This is the first Open Access Day, an effort sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and Students for FreeCulture.  The goal of the day is to encourage Open Access – where the internet is used to encourage the unrestricted dissemination of research results to all.

Open Access has been gaining steam over the last several years, where journals have emerged based on a free distribution model (articles are paid for by the authors, not subscriptions), and governments are encouraging more research availability (the National Institutes of Health now requires depositing funded research results into a publicly available database).  This parallels trends to make university curricula more open (MIT’s OpenCourseWare has spread MIT course notes around the world), and other printed material more available (Google’s Book Project perhaps the most noted example).

In a number of these efforts we are talking about free research as in free speech, not free beer.  The shifts in business models that are required will be hard for publishers and organizations that rely on journals for a good chunk of their income (many disciplinary societies fall in this group), and that can explain at least some of the resistance to open access.

Learn more about Open Access Day and the open access movement at the links above, and have a great day.