Sustainable scholarship
Guest post by Brandon Butler, the Library’s Director of Information Policy.
Guest post by Brandon Butler, the Library’s Director of Information Policy.
This year’s theme for Open Access Week is “Community over Commercialization,” and it’s easy for those of us at the Library to understand the connection between community and the power of the dissemination of knowledge.
Guest post from Dave Ghamandi, Open Publishing Librarian and Managing Editor of Aperio:
In his 1973 book, “The Sociology of Science,” the influential American sociologist Robert K. Merton declared: “All scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property) to promote collective collaboration.” This “Mertonian norm,” as it came to be known, long predated the internet (Merton first theorized it in 1942), but some scholars see it as a founding principle of the open access movement, which argues that knowledge should be free, online, and legal to reuse and share.
There have been a lot of news stories in the past few years about the “big deals,” academic publishing, and its relationship to journal access in higher education, including here at UVA. And it’s true: what’s happening now is, well, a big deal; one that will affect the way we publish and read for decades to come. This article focuses on three aspects: tools you can download and utilize to make for easier access, processes we’ve put in place on the back end to ensure your access is uninterrupted, and opportunities that have come from this unique moment.