Open Access Day – October 14, 2008

Synchroblogging competition – get writing this weekend — Open Access Day – October 14, 2008

# Why does Open Access matter to me? Because I want to know and learn without paying money to people who are not in the business of learning and knowing.

# How did I first become aware of it? Really aware? 6 years ago when I started working at a scientific library and found out that they pay huge amounts of money for their own work. I must admit: before that I worked as a publisher, earning small amounts of money without paying authors too much.

# Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world? I am not really convinced everything must be open access, but the necessary knowledge for people to improve, learn, to stay healthy, should be open accessible. Besides there should be better reasons then making a profit to limit access to information.

# What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do? I do a lot to support open access: evangelise, promote, build databases, initiatie projects. What I exspect others to do is at least stop discussing copyrights and impact factors and deposit your publications.