Today (October 14^th) is the very first Open Access Day.

From the Press Release:

“SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.”

Open Access is on the rise, according to Heather Morrison, ‘The percentage of the scholarly literature that is freely available online is nearly 20%’ and the recent acquisition of BioMedCentral by Springer seems to suggest commercial publishers are increasingly aware that Open Access can indeed be a sustainable and profit making business model for academic publishing.

For more information on Open Access, just take a look at Peter Suber’s excellent Open Access Overview.