I have just signed in to take part in Open Access Week - scheduled for 18 to 22 October 2010.

Thanks to Wayne Machintosh for mentioning it during the OER forum see below.

(I copy Wayne's post in full because it is interesting, because it's how I discovered about Open Access Week, and because it may encourage others to join the OER discussions. I am assuming that everything in the forum is in the public domain - hope I'm right. )

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wayne Mackintosh <wayne@oerfoundation.org>
Date: 28 September 2010 09:02
Subject: [OER] Nurturing the development of sustainable ecosystems -- Connecting OER and Open Access
To: Open Educational Resources - an online discussion forum <oer-forum@lists.esn.org.za>


Hi everyone,

Catherine Ngugi of OER Africa highlights two significant questions relating
to the existing cost models of tertiary education:

  - What costs are associated with the provision of tertiary education?
  - What models currently exist for funding the costs of tertiary
  education?

Research activity and output is a significant component of the costs of
modern universities. Indeed, providing opportunities for learners to
interact with a community of scholars who are actively engaged in research
is a significant point of difference associated with a university education.
There are also strong links between research and teaching.

The open access movement, largely focused on providing free access to peer
reviewed research has made significant progress in recent years. However, to
date, there has not been much interaction and collaboration from the OER
world with the open access movement.

Clearly there are considerable opportunities to nurture and support the
sustainability of open models through better collaboration between open
access (research)  and OER (teaching). For example, many post graduate
programmes rely on published research output as learning materials and as
OER advocates, we should promote the integration of open access research
outputs into our OER materials and courses.

Open Access Week 2010 is scheduled for 18 to 22 October 2010 (
http://www.openaccessweek.org/). I encourage all OER projects around the
world to consider participation and active contributions to Open Access
week. We should also circulate our planned activities for Open Access Week
with the OER community via this list.  These are the ones I know of (please
add yours to the list):

  - OER Foundation: http://wikieducator.org/OERF:Open_Access_Week_2010
  - Athabasca University: http://openaccess.athabascau.ca/

Let's build sustainable open ecosystems together!

Cheers
Wayne