The 6^th year of Open Access Week is fast approaching and we would like to tell you about some exciting events BioMed Central has planned to mark the week. Open Access Week is a global event  to increase awareness of the benefits of open access publishing, and give people the opportunity to discuss and share their views on the topic.

BioMed Central publishes all research articles open access, employing the Creative Commons attribution licence, which makes research freely available for all to read, re-use and build upon. As of September 2013, all BioMed Central journals are also published under an Open Data policy (Creative Commons CC0 waiver), which allows free re-use and distribution of all published data without legal restrictions. We believe that removing barriers to access has widespread implications for the scientific community, and Open Access Week is a key opportunity to promote this.

BMC Medicine TweetChat 

BMC Medicine (@BMCMedicine) will be hosting a chat on Monday 21st October at 4 pm UK time discussing how open access publishing impacts medical research and global health , following on from the success of last year’s TweetChat about the growth of Open Access journals. Prominent researchers Agnes Binagwaho (@agnesbinagwaho), Charles Wiysonge (@CharlesShey) and Prabhat Jha (@countthedead) will also be joining the TweetChat , and we hope you too can join us to share your views, just remember to use the hashtag #BMCMed in all tweets. You can find more details on the BMC blog.

Fact of the day: redefining impact

Everyone is familiar with the infamous impact factor, but how should we really define the impact of a publication? BioMed Central would like to show how open access has had an impact on people’s lives by giving real examples. Throughout the week we will be highlighting and discussing articles which have really made a difference and that difference is thanks to open access. You will be able to read and discuss these next week on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Authors workshop

The team in Japan are organising an Author’s Workshop with Hokkaido University on 22nd October including presentations from representatives about HUSCAP – Hokkaido’s institutional repository, green open access, and on the gold open access trend and BioMed Central.

Other exciting events going on next week include the celebration of Retrovirology’s 1000^th published article, which will be highlighted on the Retrovirology blog. We will also be releasing a video of a discussion between editorial board members from a  range of BioMed Central journals about the importance of Open Access and its implications for the scientific community. You may also notice that BioMed Central has some exciting new logo designs for Open Access Week 2013, look out for these on Twitter, Facebook and Google+!

Staff out and about 

Staff at BioMed Central and Springer will be out and about at a great range of international events during Open Access Week.

• In Beijing, Maurice Kwong (Executive Vice president, Springer Asia) will be speaking at Open Access publishing day at the Chinese Academy of Science, discussing the Open Access challenges for Chinese research.
• Leo Cheung (Publishing Manager, BioMed Central Asia) will be talking about the benefits of Open Access publishing at the Monash University, Malaysia and at Mahidol University, Bangkok.
• Wim van der Stelt (EVP Corporate Strategy, Springer) will be speaking about ‘OA policies of Big Publishers’ at the Turkish National Open Access Workshop at Izmir Institute of Technology, you can view the program for this event here.
• Queens University, Belfast will be holding their Student Research Symposium. One of BioMed Central’s Media Officers Shane Canning will be attending with a small booth and will be on hand to answer any questions about open access.
• In the Unites States, Robert Schatz (Academic Sales Executive, BioMed Central) will be speaking at University Colorado Boulder about ‘Publisher Perspectives on Open Access’ as part of their open access week activities.