The University of Kentucky’s William T. Young Library hosted an informational pop-up event on Wednesday, Oct. 23, celebrating International Open Access Week. The event, held in the library’s lobby from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., aimed to promote free, unrestricted access to scholarly information worldwide.
Students and faculty gathered to learn more about open access while enjoying sweet treats and hot apple cider. The event highlighted the importance of removing barriers like paywalls to scholarly research, making it available to all.
Isaac Wink, head research data librarian at UK, stressed the significance of the open access movement.
“Open access is the principle of making scholarly outputs like research articles and data sets more available and removing barriers like paywalls to help people access them worldwide,” Wink said.
Wink encouraged students and professors to contribute to the movement by publishing their own work openly through the university’s institutional repository, UKnowledge.
“Students and professors can take steps towards change by publishing their work open access, and they can do so through UKnowledge. It is the best platform for enabling change like that,” Wink added.
Kyle Bachman-Johnson, manager of UKnowledge, discussed the repository’s growth and impact over the years.
“It has been a movement. The number of people publishing open access is increasing over time. One of the great benefits of using UKnowledge is that authors receive monthly reports on who downloaded their work, including demographics from around 250 countries,” Bachman-Johnson said.
She also emphasized the broader implications of access to information.
“Information access is a social justice issue and a privilege for those who are provided with it,” Bachman-Johnson said.
