Oct. 20-26, 2014, marks Open Access Week, an annual event that promotes the global movement to make scholarly content and research output more accessible. Memorial University is one of many academic institutions that support open access and open education. In 2012, the Senate of Memorial University approved the Memorial University Statement on Open Access, which supports and encourages the open dissemination of research output.

In addition to its statement on open access, Memorial currently supports a variety of initiatives that support open access and open education. Some of them include:

Memorial University Research Repository - an open access platform to showcase and preserve Memorial’s creative and intellectual output. The repository supports faculty efforts to discover and communicate new knowledge, improve the visibility of Memorial’s research in the global arena, and help our faculty to build impressive, lasting digital portfolios. http://research.library.mun.ca/

stor – a learning object repository that is supported by Memorial and is available to all educators within the provincial K-12 and post secondary public education system. Learning objects are small, digital, instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. stor contains collections of objects that can be used or repurposed for teaching and learning; objects can also be contributed to stor and shared with the provincial learning community. stor.mun.ca 

Open Journal Systems – Faculty and graduate students can start an Open Access journal on the QEII Library’s publishing platform. The Open Journal Systems platform provides a full suite of services for creating and hosting online journals, including mechanisms for article submission, peer review workflow, journal layout, reader access and long-term archiving. http://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php

Teaching with Technology Community – Memorial’s DELTS has established a collaborative relationship with provincial public education partners to build a resource sharing community that creates and shares quality support resources for teaching with technology across the K-12 and post secondary public education system. Innovators in educational technology from Memorial University, the College of the North Atlantic and the provincial government’s Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation have created a network that focuses on continual improvement as they support educators in their integration of technology in teaching and learning. http://blog.delts.mun.ca/technologyresources/

To learn more about open initiatives at Memorial, visit www.open.mun.ca, or http://guides.library.mun.ca/openaccess.

For more on Open Access Week, visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/.