Open Access Week 2011 is this week from October 24th-28th, and it’s a celebration for everyone:  If you read journal articles, publish journal articles, or think you might publish some day in the future, Open Access is for you!

What is “open access” you may ask? The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, the leading advocate for Open Access, defines it in their Open Access guide as

The free, immediate, availability on the public Internet of those works which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment – permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.

Interested in learning more? Visit the Library’s Scholarly Commons for information and advice on open access and your rights as an author.  And if you want to find open access journals that you can use, check out the Directory of Open Access Journals: it lists open access journals in all disciplines, including Languages and Literatures journals and Linguistics journals.