It’s Open Access Week! Woohoo!
October 22 – 28, 2018 is an international week of celebration for free and open scholarship. For those who are new to the term, ‘Open Access’ (often shortened to ‘OA’) is a mode of research dissemination that promotes free access instead of paywalls and profit. Open Access is a hot topic these days, because it challenges the near-monopoly of traditional research publishers, who are known to make eye-watering profits without paying the academics who write articles and perform peer reviews.
In the traditional business model for academic publishing, a few big companies own the majority of academic journals, and they control access to research by charging universities to subscribe to databases (or charging for individual downloads). The AUT Library maintains access to databases through a complex network of subscriptions with multiple research publishers, meaning that we as researchers don’t have to navigate multiple publishers and paywalls.
But our library, and many other academic libraries, promotes OA as a better solution in the long-term. Research outputs from AUT staff and students are published via Tuwhera, our open access repository. Anyone can access the research outputs within Tuwhera, without paying a cent. That means that the authors placing their work there can reach more readers, and the knowledge within those outputs can be shared, cited, and built upon freely.
If you’d like to learn more, or join the conversation about Open Access, please come along to AUT Library’s Open Access Week event. You’ll see clips from a documentary about the academic publishing industry, and have a chance to discuss OA and what it means for you. 
Paywall – the business of scholarship
Thursday 25 October, 2-3pm
WG404, City campus
