Here at the Centre for Research Communications we've been thinking of ways that we can help to promote Open Access Week. One idea we had to raise awareness of the week for a wider audience was to propose to Google that they use OA week as a subject for a Google Doodle for their main home page or the home page of Google Scholar. Since Google will receive large numbers of suggestions for Doodles it would help if the OA community could join us in lobbying Google to consider OA week.

To make a suggestion for the Doodle simply email Google at proposals@google.com.

Here is some suggested text for an email to Google:

"The week of October 18th is international Open Access week, with events and activities taking place world-wide on university and research campuses. We believe that Open Access, researchers making their research
articles available for free to all, is an exciting and important shift in the availability of research for scholars and the public. We would like to support the idea of a Google Doodle on Open Access for this week."

We are also planning to run a competition to find the best "success story" in open access. This will be open to anyone working in open access or repositories worldwide and may even involve a (small) prize for the eventual winner and runner up. The idea is that entrants submit their success story, for example how a personal intervention improved OA or how someone was converted to the importance of OA, and a shortlist is presented to a panel of judges to find the overall winner. We're currently looking into the possibility of using crowdsourcing for submitting stories and generating the shortlist. Watch this space for further details.