Access to information is vital for college students as their work often involves research and source citing. This information can usually be accessed through their university’s subscriptions to scholarly journals and information databases. But the open access movement is focused on promoting more readily available information for not just students, but anyone in the world.

Open access refers to the freely available access to scholarly work like articles, books, research data, multimedia and more. The goal of open access is to enable as many people as possible with access to scholarly information with few or no restrictions. This will, in turn, enable more people to continue making new discoveries and advance human knowledge.

Open Access Week is a worldwide celebration which raises awareness for the movement and promotes avenues to gear more toward open access initiatives. This year, the celebration is set for Oct. 24-30.

University Libraries at Grand Valley State University spearheaded the celebration locally with many events throughout the week focusing on the theme of Open in Action. GVSU student senate held information tables in the Kirkhof Center Oct. 24-28. They provided information flyers about Open Access and Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are free, online, open access textbooks and course materials, which can be used, shared and adapted.

OER workshops were held Tuesday, Oct. 25 and Thursday, Oct. 28 for faculty and staff in partnership with Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center as well as eLearning and Emerging Technologies. A panel discussion featuring GVSU faculty who use open access was held Wednesday, Oct. 26, where panel members discussed how they use open resources and how it has contributed to their professional practice.

Matt Ruen, who serves as the scholarly communications outreach coordinator for University Libraries, said open access has become more prevalent in the age of the internet.

“Open access is really about making information readily available for people all over the world,” Ruen said. “This allows people to expand on ideas and research, it drives and advances knowledge.”

Ruen added that open access is gaining more momentum because the publishing process which has been used before is now outdated. In the past, publishers could only fit a set amount of information in a journal, they had to choose the most interesting research and this limited the amount of information shared.

With the internet having a limitless capacity to hold information, using open access journals online allows all quality work to be published and shared. This allows the research to advance since more people have access to study and expand on it. Ruen said GVSU’s own open access journal, ScholarWorks, has had over three million downloads from almost every country in the world.

“I’ve used ScholarWorks for a lot of my classes,” said Tamara Bailey, a GVSU sophomore. “We had a librarian come into class to explain how to find articles for research papers and I like how easy it is to use.”

University Libraries also holds a fund from which they provide grants for GVSU faculty research and work to be open access by helping to cover publication fees charged by some journals.

In the 2015-16 academic year, the fund helped to publish 19 articles by 21 authors.