ScienceOnline Vancouver
Naked Science: Excuse me your science is showing
About this event:
Created by Catherine
Took place on 12 June, 2012 from 19:00 to 21:00
Science World at TELUS World of Science
1455 Quebec Street, Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Z7
If you weren’t able to make it, you can see the livestream and related tweets in the recap.
Exposed. Transparent. Nude. All adjectives that should describe access to scientific journal articles, but currently, that’s not the case. The research paid by our Canadian taxpayer dollars is locked behind doors. The only way to access these articles is money, and lots of it!
Right now research articles costs more than a book! About $30. Only people with university affiliations have access and only journals their libraries subscribe to. Moms, dads, sisters, brothers, journalists, students, scientists, all pay for research, yet they can’t read the articles about their research without paying for it again. Now that doesn’t make sense.
At this month’s ScienceOnlineVancouver, we will be discussing:
- What is open access?
- Why is it important?
- What can we do to make journals open access.
Our panelists:
- Heather Piwowar is a postdoc with Duke University and the Dept of Zoology at UBC. She’s a researcher on the NSF-funded DataONE and Dryad projects, studying data. Specifically, how, when, and why do scientists publicly archive the datasets they collect? When do they reuse the data of others? What related policies and tools would help facilitate more efficient and effective use of data resources? Heather is also a co-founder of total-impact, a web application that reveals traditional and non-traditional impact metrics of scholarly articles, datasets, software, slides, and blog posts.
- Heather Morrison is a Vancouver-based, well-known international open access advocate and practitioner of open scholarship, through her blogs The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com and her dissertation-blog http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
- Lesley Evans Ogden is a freelance science journalist and the Vancouver media officer for the Science Media Centre of Canada. In the capacity of freelance journalist, she is a contributing science writer at Natural History magazine, and has written for a variety of publications including YES Mag, Scientific American (online), The Guardian, Canadian Running, and Bioscience. She has a PhD in wildlife ecology, and spent more than a decade slogging through mud and climbing mountains to study the breeding and winter ecology of migratory birds. She is also an alumni of the Science Communications program at the Banff Centre. (She will be speaking in the capacity of freelance journalist).
- Joy Kirchner is the Scholarly Communications Coordinator at University of British Columbia where she heads the University’s developing Copyright office in addition to the Scholarly Communications office based in the Library. Her role involves coordinating the University’s copyright education services, identifying recommended and sustainable service models to support scholarly communication activities on the campus and coordinating formalized discussion and education of these issues with faculty, students, research and publishing constituencies on the UBC campus. Joy has also been instrumental in working with faculty to host their open access journals through the Library’s open access journal hosting program; she was involved in the implementation and content recruitment of the Library’s open access institutional repository, and she was instrumental in establishing the Provost’s Scholarly Communications Steering Committee and associated working groups where she sits as a key member of the Committee looking into an open access position at UBC amongst other things.. Joy is also chair of UBC’s Copyright Advisory Committee and working groups. She is also a faculty member with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) / Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Institute for Scholarly Communication, she assists with the coordination and program development of ACRL’s much lauded Scholarly Communications Road Show program, she is a Visiting Program Officer with ACRL in support of their scholarly communications programs, and she is a Fellow with ARL’s Research Library Leadership Fellows executive program (RLLF). Previous positions includes Librarian, for Collections, Licensing & Digital Scholarship (UBC), Electronic Resources Coordinator (Columbia Univ.), Medical & Allied Health Librarian and Science & Engineering Librarian. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of British Columbia.
The panel will start at 7 pm but we’ll have mingling (with BEvERages) at 6:30. Please RSVP so that we comply with liquor laws
See you on June 12! - SoVan Organizing Team
Note: There is also petition going around that states that research paid for by US taxpayer dollars should be available for free to US taxpayers (and others!) on the internet. Don’t worry if you are Canadian citizen, by signing this petition, Canadians would get access to the US research too and it would help convince the Canadian government to adopt similar rules. Sign petition here! Watch this video
Write us your thoughts. Play nice.
Is livestream available for this event? I might not be able to attend in person but hope to join via web…
Venkataraman Balaji (COL), Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation), Rory McGreal (AthabascaU) and Joy Kirchner (UBC Library), each took a turn highlighting oeinrtuoitpps in the OER space for higher education institutions to
I worked in the media isdrntuy for 7 years and I now work in communications.My advice to aspiring journos is to do the following:1. Be highly literate. I can’t tell you how many journalists I’ve come across who can’t string a sentence together properly. I won’t even get started on spelling and grammatical errors.2. Study History.3. Study culture, including pop culture. It’s awful to watch a broadcaster or writer who doesn’t know squat beyond what’s immediately before them.4. Don’t seek fame.
Um, is this “naked science” a clothing optional event? Because it’s a bit cold for that. More like June-uary. I’ll be there to bare all, but fully clothed. :)
Yes, clothing is required :) I’ll try to have spare lab coats in case others decide to go bare!
I’m glad that you will be there – it’s going to be great!