OA Advocacy: a fun way to help out

Open Access has advanced to the point where advocacy need no longer focus just on philosophy, debate, and public policy, important as these continue to be!

There are already a very great many wonderful open access initiatives that deserve highlighting, celebration - and friendly critique for continued improvement, of course.

I try to highlight successes as much as I can, through my series The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, occasional blogposts and other messages such as my recent Open Access: Quick Stats, Fast Facts, my celebration of OA Librarian heroes, and most recently, my feature on PubMedCentral, and OA leadership at NIH / NLM, and the occasional formal review, such as the review of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for The Charleston Advisor, a highly regarded traditional journal with an interesting approach to combining an ongoing subscription basis while experimenting with OA.

There are now well over 800 open access repositories around the world, more than 2,800 fully open access journals, and many very fine OA initiatives and projects of many types, all over the world, and OA advocates and heroes around the world, too.

To express this another way: as we more rapidly towards an open access future, writing about OA will become no less than writing about the world's scholarship as a whole; the world's academic library, the public library of science (broadly conceived, including but not limited to PLoS as a publisher).

Or - as we move towards as OA future - writing about OA in all its aspects, resources and projects - becomes almost synonymous with writing about librarianship. I will continue to write about as much as I possibly can about The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, one of my favorite series. I will celebrate as many projects, initiatives, and resources as I possibly can. It is already, however, far too much for just one person. Help would be most welcome. If this is of interest and you'd like to chat, please send me an e-mail, at heatherm at eln dot bc dot ca. Or, if you know of a great OA initiative, resource, or hero - write away!