Here's a sampling of what people were writing about Open Access Day, in no particular order:
Molly Keener, Open Access Day, 2008, ZSR | Professional Development, October 14, 2008.
... Here at Wake Forest, the WFU Libraries are working to raise awareness of open access among faculty, students and staff. Both the Z. Smith Reynolds Library and the Coy C. Carpenter Medical Library have resource pages on scholarly communication issues (ZSR, Carpenter) and open access (ZSR, Carpenter). A group of librarians, with input from faculty and research administrators, are working to build an institutional repository for Wake Forest that will enable us to better collect, highlight and disseminate the world-class research conducted at our University. Faculty members from both campuses are already publishing in open access journals and hybrid access journals (traditional journals with article-by-article optional open access), and submitting to subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central. Through compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, many faculty researchers are realizing that they are able to retain many of their rights as copyright owners in their works when seeking publication, without forfeiting the opportunity to be published in premiere journals. ...
Have you ever googled the title of an article and found you were able to get the full-text? Conversely, have you ever googled the title of an article only to find the publisher of the journal asking for your credit card?
Most likely, the free article came from an open-access journal or repository.
Not to be confused with subscription-based journals and databases, open access calls for publicly funded research to be made freely accessible online, immediately after publication. ...
As it has for generations, Open Access Day at my house will involve insane travel stresses, endless hours of cooking and dishwashing, dangerously excessive alcohol consumption, the therapeutic airing of familial tensions, grievances and debates on the Creative Commons NC clause in shrieking tones, and falling asleep in front of the television watching an uncompetitive big league sporting match...
Thankfully, more mature people are organizing more wholesome fare at public locations ...
... Why support open access? Won’t the people who need these resources already be associated with colleges or universities, and so have access to them? Well, first off, no; currently access to many important resources costs more than many institutions can afford. But consider also the full range of uses for open-access materials. Educators at all levels can use it to keep up to speed with their fields, and better teach children of all ages. (”Won’t somebody think of the children?!” actually applies here.) People who are dealing with diseases they know little about, whether it’s them or their relatives who are sick, can use scientific articles to educate themselves and get a better perspective on what’s going on with their bodies. Researchers can get their work done faster and ultimately more cheaply – less need for interlibrary loan! – which again increases equality in access to the knowledge we are so quickly amassing, regardless of a scholar’s or institution’s economic status. ...
Support open access. Talk to librarians about it. Talk to your scientist friends about it. Talk to anyone who’ll listen.
Allyson Mower, Open Access Day, Information Literacy Blog, October 14, 2008.
A haiku for Open Access Day:
Let's create a rule
Information is a tool
Everyone can use!
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/17/2008 05:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
