Tom Olijhoek's blog

A new website has just been launched where people can tell their personal stories on how they have benefitted from access to research, or suffered from the lack of it.  The new site is called Who needs access? You need access?

This month was the 10^th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, considered by many as the start of the open access movement. In the past 10 years the term open access has come to mean a lot of different things. Publishers have been giving this label to very different kinds of open access.

 While in Europe the European ‘s Commission Digital Agenda is paving the way for Open Access to publicly funded research data (Data Access ) and Publications (

 • Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable.

• There’s no such thing as “too much” information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need.

 While one in six humans lives in abject poverty, half the world’s people live  in a state of knowledge deprivation, meaning that they cannot obtain  the basic knowledge or technologies necessary for a decent life, to raise their children, eat well, enjoy good health and improve their circumstances.

Apart from all the other arguments in favour of open access there may be two less obvious reasons to support it. These reasons are that it may contribute to better science by counter-acting the publication bias in the current publication system, and by discouraging selective publishing on the part of the author.