Last week during Open Access Week if you walked through Lewis Library or the Information Commons, you might have noticed a large tub of candy. Each piece of candy represented $10,000 spent on journals and databases, and we asked you to guess how many pieces of candy were in the box. We chose six winners out of about 300 guesses. Congratulations to Nicholas, Kamille, Gabriel, Mohammed, John, and Martina for getting the closest guess of 360 pieces of candy, which represented $3.6 million dollars in spending.
This wasn’t just a game to scare everyone and make sure they were well stocked for Halloween trick or treaters. It’s important to recognize how much academic resources cost, for a few reasons. We are lucky to have an institution that will invest that much in student and faculty success. This means that we can access high quality scholarship and research tools. But the other side of this is that those costs go up every year, and have outpaced inflation. Those increases aren’t sustainable forever, and many institutions have had to make hard choices about which journals and databases the library can afford. Open Access Week helps us understand our options and ways we can all help to keep scholarship open and accessible to more people.
We had a great Open Access Week here at Loyola, and we hope you’ll spend a few minutes learning about the ways we support open access all year long.
