October 14, 2008 was the world’s first Open Access Day!

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access (OA) to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content. Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of OA, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

OA is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. For example, this issue has been especially highlighted for the field of biomedical research and health care.¹ OA is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.

Why OA matters? First, I was really fascinated by the personal perspective by Jonathan Eisen published in PLoS Biology.² Second, perhaps it signals a fundamental change in the way that information is flowed from writers to readers and an admission that the traditional publishing process is obsolete in the digital age. We live in a world where people expect instant information in the top 20 hits from a Google and that expectation is transferring the science too. It doesn’t matter how prestigious your journal is. People want information, they want it now! And if you can’t deliver, they are going somewhere else.

C’mon, I am just a postdoc (poor assistant professor, grad, undergrad, etc)… What can I do? It’s very simple, try to submit articles to OA journals and review papers for them. Next, spread the world. There are plany of stuff the faculty, librarians, Universities, administrators and even Research Funders can do to promote OA.

1. Heather A. Piwowar, Michael J. Becich, Howard Bilofsky, Rebecca S. Crowley (2008). Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers PLoS Medicine, 5 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050183
2. Jonathan A. Eisen (2008). PLoS Biology 2.0 PLoS Biology, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060048

14th October, 2008