By cross-pollinating career skills with the ideologies of “hacking,” academics can seed creative avenues of research

Open Access journals PeerJ and eLife have joined together to promote a day of open licensing awareness in academia through a hackday event on 6th July called “Hack4ac”. PeerJ co-founder Jason Hoyt outlines why “hacking” is beneficial to academic creativity, quality research and wider dissemination of research findings. It is hoped that as more hacking events take place the benefits of programming and OA content in the sciences and humanities will become more widely known.