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