This week is the fourth annual Open Access Week, “an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.” The week boasts its own website to coordinate events and contributions from around the globe. Although the site itself is a bit schizophrenic, it features some great material and is well worth the time to explore. A short film from the UK about the absurdly repressive practices that block access to film archives struck me as especially sharp and well-done. How much history (not to mention historical consciousness) are we losing because primary sources are locked away in this fashion?

In the spirit of Open Access Week, I thought I would highlight some great Open Access projects at Yale, a few of which have already been featured on this blog. Yale Open Courses is perhaps most conspicuous, offering free access to a range of high quality lectures (more lectures are available as podcasts on the Yale section of iTunes U). Another popular resource are digitization projects, such as the Historical New Haven Digital Collection, which “contains over 500 images of historical New Haven, as well as over 75 documents containing key census information and other data from New Haven over the past 150 years.” The library’s Digital Collections site offers a centralized space for exploring the profusion of digitized objects and documents spread across the university. Although not hosted at Yale, the university contributes material to UNESCO’s World Digital Library, a relatively new and (hopefully) growing clearinghouse for digital material from around the world. Research gateways, such as the Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal and the recently-launched resources module at the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, encourage students and researchers from around the world to investigate the vast archival holdings of the University, both analog and digital. And I would be remiss not to mention the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, which sponsors a conference series on “Access to Knowledge” in the digital age.

There is much to be done to promote broader access to and interaction with digital resources. Nevertheless, as the overwhelming international response to Open Access Week demonstrates, this new model of academic practice will be a powerful and important force in our future.