As many of you will have gathered, 14th October 2008 was Open Access Day. 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!
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
