The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced that this year's Open Access Week came to a close on October 24. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year's event was three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos and blog posts were released to promote and highlight the benefits of open access (OA) to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community.
Started as a student-driven event in 2007 with support from SPARC and the library community, Open Access Day was at first a library-centric affair. The student stake in the conversation on access continues to grow more firm, but this year participants from the academy - including humanists, climate change scientists, provosts, research funders, Nobel laureates and lawyers – reportedly took advantage of the occasion to share their insights on how OA had had an impact on their work and lives.
Nobel prize-winning scientist and director of the US National Cancer Institute, Dr. Harold Varmus, participated in the official OA Week kick-off event. Varmus has reportedly been a leader in promoting OA in a succession of key roles - from introducing the topic of wider access and launching PubMed Central to increase public access to the literature as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, to helping to found the Public Library of Science.
In his video, Dr. Nico Sommerdijk, associate professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at the Dutch Eindhoven University of Technology, expressed a need for moving beyond traditional publishing approaches to share data. He made his research data openly available so that everybody can access the data set directly with one click of the mouse.
In Portugal, the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém held a portion of its Open Access Week programme in Second Life. Students at Boston University made a video to illustrate that studying without access to the resources you need is like having half a sock to wear, half a hotdog to eat, or half a book to read (http://www.openaccessweek.org/video/open-access). And, in Open Families (http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/openfamilies), scientists relate in personal and compelling terms how OA to the research and data they produce, as well as that produced by others, is not just a professional cause for them but a family affair.
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