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 Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific).

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“Scholars are facing unprecedented Information Overload in their attempts to identify potentially relevant information sources. Electronic networks have not only expedited traditional forms of publishing but created new formal and informal opportunities for communication. Conventional methods of information management are reaching the limits of their effectiveness. To enhance access to information in the coming decades, systems that fully utilize the digital nature of a growing number of scholarly resources must be implemented.”

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“Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the medium’s interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the reader’s impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog readers, including common blog reading practices, some of the dimensions along which reading practices vary, relationships between identity presentation and perception, the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with, previous work, and suggests a number of directions and implications for future work on blogging. ”

Eric Baumer University of California, Irvine

Mark Sueyoshi University of California, Irvine

Bill Tomlinson University of California, Irvine

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