This week marked the beginning of the annual Open Access Week 2010 event, running from Oct 18th-Oct 24. As the challenge this year Dr. Philip E. Bourne, Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego and Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, called upon scholars to think beyond free and ready access to the literature – made possible by Open Access – and consider how technology may be deployed to advance research, to truly mine the increasing amount of available literature.

At Mendeley, we share the goal of making research more transparent and aim to provide the best productivity and collaboration platform for researchers. So we wanted to share an effort we are contributing for this week, and ask for YOUR contributions.

Recently Mendeley rolled out new group features and in the spirit of Open Access we have started a public fully open group called ‘Open Access’ as a call to the community to come together and contribute research on the subject. But also to experience how Mendeley supports digital organization and collaboration interactions and discuss the power and necessity of technologies to support OA in the future. So get involved, join the group, post research and discuss Open Access!

Also, if you are a student, are interested in working with students on Open Access, or just want to know what’s going on with students in the Open Access movement, you should plan to join the Right to Research Coalition student webcast with UC Berkeley on Thursday, October 21^st at 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT. The webcast is open to anyone, and everyone will be able to participate, comment, and ask questions both live on the call and by using Twitter and backchan.nl. For a variety of other events going on check out the OA Week website.