Friends: Here is an item from Peter Suber's blog. Despite so much being written about open access, a very large proportion of researchers is not aware of it even in an advanced country like Germany. please read on. --- Spreading the word about OA Richard Seitmann, "Open access" is practically unknown among scientists as an alternative for publications, Heise Online, May 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'The secretary-general of the conference of deans of higher education (HRK), Christiane Ebel-Gabriel, explained today at the opening of the symposium with the title " The Future of Scientific Communication -- Open Access", which will be taking place today and tomorrow in Göttingen, that directors of institutions of higher education will have to "see ensuring access to scientific publications and research results as a strategic task much more than they currently do." Two years ago, the HRK called for a refocus of scientific publications and information exchanges in light of the crisis among journals at the time because skyrocketing subscription prices both for conventional and electronic scientific journals had been leading people to cancel their subscriptions, paradoxically making access to published research results even harder despite the Internet. "The financial pressure on the field of science continues to grow," Ebel-Gabriel explained. She regretted that the current alternatives for publication in "open access" journals and on institute servers have not been used to the full. The secretary-general quoted figures from a still unpublished study (PowerPoint file) by the German Research Society, which found that three of four scientists surveyed and more than 85% of social scientists and professors of the humanities are not aware that open access is one possibility for publication.' ---- So what is needed is focused advocacy and awareness campaigns. And some real action on the ground - I mean setting up open access archives and filling them with papers! Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]