Today is Open Access Day — the First Annual Open Access Day, to be exact.

As far as I can tell, no parades or fireworks are scheduled, and there’s no special feast to be had, although Canadians are welcome to make a sandwich from leftovers from their recent Thanksgiving.

What there is is a challenge — for as many people today as possible to write a blog entry on why Open Access is important to them.

For OpenCourseWare, I think that’s a pretty easy post. You need only to flip through the reading lists of OCW courses to see why OA is a crucial part of the OER ecosystem. When producing courseware, courseware creators have to include in their reading lists many articles that are not freely available. While it may be trivial for a student enrolled at an institution to get these materials via the library, or some firewalled electronic repository, for many users of OpenCourseWare, the lack of access is a show-stopper.

With Open Access, OCW can reach its democratic potential. Just as OCW opens up possibilities for those students without access to the classroom, OA opens up possibilities for those without access to the library. It’s really that simple.

That’s my pitch in brief. But please, write yours…