Oh, the horror (of traditional publishing practices)!

This year, the Iowa State University Library is featuring a display of eye-catching, frightful posters for Open Access Week.


Drawn from classic horror movie posters, these posters touch on a range of scholarly communication topics, from journal subscription costs to the Iowa State University Digital Repository.


Colored image of the Open Access Week poster at Iowa State

Open Access week poster touting the
Iowa State University Digital Repository


Open Access Week happens to fall right before Halloween this year, so Abbey Elder, our new Scholarly Communications Librarian, wanted to give Iowa State’s Open Access Week a “spooky” theme. Abbey worked with Megan O’Donnell, our Data Services Librarian, to create these posters. Abbey worked on the text and ideas, while Megan created the images and did fine-tuning.


Megan O’Donnell shared the genesis of these Open Access horror posters:

After experimenting with a few ideas I found the ‘Not of This Earth’ poster and sent Abbey an email that said, ‘This, but with the text, ‘Your face when you realize you gave away your copyrights.’ It kind of took on a life of its own from there.”

Colored image of the Open Access Week poster at Iowa State

Eight posters are featured in this year’s display. You can view them all in the Open Access Week Posters gallery in the Iowa State University Digital Repository.