Open Access Week is now underway, from today until the 28th October. Organised by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), this week-long event aims to promote and raise awareness of open access publishing within the scientific and academic research community. Institutions and universities from all over the world are getting involved and there’s an extensive calender of events that you can browse through to see what’s going on near you. The open access policy has attracted much debate over recent months, and this event is an opportunity to hear about its potential benefits and keep up to date with the latest opinions.

Although Methods content is only available to subscribers and BES members, OnlineOpen is available to all authors of primary research articles. With OnlineOpen, the author, or a funding agency, pays a fee to ensure that the article is made open access. You can read more about the terms and conditions in our author guidelines. Did you know that BES members are entitled to a  50% discount on this service? If you’re not already a member then you can read about all of our membership benefits and sign up here!

Our latest issue contains an OnlineOpen article, entitled Advances in multiplex PCR: balancing primer efficiencies and improving detection success, by Daniela Sint, Lorna Raso and Michael Traugott. Other OnlineOpen articles published in Methods so far this year include: Biodiversity soup: metabarcoding of arthropods for rapid biodiversity assessment and biomonitoring by Douglas Yu and colleagues, and How safe is mist netting? evaluating the risk of injury and mortality to birds by Erica Spotswood and colleagues.

What are your thoughts on open access publishing within the ecological community?

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