UW Libraries Hosts ‘Open October’

University of Wyoming Libraries is hosting “Open October,” a series of programs focusing on open access, open research and open education initiatives.

Open access and open research initiatives provide unrestricted access to scholarly research, data and knowledge. Open education initiatives focus on making educational materials freely available to remove barriers to learning and promote accessibility.

“We’re really ramping up our efforts to inform the UW community about our open initiatives this year,” says Chad Hutchens, chair of Digital Collections at UW Libraries. “International Open Access Week takes place the last week of October, and we wanted to expand on that by offering numerous workshops throughout the month. Several services are available to faculty and students that can make their scholarship and teaching more impactful, more discoverable and, of course, more openly available.”

UW Libraries manages several open access platforms for the campus community. WyoScholar, UW’s institutional repository, offers open access to scholarly materials such as university publications, open scholarship, research datasets and other materials. The UW Open Journals platform hosts published journals that are openly accessible, registered with the Library of Congress and feature persistent digital object identifiers for preservation and discovery.

UW Libraries also hosts the WyoDigital repository, which features digitized books, maps, images and artwork, and the Wyoming Digital Newspaper Collection, which offers over 5 million pages of historical Wyoming newspapers. The UW Libraries’ Digital Collections office also manages an open access 3D object platform that features digitized 3D objects from the UW Geological Museum, the UW Vertebrate Museum, the UW Archaeological Repository and other partners. Additionally, UW Libraries collaborates with publishers to simplify open access publishing for UW authors.

These initiatives enable Wyoming residents and scholars worldwide to access UW-created research and resources.

Furthermore, since 2017, UW Libraries has supported open education initiatives through alternative textbook grants. These grants are awarded to instructors who adopt, adapt or create new open textbooks or course materials. The alternative textbooks grants from this year are estimated to save UW students over $30,400 per semester

Open October program highlights include:

-- Tuesday, Oct. 3, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Coe Library, Room 302: “Open Access 101” will discuss basic aspects of open access publishing.

-- Wednesday, Oct. 4, noon-1 p.m., Coe Library, Room 302: “OER 101: Pre Alt-Textbook Grant Workshop” will cover copyright as it applies to open educational resources (OER), Creative Commons licensing and more. This workshop is required for all OER alt-textbook grant applicants.

-- Tuesday, Oct. 10, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Coe Library, Room 302: “Open Data Publishing” will address basic research data management best practices, options for working data storage and options for final data storage and publishing.

-- Thursday, Oct. 12, 4-5 p.m., Coe Library, Room 218 and online: “Finding Open and Inclusive Images” will share strategies on how to find openly licensed photos, illustrations and icons.

-- Tuesday, Oct. 17, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Coe Library, Room 302: “UW Publishing Trends, APCs and Publisher Agreements” will discuss open access archiving and publishing.

-- Wednesday, Oct. 25, noon-1 p.m., Coe Library, Room 506: “OER Grant Panel Discussion” will feature a discussion that will include faculty members and their integration of OER materials into courses, student success stories and panel members’ experiences with the Alt-Textbook Grant Program. Lunch will be provided.

The complete schedule of programs, including registration information, can be found here. For more information about the workshops or open initiatives, email coeref@uwyo.edu.