Oct. 22-28, 2018, is Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, which is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of open access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make open access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Open access is a publishing model that allows for unrestricted and free access to scholarly research materials without a subscription charge for anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, display and modify. Becker Library has played an active role in supporting open access since 2010 through our institutional repository for the School of Medicine – Digital Commons@Becker. With over 40 digital collections, including an Open Access collection, Digital Commons@Becker brings together a wide variety of openly available scholarly and research communications incorporating peer-reviewed articles, capstones, research papers, poster presentations, newsletters, videos, and podcasts.
The Open Access Collection contains peer-reviewed articles authored by Washington University School of Medicine faculty that have been published in open access journals or authorized by the publishers for open access availability. With over 6,700 articles, this collection received over 88,000 downloads in 2017 alone. To learn more about open access, check out our Open Access Subject Guide.
Are you interested in adding your works to a collection? The librarians here at Becker are here to help. We can review copyright agreements and help you retain rights to your works. If you would like to learn more about how the library can help you create a Digital Commons@Becker collection, please contact us at publicationsupport@wustl.edu.