The WSU Libraries support open access by providing venues where researchers can share their research with the general public.

• Any researcher at WSU can use Research Exchange, WSU's repository of institutional scholarship, to share their scholarly work, including articles, presentations, dissertations, grey literature, reports, photos, educational materials, and more.
• Via Affordable Learning Grants, the university supports faculty who wish to create and use open educational resources in their classes.

Bill Lipe (Professor Emeritus, Anthropology) supports open access because it allows him to rapidly share findings about archaeological sites in the Cedar Mesa highlands of southeastern Utah. Lipe and his collaborator, R.G. Matson, use WSU’s repository of institutional scholarship—Research Exchange—to distribute research that typically goes unpublished, including posters, slides, addenda, dissertations, and grant reports. This material enriches the historical and scholarly record while educating the general public about culturally significant sites in the American Southwest.

(Photo credit: G. Thomas. The photo shows the view southwest from Muley Point, Utah.)

What is the most popular type of scholarship in Research Exchange? Student work--namely, the some 1,244 electronic copies of theses and dissertations (ETDs) that have been deposited in the repository since 2004. As of June 2018, this work had been downloaded more than one million times since 2011.

The WSU Libraries are pleased to see this level of engagement with student work. Ideally Research Exchange will open up publishing, teaching, employment, or research opportunities for students who are discovered online. Work that might otherwise receive little attention now has an opportunity to reach a wide and engaged audience.

The Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) is a five-year project led by Washington State University and supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Under the umbrella of NARA, universities, private industry and government laboratories authored a wide range of materials that support and evaluate a future wood residual to bio-jet fuel and co-product industry in the Pacific Northwest.

As this project draws to a close, NARA is using Research Exchange to preserve access to the project's accumulated research outputs, including articles, posters, lesson plans, infographics, fact sheets, and media. As NARA's director, Ralph Cavalieri, noted, "WSU Research Exchange allows for a centralized repository where all NARA materials can be properly archived and made accessible, long after the NARA project has ended, to researchers, industry, policy makers and the general public."

In 2006, Dean Glawe (Professor Emeritus, Plant Pathology) began his own open access journal--North American Fungi. Glawe continues to work with the WSU Libraries to publish the journal using Open Journal Systems (OJS). He uses the workflows in OJS to receive, edit, and post submissions to the journal website.

North American Fungi is a peer-reviewed journal, indexed by CAB Abstracts and Scopus. The journal deals with fungal natural history in North America, including taxonomy, nomenclature, ecology, and biogeography. As part of its mission, the journal works to catalog fungi throughout North America--an effort that has been largely neglected by state and federal programs. Glawe values the ability to engage a wide audience via open access publishing. By collecting information from around the country, he hopes to help solve problems in regional agriculture, natural resource-based industries, and human health care.

(Photo credit: Strobilomyces. The image shows Chanterelle Cantharellus cibarius.)