Atla Annual 2021 Online

Open Access (OA) journal collections can add diversity and breadth to your library’s theological resources. We'll review and recommend some OA collections for quality, ease of implementation, and indexing. We'll consider OA materials from regions and language. What are some ways to search for and select OA collections? There will be time for questions and sharing experiences.

Atla Open Press publishes open access books, journals, and other serials that cover subjects at the intersection of librarianship and religious and theological studies that potentially impact libraries, that guide and support innovative library services, that enhance professional development for religious studies and theological librarians, and that represent specialized topics of interest in religion and theology that are of relevance to libraries. Over the last few years, the program has evolved with the addition of guidelines, policies, and procedures representative of a professional open scholarly press, resulting in an impressive growth and diversity in its output. During this session, the editors in chief of three of Atla Open Press’s publications will speak about recent developments and publications from their area of Atla Open Press as well as offer guidance on how to edit, peer review, and author with the Press. Additionally, Atla’s Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects Manager will provide a brief overview of open access publishing in librarianship as well as share other resources and opportunities to engage with open access publishing and Atla Open Press.

Golden open access means publishing scholarly articles in journals that are open without costs for all readers. Green open access means secondary publishing of toll access articles in institutional repositories. Thus, it offers scholars a nice possibility to promote open access without giving up their preference of publishing in high-ranking toll-access journals. But what are the real pros and cons of this path to open access publishing culture?

(This conference presentation is a requirement for fulfillment of the terms and conditions of the Atla grant I received in September 2020.) In Fall 2020, I was fortunate to be chosen as a recipient of an Atla grant to produce an Open Access resource to be used in a class at the Interdenominational Theological Center in June of 2021. At the same time I received the grant, I was chosen for a SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Leadership Program Fellowship, which was to run, coincidentally, concurrent to the timespan of the Atla grant. I will examine my starting knowledge about open access resources and how, through the Fellowship, my growth in knowledge about and advocacy for open access resources informed my work on the Atla grant. I was able to make the grant project, an open-access textbook for a Traditional African Religions course, the capstone project for my SPARC Fellowship. I will walk through the different stages of the project, from the application for the grant to working with faculty to find and create the necessary public domain material to the technological processes involved in making the resource accessible to the implementation of the resource.