Emory University will participate in the internationally celebrated Open Access Week Oct. 21-27 with a roster of speakers, panels and other events that will examine the benefits, effects and issues that occur with open access.  

Open access, the practice of providing unrestricted access to scholarship published online, is managed at the university by OpenEmory, the open access repository for faculty-authored published research articles.  

OpenEmory celebrated its one-year anniversary in September, and as of Oct. 3, surpassed 1,800 articles uploaded to the site and has logged 9,912 article downloads.  

OpenEmory is a service of Emory Library and Information Technology Services (LITS). The library’s Scholarly Communications Office, under the leadership of director Lisa Macklin and located in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, manages the repository.  

The open access international movement gained tremendous momentum in the United States in 2008 when the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy went into effect, some eight years after the launch of PubMed Central, a free database of life sciences research articles.  

Emory University adopted its open access policy in 2011 to encourage faculty to share their published journal articles and provide a university-based repository. In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a directive that all federal agencies with research funding over $100 million must develop plans to make any peer-reviewed articles and digital data sets resulting from this federal funding open, available and accessible to the public.