Open Access scientific publishing - should you be interested?

In October 2013 Rhodes University will be holding an Open Access Week during which it is anticipated that that Rhodes will join 23 other African institutions (including ASSAF, Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal, Johannesburg, South Africa and Free State) in becoming a signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Below (in no particular order) are links to a selection of fairly recent articles and resources

 on the topic of 

Open Access scholarly publishing.

1. New this week:  How Open Access Empowered a 16-Year-Old to Make Cancer Breakthrough - this 4 minute video clip says it all! An interview on Open Access to research journals with Dr. Francis S. Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, and Jack Andraka, the 16-year-old inventor of a breakthrough cancer diagnostic
2. Open Access inaction - an academic researcher recognises "how stupid scientific publishing is"
3.  My experiences with Figshare [figshare allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner] 
4. Open Access publishing - common misunderstandings
5.  Why scientists are reluctant to publish in Open Access? 
6.  Open-access scientific publishing is gaining ground
7.  Labelling scientists who publish in traditional journals as 'immoral' only hinders the cause of open access publishing
8. The Open Access Initiative: A New Paradigm for Scholarly Communications
9. Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact "...OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges... "
10.  Predatory publishers are corrupting open access  [article in Nature 2012]
11.  The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research
12. The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles: A failed experiment [Overall conclusion ...the hybrid experiment, at least in the case of the major publishers and with the current price level, has failed as a way of significantly adding to the volumes of OA articles]