Interview with Gavin about outreach campaign in Library Journal

Library Journal Academic Newswire has interviewed yours truly, Open Students‘ humble community manager, about the new SPARC student outreach campaign. You can read the interview here.

How do you approach the subject of open access with students? Is there any real knowledge base there to work from?
Issues like open access are certainly niche issues for students, who are more accustomed to hearing about issues like the Iraq war, the environment, and the like when someone talks to them about political and social issues. But when I’ve talked with students who have no prior knowledge of open access, they grasp it pretty quickly. Everybody’s had the experience of finding a paper that looks relevant to their work, then discovering their library doesn’t have a subscription. Graduate students especially are cognizant of the academic publishing system and understand how the subscription-only model works against the research community. And, of course, most students today have grown up online. My generation expects access to information, and systems that don’t provide this seem foreign to us. Students are fertile soil for supporting open access. It just takes someone to plant the seed.