Western CEDAR launch party to kick off Open Access Week

Western Libraries invites the campus community to celebrate the official launch of Western CEDAR, Western Washington University’s new campus digital repository, on Monday, Oct. 20, the first day of Open Access Week.

Open Access Week, a global event that is celebrated by the international academic and research community, is now entering its eighth year. The Open Access movement is centered on creating open access to information, and Western CEDAR will enable Western to make faculty, staff, and student research accessible, free, and worldwide via the internet.

“Works that are deposited in Western CEDAR will become openly available for anyone to use, regardless of their university affiliation. Whether the most recent research in sustainable energy or supplemental materials for a speaker series, these are works that are of interest to and impact the wider community. And these works should be available for the entire community, state, and world,” explained Jenny Oleen, Western Libraries scholarly communications librarian.

CEDAR will include published and unpublished works, open-access journals, conference proceedings, data sets, university documents, and other textual and audio/visual content deemed desirable for wide dissemination. CEDAR is an acronym that stands for Contributing to Education thorough Digital Access to Research, and its creation is the result of a university-wide partnership with Western Libraries, Research & Sponsored Programs, the Graduate School, and the Provost’s Office.

In the coming months, Western Libraries will be working closely with faculty and staff across the university to identify content for CEDAR, to share additional information about its value and many uses, and to provide workshops on author rights and responsibilities when creating research pages.

Throughout North America and Europe, academic libraries have led efforts on behalf of their universities to launch institutional repositories.

“At the center of the rapidly changing information age, Libraries see enormous benefit in making a small investment to advance a paradigm shift: to support and disseminate scholarship produced locally in addition to their traditional role paying for access to research produced elsewhere. For faculty, the opportunity to create research pages and freely share teaching resources, conference proceedings, scholarly journals, and other digital content in Western CEDAR opens new avenues to increase readership and expand their work’s impact. Faculty have also seen great potential to highlight their students’ academic work, including theses, performances, and other curricular and co-curricular projects,” explained Dean of Libraries Mark Greenberg.

As part of the programming to celebrate both the launch of Western CEDAR and Open Access Week, a cake and beverage celebration combined with a presentation will be held from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm in the Wilson Library Reading Room (4 Central), and will also include: an introduction to CEDAR's campus partners, information about Open Access week, a tour of CEDAR, and user testimonials. Speakers include representatives from the Graduate School and the Provost’s Office, Dean of Libraries Mark Greenberg, Scholarly Communications Librarian Jenny Oleen, and Librarian to the College of Business & Economics Elizabeth Stephan.

For more information or if you have any questions about Western CEDAR, please contact Jenny.Oleen@wwu.edu.