As a librarian I have supported Open Access as a way to provide more equitable access to scholarly content for all library users, but I have also sought to ‘walk the walk’ as a writer. At each institution I have sought to deposit my work in an open institutional repository, to publish in open publications, and release the work under an appropriate Creative Commons license that enables the widest possible use. My dissertation is openly available in the University of Pittsburgh’s D-Scholarship repository, the articles and chapters I wrote while at Rollins College are available in Rollins Scholarship Online, and I have continued to make work I have published while here at Williams openly accessible as well. One fun by-product of this is that many of these repositories collection usage data and send me regular reports. Unless our work is cited, we rarely hear whether our work is read or not. It is good to see that my work has a readership long after its publication date.
Jonathan Miller
Director of Libraries
For more information about Jonathan’s work, visit: https://library.williams.edu/profile/jm30/
This story is published in celebration of International Open Access Week 2024. If you want to chat about OA and the library, reach out to your librarian liaison.
To read the complete set of the Open Access 2024 series, visit: https://library.williams.edu/category/openaccess/