What can I do to encourage open access?

Anyone can help raise awareness by installing an open access button in their web browser and sharing it via social media. Open Access Week is an international event held online each year in late October. It provides ideas for students, researchers, funders, administrators, librarians and others to connect and demonstrate their support for open access. This is a great opportunity to learn more about open access and share it with others.

If you are an academic, please consider submitting your work to an open access journal. If you're researching open source, there are a variety of open access journals to choose from. For the life sciences, F1000Research is an excellent choice and very innovative. In addition, the journal Nature Methods recently strongly supported openness. If none of these are suitable for your research, you can browse the Directory of Open Access Journals to find one that is right for you. If you cannot find a journal that is right for you, consider self-archiving by adding your journal articles best open source database to your institution's open access institutional repository. If your institution does not have an institutional repository, advocate for the creation of one.

Where can I learn more about open access?

In addition to the sites already mentioned above, the Consortium for Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Resources (SPARC) is a great resource, and you can find practical instructions for implementing Open Access in the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS). For student-centred open access, Right to Research is a great place to start. Peter Suber's book Open Access, freely available under a Creative Commons license, provides a solid overview of the topic if you want more in-depth content. You can also check out the Open Access Directory's list of open access blogs, or read Opensource.com's articles on open access.

Finally, the documentary Son of the Internet: The Aaron Swartz Story offers a glimpse into the life and tragic death of one of the early leaders of the open access movement. Swartz, a co-developer of the RSS protocol and co-founder of Reddit, has shown such enthusiasm for open access that he tried to download and distribute all articles from a library of digital scholarly journals called JSTOR, which got him into trouble. A two-year legal battle with federal prosecutors over wire and computer fraud. His untimely death in 2013 renewed his call for scholars to support open access journals and publish their work in free format.