As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, we turn to an openly licensed book called The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World which discusses botany, medicine, religion and mining in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. UMass Dartmouth Professor Timothy Walker of the History Dept. contributed a chapter to this freely available book called “Global Cross-Cultural Dissemination of Indigenous Medical Practices through the Portuguese Colonial System: Evidence from Sixteenth to Eighteenth-Century Ethno-Botanical Manuscripts.” The book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license which means that not only can other researchers and faculty share the material, but they can also remix, transform, and build upon it.
When asked about his thoughts on Open Access publishing, Prof. Walker said “To be most effective, and to achieve the widest possible dissemination, knowledge needs to travel freely, unimpeded by online pay walls or the practical limits of print-only distribution of publications. Open Access publishing online democratizes information by making it available to anyone with internet access, and guarantees the broadest impact of our scholarly work. Open Access publishing should be a central aspiration for researchers seeking to publish and disseminate their work.”
