Open Access Day: October 14!

Submitted by Anonymous on October 10, 2008 - 15:25 Filed under

Open Access Day is jointly sponsored by Students for Free Culture, PLoS (Public Library of Science) and SPARC to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, a growing international movement that encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement of society.

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

Source: Peter Suber's "A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access"

Some Canadian OA perspectives:

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Policy on Access to Research Outputs (Sep '07)
National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC) Open Access Policy (Jul '09)
PubMed Central (PMC) Canada Initiative (CISTI/NRC and CIHR)
Canadian Federation for the Humanities & Social Sciences Position (Mar '06)
SSHRC Open Access Policy Focus
NSERC Open Access Policy Update (May '08)