in Ekstrom Library

Monday, October 22, 9:30am-11am

"Publish Open Access With No APCs"

Online Presentation

Wednesday, October 23rd, 12-12:30pm

Display in Ekstrom Library

During Open Access Week

Open Access Week is a great time to make sure your research is not only freely available, but visible to others! 

If you haven't already, create an ORCID account to keep track of your research. ORCID also allows you to automatically add your work to Elements, UofL's researcher profile system. 

Check out open access scholarship by UofL researchers in Dimensions. Below is a chart that show trends in open access publishing for UofL researchers. It's interesting to see that overall OA publishing is much lower in the past year, and that Green OA (or self-archiving) is declining and Gold OA (publisher processing, often with APCs) is on the rise. Remember, publishers will often allow researchers to self-archive pre-prints of their work in institutional repositories (like ThinkIR) at no cost!