First Monday Podcasts and UIC Library celebrate first Open Access Day
The Internet journal First Monday and the UIC Library mark the first Open Access Day, October 14, 2008, with First Monday Podcast’s launch of a series on the topic of openness.
In the first of five episodes, Chief Podcast editors AJ Hannah and Joy Austria examine The State of Openness and the meaning of openness in scholarly publishing politics, society, and culture. The editors interview Sandra Braman, Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Mary Case, University Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Steve Jones, Professor of Communication and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Open access is freely available public access to scientific, scholarly, and government information on the Internet without financial, legal or technical barriers. The importance of open access often becomes a personal issue when, for example, a lay person is prevented from learning more about a disease or medical treatments because publishers require prohibitively expensive licensing agreements in order for the public to read reliable, scientifically vetted articles. Open access is a pivotal international issue for countries that cannot afford subscriptions to commercial electronic resources.
Open Access Day will focus attention on the principle that publicly-funded research results should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. Some organizations such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are committed to free dissemination of scientific and medical literature as a public resource and as a tactic to increase the efficiency in science. SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries that works to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.
SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture founded Open Access Day. The Open Access Day Web site lists activities in academic and research organizations worldwide., field_56ba6f8fdb00c