In what has become a seminal work, Dr. Seuss (1978) once wrote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”. Taking its inspiration from this quote, this paper addresses the question that with so much open access material now available for educators, researchers and policy-makers to read in the general area of Digital Learning, how do you know what to read and where you might want to go?

Over the past decade, arguably, with such a proliferation of open access literature and scholarship it has become almost impossible for people to keep up-to-date with everything being published, especially given the number of journals and new dissemination channels. On last count, for example, there were more than 270 open access journals in the area alone (Perkins & Lowenthal, 2016), without considering blogs, e-zines and hybrid publications—the latter being traditionally closed or restricted journals now offering readers some form of open access.

To partly address this challenge, over the past 5-years the team in the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL) at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland has each year selected an annual list of the “top 10” open access journal articles published over the year. This task is not a simple exercise. It involves the team checking and reviewing several hundred publications and refining a long-list and then short-list of nominated articles.

In this paper, we outline the selection methodology and then try to achieve three main objectives: (i) to briefly introduce and explain the rationale for the best of 2020 (NIDL, 2021a), including a special COVID-19 collection (NIDL, 2021b); (ii) to reflect on key trends and lessons arising from an analysis of the sample of selected publications over the past 5-years; and (iii) to discuss what educators find most useful in terms of their professional reading, including strategies for keeping abreast of, and helping to critically interpret, the many different shades and colours of the open access literature.

With respect to this last objective, metaphorically speaking, the intention is to help demystify what has become a rich pallet of ‘red, blue, pickle colour too’ splashed across the field by sharing valuable critical reading strategies. Participants will be able hear as well as share their own useful tips and reading strategies on how to make the most of open literature. Put another way, borrowing from the words of Dr Seuss and the skill of reading with your eyes shut, the aim of this paper is to support new and emerging researchers, scholarly professionals and educational practitioners to learn more about ‘Jake the Pillow Snake’ and ‘Foo-Foo Snoo’.