Tennessee Features Stories of Public Need for Access to Research for OA Week

[Rachel Radom]

At the University of Tennessee Libraries, our Open Access Week events for the past two years involved outreach workshops to local nonprofit agencies. Staff from many nonprofit organizations visited campus and our subject librarians helped them find research and data to help in designing interventions and writing grant proposals. Then, we asked the nonprofits to fill out a survey and/or participate in a short interview about why open access to research matters to them and to the communities they serve.

Working with a student film editor, we have several videos we're ready to share with our faculty and research community. We hope the videos will inspire faculty interest in learning more about open access in general, and open access archiving in particular.

• Why Public, Open Access Matters
• Expand the Audience for Your Research
• Open Access to Research Vital to Local Nonprofits

This week, our subject librarians will email their departments with one email a day. Each email will feature a quote from these interviews, a short clip from one of the videos above, or a short clip from the documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, and a link to more information about how the University Libraries has expertise and infrastructure to help researchers make their work open access, either through open access publishing or open access archiving. We'll also screen Paywall: The Business of Scholarship on Wednesday (near our elevators, so lots of people will see parts of it!).

While these events aren't really events, the resulting products (videos, quotes, film clips) will be useful for Open Access outreach throughout the year, and will be made available on a website that will be available year-round on why Open Access matters.