Happy Open Access Week! This week we celebrate open access scholarship, and remember that it is time to set the default to Open Access.

Our collection of open access scholarship in the Tufts Digital Library is small but growing, aided in a large part by our Provost’s Open Access Fund.

(This morning as I was walking around the office, cajoling my coworkers into labeling themselves with stickers that say “I Support Open Access”, I realized how many of us are employed in the business of creating open access to scholarship and research data. Just thinking about all of my colleagues who are digitizing the painstakingly gathered election data that comprise the “A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825” project makes me proud; we are creating a vital research collection for historians, and jobs for us. Huzzah for open access, I say!)

Tufts Professor of Philosophy Daniel Dennett has received the 2012 Erasmus Prize from the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, joining the ranks of such luminaries as Mary Robinson, Simon Wiesenthal, Fatima Mernissi, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Marc Chagall. The foundation, when announcing Professor Dennett’s award, said:

Dennett is an eloquent teacher who addresses the questions of our time with great audacity. He is optimistic about science and demonstrates in his work the importance of knowledge, critical thinking, and an open attitude to ‘other’ ideas. He is a source of inspiration to both his colleague-scientists and to a larger audience.

The foundation also praised Professor Dennett for “his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience“. Professor Dennett is so dedicated to communication with the broadest audience that he has donated his papers to the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, making an Open Access commitment to share his scholarship with the wider community. Most of Professor Dennett’s articles are available at the Tufts Digital Library.

Congratulations, Professor Dennett, and we thank you for your commitment to Open Access and discussing philosophical ideas with the larger community of global citizens.

To mark Open Access Week the Tufts University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Team has launched a website celebrating the recipients of our Provost’s Open Access Fund. The fund has two components: the first, for publishing, funds scholars who choose to publish with author-pays open access; the second, for digitization, supports the creation of sustainable open access digital collections of unique research materials created by Tufts faculty.

All of the publications which have been funded for open access publication have also been made available in the Tufts Digital Library. The digitized research materials will also be made available in the TDL once they are created, digitized, and described.

So congratulations to the recipients of the fund!

Publishing Fund

• Mary E. Davis for “A Retrospective Assessment of Occupational Exposure to Elemental Carbon in the US Trucking Industry in Environmental Health Perspectives.
• Dan Dennett for “Homunculi Rule: Reflections on Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Peter Godfrey Smith” in Biology & Philosophy.
• Daniel Jay, for “Extracellular Heat Shock Protein (Hsp)70 and Hsp90<alpha> Assist in Matrix Metalloproteinase-2 Activation and Breast Cancer Cell Migration and Invasion” in PloS One with Tufts co-authors Jessica Sims (phD student) and Jessicia McCready (postdoc).
• Michael Court, for “Evolution of a Major Drug Metabolizing Enzyme Defect in the Domestic Cat and Other Felidae: Phylogenetic Timing and the Role of Hypercarnivory” in PLoS One with Tufts co-authors Binu Shrestha from the Tufts University School of Medicine, J Michael Reed and Philip T Starks from the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences, and Gretchen E Kaufman from the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
• Karen Panetta for “Multiresolution Decomposition Schemes Using the Parameterized Logarithmic Image Processing Model with Application to Image Fusion” in EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing .
• Andrew Ramsburg for “Analytical Modeling of Degradation Product Partitioning Kinetics in Source Zones Containing Entrapped DNAPL” in Water Resources Research with Tufts doctoral candidate Ali Boroumand.

Digitization fund

• Marie-Claire Beaulieu for Greek Epitaphs Online.
• Mark Pokras for Pathology Atlas Digitization.