This year’s theme of “Open in Action” is all about taking concrete steps to open up research and scholarship and encouraging others to do the same.

We’ve created an Open Access Week action portal where you can indicate which key steps you’ll take to support Open Access this October and year round. With this year’s focus on action at the personal level, the action portal will help capture the individual efforts across the world that are driving Open Access forward and demonstrate the momentum toward openness.

Click here to visit the Open Access Week Action Portal

Below, you can find the menu of actions listed on the portal, along with additional information and links to resources to support each action.

Make a list of Open Access journals in my discipline I would consider publishing in and share it with colleagues. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. The DOAJ is a great starting point that allows you to browse open access journals by discipline and discover open publications which might be a good fit for your work. You can also use resources like Think. Check. Submit. to evaluate journals before deciding to submit a manuscript.

Start a conversation about Open Access during a research group meeting, journal club, or staff meeting. Find opportunities to start a discussion with those in your department, lab, or research group about Open Access and how sharing research openly can increase the visibility and impact of their work. Use videos such as Open Access Explained from PhD Comics to help start the conversation.

Send at least one manuscript to an open-access journal within the next year. Once you have a list of open access journals that are a suitable venue for your work, commit to sending one of your publications to an open access journal over the next year. You can use WhyOpenResearch to find no-cost or low-cost open access options as well as tips for reducing the cost of publishing in journals that do charge fees and finding funding to cover related costs.

Deposit at least one of my articles into an open-access repository during Open Access Week and encourage colleagues to do the same. A growing number of studies show a strong correlation between making an article publicly accessible online and a significant increase in views, downloads, and ultimately citations for that article. Using tools such as Sherpa-Romeo or Dissem.in, you can determine what rights you have to make already-published work publicly accessible (an estimated 80% of publishers allow authors to make some form of their article publicly accessible), and the Directory of Open Access Repositories lists more than 2,600 repositories—both institutional and discipline-specific—among which you can find a good fit for your work.

Use the SPARC author addendum on my next publication to reserve rights to make a copy of my work publicly accessible. When you sign a copyright transfer form, you can decide which rights you want to keep, and which you want to give away. The SPARC author addendum is a legal instrument that you can use to modify your copyright transfer agreements with non-open access journal publishers. It allows you to select which individual rights out of the bundle of copyrights you want to keep, such as distributing copies in the course of teaching and research, posting the article on a personal or institutional Web site, or creating derivative works.

Contribute to a conversation on campus about institutional support for Open Access. Increasingly, colleges and universities are supporting faculty in making their research and scholarship open—from institutional open access policies to expressing support for Open Access in promotion and tenure guidelines. Using ROARMAP, you can explore which institutions and funders already have policies requiring research results to be made publicly accessible. If your institution already has supportive policies in place, work with colleagues to help make them more effective. If not, start a conversation about the importance of Open Access, how OA can benefit both faculty and the institution, and the various policies institutions are using to support faculty in making their research and scholarship open.

Sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and commit to not using journal-based metrics in evaluation. Moving away from flawed, journal-based metrics of evaluation is an important step to help enable a larger shift toward Open Access. Now signed by more than 12,000 individuals and 900 organizations, DORA is a commitment not to use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

Sign up for Impactstory to discover your #OAscore and get an ORCID. Impactstory is an open-source website that helps researchers explore and share the online impact of their research. In addition to many other metrics, Impactstory provides a badge that tracks what percentage of your articles are accessible online—your OAscore—and will measure progress in opening up your work. Impactstory uses ORCID, a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.

We hope you’ll put open into action during Open Access Week (and year round!) and help demonstrate the collective momentum for Open Access by registering your efforts through the action portal.

Click here to visit the Open Access Week Action Portal