Open Access for Health Information

How to Be More Open in Your Research:

Exploring-Get informed

• Talk to a librarian about open access (OA)*
• Attend a Libraries workshop on open scholarship
• Follow the hashtag #OA on Twitter
• Go to the SHERPA/RoMEO database to see which versions of your articles you can post online
• Find out how much the subscription cost for the journals you submit to
• Find out how much it would cost to buy your own article if you didn’t have access

Developing-Engage in open practices

• Give a lecture about your in-progress research
• Write an op-ed about your research for a newspaper or magazine
• Blog or tweet about your research
• Share a preprint of your work before it is published
• Negotiate your author contract so you can control how you share your scholarship
• Use a Creative Commons license on your work
• Deposit your work in an open, non-profit, disciplinary repository
• Register a protocol in an open access journal or registry to reduce bias

Be an open advocate

• Use the Open Science Framework to conduct your research and collaborate with peers
• Engage your colleagues in discussions about OA
• Publish in a journal that allows you to make your article OA
• Publish in an OA journal
• Apply to the Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund
• Serve on the editorial board of an OA journal
• Create an OA journal
• Hold a collegial assembly meeting about a campus OA mandate

*What is Open Access (OA)?  According to SPARC, “Open Access is the free, immediate online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.  Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.”

“How to Be More Open in Your Research” by Temple University Libraries is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

How to Be More Open in Your Teaching:

Exploring-Get informed

• Consult the Libraries’ website to learn about open educational resources (OER)*
• Join a listserv about open education
• Have discussions in class about Creative Commons (CC) and using CC content
• Be mindful of the costs of your course content for students
• Ask your students how much they spent on your course texts and materials
• Talk to a colleague about OER
• Attend a Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) or Libraries event about OER

Developing-Engage in open practices

• Collaborate with a librarian to find and use OER in your class
• Replace one class reading with a free online resource
• Recommend open access journals as sources for your students’ research
• Make your syllabus openly available
• Incorporate OER into at least one of your classes
• Share your classroom slides on SlideShare or Prezi
• Share your course content (quizzes, assignments, class activities, etc.) on an educational repository site like MERLOT
• Apply to the Libraries’ Textbook Affordability Project

Be an open advocate

• Have your students submit their work to a disciplinary repository or open access journal
• Adopt open textbooks and/or use OER in all of your classes
• Write an open textbook or create OER
• Facilitate a CAT or Libraries event about your experience using OER
• Write a review of an open textbook for the Open Textbook Library
• Encourage students to license their own work with a CC license
• Talk at your department or collegiate assembly meeting about OER

*What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?  According to UNESCO, “Open Educational Resources are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license.  The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them.  OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”

“How to Be More Open in Your Teaching” by Temple University Libraries is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0).