open access

It’s International Open Access Week from October 20-26. This week is a chance to celebrate the practice of making scholarly research articles freely available to all through Open Access (OA). Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has compiled over 11 million OA articles in their database. This vast collection of scholarly knowledge is immensely useful to the public, but how do Bentley faculty view OA? We interviewed several Bentley faculty members who have published openly to gain their insights. 

You’ve probably heard the term greenwashing before.

It’s surprisingly expensive to access scholarly articles. Many important articles, vital for research, are behind paywalls—financial impediments from accessing the material. It might not seem like these articles are expensive while browsing through Bentley’s collection, but online access doesn’t come cheap. Generally, around half of library budgets often go to electronic resources. The most frustrating part? There are still more databases out there that are too expensive to justify purchasing. 

At a time when most academic work is moving online, it is important to ensure that quality research and resources are digitally available to the global scholarly community. To that end, the Bentley Library would like to remind faculty members that Scholars @ Bentley, the university’s institutional repository, is available to those who wish to share their work in an open-access, searchable database.