Open Access

What is Open Access?

Put very simply: “Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).” http://opendefinition.org/ Doing so not only makes sense, since most research is publicly funded, but also helps to advance science.

For a fun explanation of Open Access check out PhD Comics’ What is Open Access.

A more detailed look is available in Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.

How Open is It?:

My Philosophy

I believe that the next cultural and scientific revolution will be in the form of Open Access. Many of the overarching theories of how our world and universe works have already been discovered and, now, the major work of scientists is to understand the intricacies within these theories. The issue with achieving such an advanced level of understanding, however, is the vast number of details that exist. With the current system of publication, along with the fact that data sharing and collaboration are the exception rather than the rule, these intricacies will never be completely be understood. Most failures remain unpublished, not allowing other researchers to learn from them. Work will continuously be repeated unnecessarily.

OpenCon 2014

I want to thank the Oregon State University Library for sponsoring me to go to OpenCon2014. This conference was life changing and there is no way I could do it justice by trying to summarize it. A few others have tried and done a much better job then I ever could: Martin Bentley, Ross Mounce, Karin Purshouse, Emilie Champagne, Lauren B. Collister, Peter Murray-Rust, and Hilda Bastien at Scientific American
To watch the whole thing Check out the videos here. All the slides will are here.

Links to resources and good info:

Oregon State University OA

LibGuide on OA, OA Policy, Open ORST - Online educational resources Open Educational Resources (OER), Center for Digital Scholarship and Services, Research Data Services

Videos worth watching

PhD Comics’ What is Open Access, OpenCon Webcast: Open Access 101, OpenCon Webcast: Open Education 101, OpenCon Webcast: Open Data 101,

My Talks On Open

Slides from Materials Science Seminar February 12, 2015

Other Organizations

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) The Right to Research Coalition Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
OA News Letter OA Button Hack your Phd peerlibrary Why OA Matters

Open Edu

Open Textbook Library

Open Data

5 stars of open data, Open data handbook, Content Mine, Ross Mounce, Opennotebook, Reclaim your Copyright (after 35 years), OpenCon2014 on Scientific American

My Projects

The list of projects is quite long, now, because of all that I learned at OpenCon. I will list just a few of them in no particular order:

1. Create a number of presentations to give to different groups around OrSt and elsewhere.
2. Promote “Open” in Oregon (Start student group or something, yet to be determined)
3. Work with Peter Murray-Rust on Data-mining Powder diffraction Data. (and maybe some other Crystallography projects)
4. #myopenstory videos
5. Have the Open Talk
6. Follow up with Congress!!

If you are able to help in any way or have questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.