As many of you will have gathered, 14th October 2008 was [Open Access Day]( http://www.openaccessday.org/). Peter Suber (of Open Access News and on the OKF’s Advisory Board) and Gavin Baker have provided an 8 page roundup of some of the comments on OA from around the world (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8). You can also check out a FriendFeed room and a Google blog search.

On the Open Access Directory there are links to events, educational material, audio and video about OA. Futhermore, at the OADay08 page at Vimeo there are new “interviews with a Teacher, Funder, Patient Advocate, Physician Scientist, Librarian and Student who explain why Open Access matters to them”.

To celebrate the day the Wellcome Trust announced a £1 million commitment to supporting OA. The Information Society Project at Yale Law School announced a new book, Access to Knowledge in Brazil: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development. Finally the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) was launched:

The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

[...] The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur).

Lots of great news for Open Access on all fronts – a big well done to all those involved in making this happen!

Related posts:

1. Open Knowledge (OKCon) 2008: LSE, London, 15th March 2008 OKCon 2008 – ‘Open Knowledge: Applications, Tools and Services’ where: London School of Economics, London, UK when: 15th March 2008 (1030-1830) www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/ register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/ wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/ Following on from the success of our inaugural conference last year, we’re pleased...
2. Berlin Open Access Conference No. 5: From Practice to Impact: Consequences on Knowledge Dissemination The next Open Access conference in the Berlin Declaration follow-up series (the 5th) will take place September 19 – 21, 2007 at the University of Padua. The preliminary programme includes: … c) Open Access and the e-science: how to support...
3. SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have just announced a new SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals. In order for journals to be approved, they must use a Creative...