Rebecca Ortenberg
As part of Penn Libraries’ Strategic Communications team, Rebecca is editor and lead writer for the Penn Libraries News blog, and she leads content-sourcing, creation, planning, monitoring, and daily posting to the Libraries' institutional social media channels.
Before coming to the Penn Libraries, she worked at the Science History Institute, where she held the role of social media editor and served as project manager for digital public humanities projects. Previously she conducted research and presented programs at historic sites in Oregon, New York, and Delaware. She is also the managing editor of Lady Science, a magazine and podcast about the history and popular culture of science.
Rebecca received an M.A. in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program (SUNY Oneona) and a B.A. in history from Lewis and Clark College.
The Penn Libraries is pleased to join Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth, and other members of the NERL consortium on a first-of-its-kind open access agreement with Elsevier, the largest academic publisher in the world. The agreement was negotiated by a committee made up of representatives of NERL consortium members, including Katie Brady, the Penn Libraries’ Head of E-Resources and Licensing. “I’m delighted by this innovative agreement, which takes a completely novel approach to open access,” says Brigitte Weinsteiger, Gershwind and Bennett Family Associate Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications, who serves on the NERL Program Council.
As part of this three-year pilot, authors who have published with many Elsevier journals and who were affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania at the time of publication will retroactively have their articles made open access. For each year of the agreement, Elsevier will flip five years of publications; that means that by the end of the pilot, 15 years of published work, constituting tens of thousands of articles authored by leading researchers, will be newly available to everyone at no cost to them and regardless of institutional affiliation.
This new agreement is only one of the many ways that the Penn Libraries has expanded its support for open access in recent years. Just a few months ago, the Libraries signed an agreement with Cambridge University Press that allows anyone associated with the University of Pennsylvania to publish articles with Cambridge without paying article processing charges. The Libraries also supports new open access journals like Glossa Psycholinguistics, provides the Penn community with access to a variety of open access resources, and maintains Penn’s own open access repository, Scholarly Commons.
To see a more detailed schedule of when articles published by Elsevier journals will open, find out if a particular publication qualifies, or learn more, view our Frequently Asked Questions.
For more information on the agreement between NERL and Elsevier, see the press release from the Center for Research Libraries.
As part of this three-year pilot, authors who have published with many Elsevier journals and who were affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania at the time of publication will retroactively have their articles made open access.