Open Access After Graduation

Academic libraries have, for too long, built relationships with students around a single dimension: temporary access to paywalled scholarly materials. We believe this dimension is too narrow and short-term to honor the complexity of our students’ future goals and their lives beyond graduation. Open Access (OA) scholarship helps us reimagine relationships with our students far longer than their institutional login credentials, and to empower them as lifelong information-literate individuals. Freely available to readers, OA research extends the benefits of scholarly knowledge beyond the academy and removes economic barriers to accessing information. OA invites us to engage the multiple, evolving, and intersecting dimensions that lead people to continue to seek scholarly research throughout their lives, such as advocacy, education, workplace, health, self-actualization, spirituality, and pleasure. We consider the ways OA can inspire library employees to center students’ immediate and long-term information needs in new ways. Purposefully integrating OA into the design of access, teaching, collections, and services provides a holistic approach that ensures that our connection with students persists with them long after graduation and honors them as whole people.