Open Access means free availability on the Internet of scientific or academic literature (mainly the peer-reviewed articles), allowing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts.

On the 27th and 28th and November, 2006 I’ll be attending to the 2nd Open Access Conference taking place at University of Minho, Braga. I’m looking forward to it because there’ll be an opportunity to meet with the gurus and other people whose institutions or them selfs signed the The Budapest Open Access Inititative and are in the movement, or as publishers, author or technical personnel. Myself, which belong to this last category, will be there representing Sociedade Portuguesa de Vida Selvagem. This non-profit organization has its own self-archive and is a publisher for the Wildlife Biology in Practice journal. It also has a lot of portuguese and international author that somehow are connected.

Because I’m the one responsible for the SPVS platform implementation I’m looking forward to be in the Monday Morning pre-conference about “Platforms and services for repository hosting”. There’ll be some interesting people:

• CDS Invenio – Diane Berkovits (CERN)
• Digital Commons – Júlio Anjos (Lusodoc)
• Digitool – João Neves (Datinfor)
• DSpace – Ângelo Miranda (Universidade do Minho)
• Eprints – Leslie Carr (Southampton University)
• Fedora – Alicia López Medina & Luis Zorita (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distância)

For now I’ll leave you with a link to the official website of the 2nd. Open Access Conference, you’ll find a lot of information on the movement and of course the whole program including the speakers.

Also you can visit SPVS website and take a look at the wildlife preservation open access articles available at Wildlife Biology in Practice. Please feel free to register and if you’re an author you can submit your paper there. It’ll be peer reviewed and could be on the next issue available to all. After all, that’s what Open Access is about.