Keeping Up with Open Access

SPARC Links to an external site., the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is the lead organization advocating for open access. Their website is filled with great material explaining what open access is and why it's important. They also provide tools for authors to use in copyright negotiations with publishers, like the SPARC Author Addendum Links to an external site..

Open Access Week Links to an external site. is a global event now in its sixth year, and is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

Finally, Peter Suber coordinates the Open Access Tracking Project Links to an external site. (OATP). OATP is a kind of news service that uses social tagging Links to an external site. to capture new OA developments comprehensively and in real time. Participants tag OA-related developments using the tagging platforms of their choice (like Twitter). Open-source software developed for OATP, called TagTeam Links to an external site., pulls these separate efforts together, creating a primary project feed of new OA developments and a series of secondary feeds on a range of OA subtopics Links to an external site.. The project launched Links to an external site. on April 16, 2009, and there's a full-length description Links to an external site. of it in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for May 2, 2009. It started on Connotea and moved Links to an external site. to TagTeam on September 17, 2012. You can follow and subscribe to the feed (which currently has over 16,000 news items in it!) at on the TagTeam site Links to an external site..