Open access celebrating the tenth anniversary

“An open access initiative is celebrating ten years of its activities and existence. The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers... For those not familiar, the term “Open Access” (OA), the free online availability of research literature, was first coined at an Open Society sponsored meeting in Budapest in December 2001, with its primarily goal of an Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature. BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative) in order to achieve open access to scholarly journal literature recommends two complementary strategies: Self-archiving and a new generation of open-access journals... Today, according to OA, there are nearly 7,500 academic journals readily accessible in the Directory of Open Access Journals and more than 2,000 archives are included in the Directory of Open Access Repositories freely available online to doctors, patients, professors, and students around the world. Open-access repositories and journals like arXiv , SSRN, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are some of the many examples that have appeared on the scientific scene in recent years as well as education programs like MIT’s OpenCourseWare with the idea of openly sharing educational resources into the public. Also this week the Open Knowledge Foundation announced a new open access initiative... you may find the following sources as an interesting read: [1] a list of social media sites focused on open access launched by the Open Access Directory [2] EFF A Decade of Open Access (And the Challenges Ahead) [3] Open Access week web site [4] Budapest Open Access Initiative”