Happy International Open Access Week! From October 21-27, the library will join academic and nonprofit organizations across the globe to celebrate, highlight, and advocate for openly accessible papers, data, and scholarly materials. Since its inception in 2007, the annual Open Access Week has been celebrated by individual scholars, institutions, and organizations around the world that rely on openly accessible papers and data to conduct research and support their scholarly conclusions.
Here are five ways the library supports Open Access all year:
- The library can publish open-access versions of your scholarly work in our institutional repository, DigitalGeorgetown. This can include pre-prints of articles, research data and other supplementary research materials, digital projects, and work created by GU centers and departments, such as conference proceedings, reports, and gray literature. For more information on publishing in DigitalGeorgetown visit this link.
- Do you currently publish a journal in DigitalGeorgetown? Are you interested in learning more about starting an open-access journal or publishing your existing journal in partnership with the Library?
Please join us for Caffeinate and Collaborate: Coffee Chat about OA Journal Publishing. Meet with current and prospective journal editors on October 24, 10:30am - 11:30am. RSVP here.
- The library mints Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). A DOI is a set of unique letters, numbers, and symbols that identify an article or document and provide it with a permanent URI, so the article can always be found and cited even if the original website where it was published moves or gets deleted. For more information on obtaining a DOI visit this page.
- The Digital Scholarship team can assist authors with obtaining an Open Researcher and Contributor Identification (ORCID), a 16-digit number assigned to individual researchers to connect their publications and research back to them. For more information on ORCIDs and how to get one, visit this page.
- The library supports Read and Publish agreements with three publishers. Read and Publish agreements allow any individual affiliated with Georgetown University to publish in any journal from those three publishers and have their work be open access. The first such agreement was with Cambridge University Press in January, 2022. It was followed by the American Chemical Society in 2023 and the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2024. Over 100 articles have been published under these programs. Journals that are part of a Read and Publish agreement are often hybrid – meaning that some of the articles will be open access, and others behind a paywall.
An alternate model of Open Access publishing is called Subscribe to Open. Under this model, when the publisher’s subscription revenue reaches a predetermined target, the journal is made open access for the rest of the current year. Annual Reviews was the first publisher to implement a Subscribe to Open model and the Georgetown University Libraries support this model through a subscription with Annual Reviews, which publishes 54 titles. All 54 journals from Annual Reviews are now openly available for the remainder of the year. For more information about open access publishing opportunities contact Ryan Johnson, Head of Research Services.