Why does Open Access matter to you? A blogging contest

Open Access Day is on October 14th (don't tell me I did not warn you in advance!). The day will be marked with lots of events, online and offline (if you are local, you may choose to go to Duke, for instance) so watch my blog for more information on Tuesday.

What you as a blogger will probably be most interested in is the Blogging Contest!

How does it work? Well, you are all supposed to synchroblog on Tuesday (but NOT before) on the topic:"Why does Open Access matter to me?"

Write a post and publish it on October 14th, and you will be entered in the competition and you can win a bag of swag, e.g., a one-year print subscription to Seed magazine, a PLoS travel mug, a couple of cool PLoS t-shirts and other items, plus your post will be cross-posted to the blogs where the judges blog.

And the judges will be:

Liz Allen - Head of PLoS Communications

Aaron Rowe - blogger on Wired Science

and, well, yours truly... ;-)

As Liz says:

On October 14, 2008, wherever in the world you live, we want you to tell everyone why Open Access Matters to you in celebration of the first ever Open Access Day. We want the cumulative effect of all these posts to show the blogosphere how Open Access touches the lives of many many people. Apparently, experts tell me that this activity is known as synchroblogging.

So, what are the rules of engagement? Not that it is easy to get bloggers to follow any kind of rulz, but here they are, try to follow them the best you can:

There are 4 key points that we would like you to address in your post (these are the same questions that we asked the stars of the Voices of Open Access Video Series that we will also release on that day):

* Why does Open Access matter to you?
* How did you first become aware of it?
* Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
* What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

To enter the competition, all you have to do is blog on this topic on October 14, 2008. We'll use Google News/Technorati to track entries - to make this easier please use the phrase "Open Access Day" in your post. We've assembled a small team of judges who will review all these posts and vote on a winner. The winning post will have their entry cross posted on some or all of the sites where the judges blog on October 14h or thereabouts depending on space and other deadlines.

If your blog is very new, or on an unusual platform, so you are not sure that either Google Blogsearch or Technorati will pick up your post with the keywords "open access day", please e-mail me the Permalink of your October 14th entry, or just drop it in the comments of this post.