Start your own ball rolling...

[Charles J. Greenberg]

I sent this out today.  Consider adapting it for your setting:

Hello,
International Open Access Week (http://openaccessweek.org/)  is coming up on October 20-24, 2014.    Would you like to know more or wish to separate the hype from the common sense?   

I have considerable experience  with my own publications and advocating for open access participation, as well as warning the unsuspecting about questionable, unethical, or predatory practices.   I started an open access journal, an open access blog, and have published with at least one commercial publisher that had to comply with NIH Public Access Policies and put a copy of my article in PubMed Central.  I am currently on the Board of Directors for the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations (NDLTD) and used to manage an open access repository of student theses and dissertations.

Nearly all traditional publishers have to take a position on open access and may offer authors the rights to place an article version openly in an institutional repository or personal web site.    I have posted some conference papers not published elsewhere in www.academia.edu where they can be viewed, cited, and even downloaded, while giving me usage statistics.

Please reply if you would be interested in my giving  a couple of lectures or workshops during Open Access Week, October 20-24, at WKU.

As major publishers have embraced open access as business model, I would be happy to come to a class and talk about true business models and the imitators that get the label predatory.