Open Access Week spreads free scholarly works | FSView | fsunews.com

"As Florida State University strives towards their top 25 goal, competing public universities have at least one edge on FSU: Open access. This principal of open access means that scholarly work should be available online for everyone, for free. Currently, publishers ultimately sell the information that universities produce, back to the university for a price. Promoting the institution of open access, Florida State hosted its 6th annual Open Access Week, which lasted until Sunday afternoon. The weeklong event was designed to inform students on the benefits of open access ... If open access becomes a university-wide practice, scholarly work would be placed in a digital archive, such as DigiNole, and anyone in the world could find the information through a search engine like Google.  'The argument or idea is that the more people that read our work, the bigger the impact is of our work and therefore the reputation and the prestige of the university will continue to grow and grow in a new way because people are able to see the amazing work that we’re doing here,' Vandegrift said.  President Eric Barron has voiced his determination to place FSU in the top 25. However, Vandegrift couldn’t help but notice the lack of open access on campus could hold the university back from this honor. After researching the top universities, Vandegrift noticed a common theme: 'Harvard, Princeton and the entire University of California all […] have made these [open access] faculty polices' ..."