Established in 2008 by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and partners in the student community, International Open Access Week marks an opportunity each year to showcase what is happening worldwide in the momentum towards the open sharing of research.

Taking place Monday 23 October – Sunday 29 October 2017, the theme of the 10th International Open Access Week is ‘open in order to…’

This is an invitation to answer the question of what tangible benefits can be achieved by making scholarly outputs openly available.

“Open in order to…” is intended as a prompt to go beyond talking about openness and focus instead on what openness enables us to do within individual disciplines and institutions. For our academic staff at the University of Nottingham, we might list the key benefits of open access publishing as:

• disseminating your work to a broader audience;
• complying with open access mandates;
• promoting and publicising quality research;
• providing easier access at no cost; and
• maximising impact and citation potential.

Find out more about how to join the conversation and support open access by visiting the Research Exchange blog.