Today is the 1st annual Open Access Day, sponsored by SPARC, PLoS, and SFC. Over 100 libraries, SFC chapters, and others on five continents are celebrating with a variety of events–most commonly the webcast with Nobel laureates Sir Richard Roberts and Philip E. Bourne at 7 PM EST and 7 PM PST. At 4 PM EST the “Voices of Open Access” video series will be going live on the Open Access 2008 Vimeo channel, so watch for that. If you recorded an open access “shout out” at the Students for Free Culture conference in Berkeley this weekend, it’ll be appearing on the channel as well.

Planning to participate in an Open Access Day event on your campus? Want to help promote Open Access Day? Participate in the OA Day synchroblogging competition!

There are 4 key points that we would like you to address in your post (these are the same questions that we asked the stars of the Voices of Open Access Video Series that we will also release on that day):

* Why does Open Access matter to you?
* How did you first become aware of it?
* Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
* What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

To enter the competition, all you have to do is blog on this topic on October 14, 2008. We’ll use Google News/Technorati to track entries - to make this easier please use the phrase “Open Access Day” in your post.

The winner gets a bag of PLoS/scienceblogs.com goodies. Remember, in order to be eligible, you have to post about it today. So get cracking!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Commentary, FC.o at Events, Open Access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.