Open access scholarship can increase the impact of researchers’ work. However, open access policies, funding, and procedures can prove difficult to understand, and authors may face conflicting and ambiguous messages when navigating the publishing process. University of North Carolina at Charlotte sought to bridge this gap by creating an Open Access Author Toolkit, aiming to build robust open access culture on campus to align with the university’s mission of furthering “local-to-global impact” through “access and affordability” and the library’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) goals of increasing information access. The OA Author Toolkit is designed to support authors in understanding OA best practices, resources, principles, and considerations for publishing scholarly research. This toolkit aims to provide a comprehensive overview of what an author needs to know as they consider publishing their research, as well as support services and publishing avenues at the university. Developing this toolkit involved rethinking how we approached outreach. Previously OA outreach at UNCC focused on the ethos of OA and benefits to faculty generally. However, each discipline engages with publishing differently, creating different relationships with open access. This poster will describe how universities can develop user-oriented, discipline-specific resources around a complex and often misunderstood topic to create a more engaged open access community. This poster was presented at the 2023 Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians and Technical Services Section Conference.
