ScholarWorks Celebrates International Open Access Week!

Jessica Ryan, Scholarly Communications Librarian, highlights an item in ScholarWorks each month.

October 23–29, is International Open Access Week, so for this month’s What Am I Reading in ScholarWorks let’s zoom out a bit and celebrate Smith College’s open access repository that showcases our scholars’ work and exemplifies this year’s theme of the week: Community over Commercialization.

We have had over two and half million downloads since our start in 2016. 57% of the downloads come from educational institutions from over 230 countries!

Looking at the readership distribution map one can see the global impact. While I have always maintained that a perk of my job is that I get to read the fascinating work of our scholarly community, I am also proud of the part that the Smith community plays in sharing its research and scholarship out to the wider world.

As the Community over Commercialization theme outlines: when communities control their knowledge production and support open access, we strengthen academic freedom, reduce personal data collection abuses, and contribute to global scholarship rather than participate in inequitable and extractive models of scholarly dissemination. When the term open access was first coined, it was described as an “unprecedented public good,” and so this month, I’d like to recognize all of the scholars and researchers at Smith that positively and generously contribute to a global movement that prioritizes community over commercialization.

Visit ScholarWorks to see the range and depth of Smith scholarship, and you can read more about International Open Access Week and this year’s theme online.