Open Access Day
It’s Open Access Day. Mission: to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access. Their approach: “synchro-blogging” – an attempt to get as many folks as possible to blog on the given topic at the same time.
So, to answer their questions:
- Why does Open Access matter to you?
- How did you first become aware of it?
- Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
- What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?
OA is important for many reasons: go and read this by Jonathan Eisen instead of my rambling. One that stands out for me: it signals a fundamental change in the way that information is conveyed from writers to readers and an admission that the traditional publishing process is obsolete in the internet age. We live in a world where people expect instant, relevant information in the top 20 hits from a Google search and that expectation is transferring to science too. I don’t care how prestigious you think your journal is, or whether you see yourself as some kind of “guardian of knowledge”. I want information, I want it now and if you can’t deliver, I’m going somewhere else (*).
I honestly don’t remember, but it was some years ago. I suspect it was around the time that journals such as Nucleic Acids Research and Bioinformatics introduced an OA option for authors. I also remember quite vividly the appearance of BMC on the scene and thinking “now, this is different and exciting”.
Lots of reasons. (i) The world pays for the research and shouldn’t have to pay again to view the results. (ii) Scientists should be accountable – exactly what are we doing with your tax dollars? (iii) When information is free, many eyes can look at it and many eyes = more ideas than fewer eyes.
Hey, I’m just a postdoc – I don’t get to make influential decisions! That said, five of my last six publications are OA. Where possible, I try to submit to OA journals and I review papers for OA journals. Once in a while, I blog about OA and other “open science” issues.
What can others do? The same and more. Read blogs that cover OA – starting with Jonathan and Bora. Understand its philosophy. Promote it in public (blogs, wikis, FriendFeed). Make it the norm, not a novelty.
(*) OK, I work in a large, relatively-funded university which subscribes to most journals – so I won’t deny myself a non-OA article on principle. Others are less fortunate.
Hello, I think you might be the first person to enter our blogging competition. Being based in Australia helps! Thank you so much for taking part. Happy Open Access Day.
Liz
PLoS Outreach.
Liz Allen
October 14, 2008 at 2:21 am
[...] Neil Saunders PostDoc University of Queensland, Australia. “Open Access helps scientists make the discoveries we need to improve health, provides the opportunity for their work to be more easily read and cited, enables integration of research with other resources, helps funding bodies evaluate the research they have funded, and ensures that the digital record of medicine can be preserved.” [...]
Open Access Day: Why It Matters « O’Really? at Duncan.Hull.name
October 14, 2008 at 10:26 am
[...] this as late as I am, there have been some great posts already, none better than that by Neil. Tough to add to what he [...]
Open Access and me : business|bytes|genes|molecules
October 14, 2008 at 2:21 pm
[...] of Open Access” auszuweiten. Der erste Blog post zur competition kam aus Australien und ist hier zu [...]
Heute ist Open Access Day! « the fabilous librarian…
October 14, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Open access is not the same thing as open access publishing (”gold open access”). Open access publishing is an alternative to the conventional model of academic publishing. But open access itself means free online access to peer-reviewed research articles. The other way to provide open access is for authors to self-archive their conventional peer-reviewed journal in their open access institutional repositories (”green open access”). Open access day is open access day (both gold and green), not open access publishing day.
Stevan Harnad
October 14, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] big question is: why Open Access? The reasons are many (see Neil and Deepak’s posts for other perspectives). For one, research is typically funded by the [...]
Happy Open Access Day! « I was lost but now I live here
October 14, 2008 at 5:24 pm
[...] October 2008 has been designated the first Open Access Day. Many people will blog on the subject more eloquently than I, but here is my [...]
Open Access Day | Fuzzier Logic
October 14, 2008 at 7:54 pm
[...] Neil Saunders: We live in a world where people expect instant, relevant information in the top 20 hits from a Google search and that expectation is transferring to science too. I don’t care how prestigious you think your journal is, or whether you see yourself as some kind of “guardian of knowledge”. I want information, I want it now and if you can’t deliver, I’m going somewhere else. [...]
For your free information (FYFI): it’s Open Access Day! « Pimm - Partial immortalization
October 14, 2008 at 10:03 pm