A couple of notes from the NAS Journal Summit

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Rick Anderson

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Mar 21, 2018, 1:53:16 PM3/21/18
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Hi, all –

 

Glenn asked me to share with the group some information about a meeting in which I participated last week.

 

Every two years, the National Academy of Sciences holds an invitation-only “journal summit.” This is billed as “a neutral forum where stakeholders across many disciplines and sectors may discuss current trends and often-contentious issues in scientific publishing.” More detailed information about the meeting, including agendas, isn’t publicly available because (in the interest of promoting free and open conversation) it’s always conducted according to Chatham House Rules: attendees are free to share the general substance of the discussions, but agree to keep the names and affiliations of other meeting participants confidential.

 

One of my functions at this meeting was to moderate a panel of early-career researchers. These were all tenure-track (but not yet tenured) faculty members, all involved in the natural or life sciences. Basically the idea was to give them an opportunity to talk about what’s most important to them as they seek to secure and advance their careers.

 

Two issues came up that were particularly striking:

 

1. These researchers recognize the limitations of the impact factor and the value of alternative metrics. But none of them seemed overly concerned about the IF’s limitations, or overly excited about altmetrics. Basically, they said what you might expect them to say: “If I’m going to keep my job, I have to publish in high-IF journals.” I wasn’t surprised that they said this, but I confess that I was somewhat surprised by how little enthusiasm they showed for reform in this area. They didn’t seem opposed to reform (and in fact sometimes expressed support for it), but just didn’t seem especially concerned about it.

 

2. More interesting to me was the issue of “scooping.” For those unfamiliar with the term in the context of scientific and scholarly research, being “scooped” is not like being plagiarized or having your copyright infringed. Scooping is what happens when another researcher (working in the same domain) finds out what you’re working on and gains access to your findings, and figures out a way to use those findings to accelerate his or her work and publish it before you can publish yours. Obviously, the fear of being scooped can inhibit a researcher’s willingness to share preliminary data publicly, and often leads researchers to keep such information indoors until just prior to publication. This issue has obvious implications for various open-science practices.

 

One other thing that struck me: how much the perspectives of these panelists on the day’s issues diverged from those expressed by most everyone else at the meeting. It was pretty startling to the other attendees, too. That alone made the session tremendously valuable, I thought.

 

---

Rick Anderson

Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication

Marriott Library, University of Utah

rick.a...@utah.edu

Peter Potter

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Mar 22, 2018, 8:47:29 AM3/22/18
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Rick: You say that the discussion of scooping was particularly striking but you don’t explain what the gist of the discussion was. Can you give us any clues? 

Peter

Peter J Potter
Director, Publishing Strategy
Virginia Tech
Newman Library, RM 424 
560 Drillfield Drive
Blacksburg, VA  24061 
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7100-5982

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susan

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Mar 22, 2018, 10:59:08 AM3/22/18
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Because JSMF supports fellowships and Scholar awards (intended for faculty at the transition from assistant to associate professor) we interact frequently with the "age group" of your panelists.   We do this is both life sciences and in complex systems science covering a wide spread of disciplines from physics to social science and everything in between.     Your observations do not surprise me - particularly in the context of the life/biomedical sciences and particularly if they were based in the US -- to be a tenure track asst professor at a major university means you already know the rules of the academic game and are quite adept at playing it.  You have grown up essentially in an environment and why you might not like it -- you are more likely to go along to get along.    In many cases they have internalized the view of their elders that the BEST papers are in Science, Nature, Cell, Neuron -- so it is hard to change.    I don't mean these statements in a judgmental or  negative way - these young people are pragmatic about what it takes to be successful.    In fact - you would not be invited to a NAS meeting if you were not already very good at the game.    The "scooping" issue - and your definition is accurate but a bit narrow because there are quite a few ways one can claim to have been "scooped" is a long standing bogeyman striking fear in the hearts of aspiring PIs since "precedence" is  the most valuable of currencies.     In highly competitive areas (again biomedical science is the poster child here) where a fair amount of bandwagonning is the norm - this scooping fear haunts young scientists and almost everyone has some story to tell.  Scooping is an ethics issue not an open science issue.  So both of your observations give me a reason to bang my favorite drum again --  worrying about mechanics of open is important -- but the real issue is the culture of academic science - particularly the reward and incentive structures.   Now, in some of the fields JSMF supports that have undergone some cultural shifting (e.g. physics, computational sciences) you encounter young faculty fiercely committed to open science and know that many of the "fears" are bogus.

Rick Anderson

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Mar 22, 2018, 11:06:42 AM3/22/18
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Yes, sorry: the gist of the discussion was that scooping is a major concern for all researchers, but particularly in medicine and the life sciences and especially among early-career researchers for whom getting credit for their discoveries/inventions is crucial to securing their livelihoods. Concern about being scooped tends to inhibit their sharing behavior early in the research cycle.

 

---

Rick Anderson

Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication

Marriott Library, University of Utah

rick.a...@utah.edu

 

Rick Anderson

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Mar 22, 2018, 11:12:30 AM3/22/18
to susan, The Open Scholarship Initiative

Are these fears bogus, though?  I think we need to be careful about dismissing the concerns of others as fearmongering or as being about mythical bogeymen; too often I think we take that stance not because the concerns aren’t valid, but rather because those concerns tend to dissuade people from embracing what we want them to embrace.

 

As for scooping as an ethical issue rather than an open science issue: that seems like a false dichotomy to me. To the degree that openly sharing the details of one’s work early in the research cycle makes it easier for other researchers to scoop you, it seems pretty clear that scooping is (or can be) an open-science issue, one that we ignore at our peril if we really want to advance open science.

 

---

Rick Anderson

Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication

Marriott Library, University of Utah

rick.a...@utah.edu

 

From: <osi20...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of susan <su...@jsmf.org>
Date: Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 8:59 AM
To: The Open Scholarship Initiative <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: A couple of notes from the NAS Journal Summit

 

Because JSMF supports fellowships and Scholar awards (intended for faculty at the transition from assistant to associate professor) we interact frequently with the "age group" of your panelists.   We do this is both life sciences and in complex systems science covering a wide spread of disciplines from physics to social science and everything in between.     Your observations do not surprise me - particularly in the context of the life/biomedical sciences and particularly if they were based in the US -- to be a tenure track asst professor at a major university means you already know the rules of the academic game and are quite adept at playing it.  You have grown up essentially in an environment and why you might not like it -- you are more likely to go along to get along.    In many cases they have internalized the view of their elders that the BEST papers are in Science, Nature, Cell, Neuron -- so it is hard to change.    I don't mean these statements in a judgmental or  negative way - these young people are pragmatic about what it takes to be successful.    In fact - you would not be invited to a NAS meeting if you were not already very good at the game.    The "scooping" issue - and your definition is accurate but a bit narrow because there are quite a few ways one can claim to have been "scooped" is a long standing bogeyman striking fear in the hearts of aspiring PIs since "precedence" is  the most valuable of currencies.     In highly competitive areas (again biomedical science is the poster child here) where a fair amount of bandwagonning is the norm - this scooping fear haunts young scientists and almost everyone has some story to tell.  Scooping is an ethics issue not an open science issue.  So both of your observations give me a reason to bang my favorite drum again --  worrying about mechanics of open is important -- but the real issue is the culture of academic science - particularly the reward and incentive structures.   Now, in some of the fields JSMF supports that have undergone some cultural shifting (e.g. physics, computational sciences) you encounter young faculty fiercely committed to open science and know that many of the "fears" are bogus.

--

Susan Fitzpatrick

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Mar 22, 2018, 11:19:42 AM3/22/18
to Rick Anderson, The Open Scholarship Initiative

Apologies from a 2 finger typist who is never able to afford the time to dot every I and cross every t in a complicated argument.

What I meant is that many scooping fears are bogus because there are tested solutions for providing time stamps and other protections for “scooping”

By ethical issue – I meant that real scooping – using the findings from someone’s work without giving them credit and  suppressing the publications of someone’s work to advantage your own publication – has less to do with the method of publication and more to do with ethical research practices.    I thought I stated that I was not judging these young scientists – they are doing their best to succeed in the system they have been given.

This exchange is why I love this listserve – even when we essentially  agree it seems it is more important to disagree.  

Signing off --

 

Susan M. Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

President, James S. McDonnell Foundation

Visit JSMF forum on academic issues: www.jsmf.org/clothing-the-emperor

SMF blog  www.scientificphilanthropy.com  

 

 

Rick Anderson

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Mar 22, 2018, 11:39:04 AM3/22/18
to T Scott Plutchak, Susan Fitzpatrick, The Open Scholarship Initiative

Sorry, I should clarify – the other attendees didn’t seem startled by the panelists’ concerns about scooping in particular. They seemed (to me) more generally startled by how much the panelists’ perspectives on the various issues under discussion diverged from the views expressed at other points in the program by the rest of the group.

 

I agree, though, that the divergence probably shouldn’t have been very surprising, given that most of the group consisted of senior academics and professionals, many of whom worked mainly in publishing.

 

---

Rick Anderson

Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication

Marriott Library, University of Utah

rick.a...@utah.edu

 

From: T Scott Plutchak <splu...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 9:32 AM
To: Susan Fitzpatrick <su...@jsmf.org>
Cc: Rick Anderson <rick.a...@utah.edu>, The Open Scholarship Initiative <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: A couple of notes from the NAS Journal Summit

 

Rick,

 

What I was most struck by in your comments was that the other attendees were “startled” by the views of those early career researchers.  Those views are exactly what I would have expected from people in the life sciences at that stage in their careers.  In my experience the concern is stronger with respect to data, but in general the culture is one in which competition is very fierce and one learns to be very protective of all aspects of one’s research.  Without dismissing their concerns, it will be worth digging further into those concerns, how existing workflows make such concerns more realistic and how different workflows might ameliorate them.

 

Scott

Glenn Hampson

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Mar 22, 2018, 12:28:46 PM3/22/18
to Susan Fitzpatrick, Rick Anderson, The Open Scholarship Initiative

We’ve been having this conversation on the summit list as well---not to hog all the fun but it was part of the summit meeting follow-up conversation and kind of got 20 replies deep before we could manage to migrate it to the full group. Dovetailing on what Susan is maybe saying here, David Mellor from the Center for Open Science noted this about the fear of scooping issue:

 

FWIW, our (Center for Open Science) two responses to the fear of scooping are:

 

1) Build tools that enable researchers to be open when they are ready to be open (even if that is at the traditional time of publication), but that are built from the beginning to enable sharing, so that extra steps are not needed later on to port data, code, materials, etc onto another platform. This is a slight modification of the "born open" philosophy: if you prepare for openness, your work will be more citable, credible, and reusable once you feel comfortable sharing. Two specific applications of this philosophy on the OSF are that projects are private by default but can be made public with a simple switch; and preregistered research plans can be embargoed for up to 4 years.

 

2) The sooner you create a citable object, the sooner you establish provenance and protect yourself from scooping. A presentation at a conference that you don't post anywhere is scoopable, because you can't point to anything permanent and state "I had that idea first!" On the other hand, preregistrations, data/code/materials in a repository, and preprints all have persistent, unique identifiers that you can point to.

 

Of course, those two arguments will not satisfy someone who is hell bent on looking for excuses not to be more open. But we can't please everyone, we have to work for the 80% of researchers who are open to persuasion and just want to do better science and get the credit that they deserve. Getting that credit is where we as a group can focus, to influence policy that ensures that credit is given for open materials in publishing, tenure, and funding decisions.

 

Best,

 

Glenn


Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

osi-logo-2016-25-mail

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

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Anthony Watkinson

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Mar 22, 2018, 1:06:20 PM3/22/18
to Glenn Hampson, Susan Fitzpatrick, Rick Anderson, The Open Scholarship Initiative

I like this

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Glenn Hampson

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Mar 22, 2018, 2:01:48 PM3/22/18
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Sharing this anonymous off-list feedback to David Mellor’s take on scooping (below):

This is mostly right except for IP.  Patent law is now not first to invent but first to file, even if you had nothing to do with the invention discovery.  University researchers are under policy to disclose potential IP, and then perform any external communication only after the IP potential has been evaluated.  This is a big deal in medical and biomedical research.  

Mel DeSart’s observation’s (from the summit group listserv) completes this perspective:

As for where the fear of being scooped below comes from, a line of research at a university lab or center almost never results in just a single paper, whether for the head of that lab or the other faculty/researchers/grad students in it.  Almost every research project will consist of a series of different experiments that will build on each other toward a final goal.  And in many cases each step in that process will result in publication of a paper.  In some very competitive fields (let’s say gene research for example), there can be multiple labs in different places working on trying to figure out how a particular gene expresses or which gene is responsible for XYZ.  If Lab A puts up the text of what will be the first in a projected series of papers resulting from a particular line of research, AND they put it up openly (perhaps in their IR or in a subject-focused repository) _prior_ to formal publication (which is required by some funders these days), the information in that paper may allow one of those other labs to take that same line of research the next step faster than the lab that produced that first paper, where if that initial lab had waited six months for formal publication that would have been six months when that lab was continuing its line of research before a competing lab saw the results from that initial paper.  That delay could potentially have kept that initial lab ahead of the competitors, instead of suddenly finding itself behind one of those competitors.  And when you’re talking about a researcher’s reputation being in part tied to the results of a particular line of research, if a competitor is able to use your research results to “one up” you and get from A to Z (as opposed to the step outlined in that initial paper, which might only have gone from A to F), then lab one “loses” and a competitor “wins” by being able to get to Z faster.  That can HUGELY impact the notoriety and reputation of a particular researcher or lab (not to mention potential revenue associated with licensing those research results to a biotech or pharmaceutical company that was willing to invest in the results of that research).

 

Best,

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

osi-logo-2016-25-mail

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

 

 

 

We’ve been having this conversation on the summit list as well---not to hog all the fun but it was part of the summit meeting follow-up conversation and kind of got 20 replies deep before we could manage to migrate it to the full group. Dovetailing on what Susan is maybe saying here, David Mellor from the Center for Open Science noted this about the fear of scooping issue:

 

FWIW, our (Center for Open Science) two responses to the fear of scooping are:

 

1) Build tools that enable researchers to be open when they are ready to be open (even if that is at the traditional time of publication), but that are built from the beginning to enable sharing, so that extra steps are not needed later on to port data, code, materials, etc onto another platform. This is a slight modification of the "born open" philosophy: if you prepare for openness, your work will be more citable, credible, and reusable once you feel comfortable sharing. Two specific applications of this philosophy on the OSF are that projects are private by default but can be made public with a simple switch; and preregistered research plans can be embargoed for up to 4 years.

 

2) The sooner you create a citable object, the sooner you establish provenance and protect yourself from scooping. A presentation at a conference that you don't post anywhere is scoopable, because you can't point to anything permanent and state "I had that idea first!" On the other hand, preregistrations, data/code/materials in a repository, and preprints all have persistent, unique identifiers that you can point to.

 

Of course, those two arguments will not satisfy someone who is hell bent on looking for excuses not to be more open. But we can't please everyone, we have to work for the 80% of researchers who are open to persuasion and just want to do better science and get the credit that they deserve. Getting that credit is where we as a group can focus, to influence policy that ensures that credit is given for open materials in publishing, tenure, and funding decisions.

.

image001.jpg

Rick Anderson

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Mar 22, 2018, 2:13:25 PM3/22/18
to Glenn Hampson, The Open Scholarship Initiative

Not to pile on, but it may also be worth pointing out that when a person declines to get onboard with open science practices, it’s not necessarily because he or she is (as David put it) “hell bent on looking for excuses not to be more open.” The scholcomm ecosystem isn’t a binary one populated entirely by people who are either OA advocates or OA enemies. Sometimes people resist not because they object to openness in principle, but because they’re not convinced that the particular “open” thing they’re being encouraged to do actually makes sense in their situation. Sometimes (believe it or not) they might not even be wrong.

 

---

Rick Anderson

Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication

Marriott Library, University of Utah

rick.a...@utah.edu

 

From: <osi20...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Date: Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 12:02 PM
To: 'The Open Scholarship Initiative' <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: A couple of notes from the NAS Journal Summit

 

Sharing this anonymous off-list feedback to David Mellor’s take on scooping (below):

This is mostly right except for IP.  Patent law is now not first to invent but first to file, even if you had nothing to do with the invention discovery.  University researchers are under policy to disclose potential IP, and then perform any external communication only after the IP potential has been evaluated.  This is a big deal in medical and biomedical research.  

Mel DeSart’s observation’s (from the summit group listserv) completes this perspective:

As for where the fear of being scooped below comes from, a line of research at a university lab or center almost never results in just a single paper, whether for the head of that lab or the other faculty/researchers/grad students in it.  Almost every research project will consist of a series of different experiments that will build on each other toward a final goal.  And in many cases each step in that process will result in publication of a paper.  In some very competitive fields (let’s say gene research for example), there can be multiple labs in different places working on trying to figure out how a particular gene expresses or which gene is responsible for XYZ.  If Lab A puts up the text of what will be the first in a projected series of papers resulting from a particular line of research, AND they put it up openly (perhaps in their IR or in a subject-focused repository) _prior_ to formal publication (which is required by some funders these days), the information in that paper may allow one of those other labs to take that same line of research the next step faster than the lab that produced that first paper, where if that initial lab had waited six months for formal publication that would have been six months when that lab was continuing its line of research before a competing lab saw the results from that initial paper.  That delay could potentially have kept that initial lab ahead of the competitors, instead of suddenly finding itself behind one of those competitors.  And when you’re talking about a researcher’s reputation being in part tied to the results of a particular line of research, if a competitor is able to use your research results to “one up” you and get from A to Z (as opposed to the step outlined in that initial paper, which might only have gone from A to F), then lab one “loses” and a competitor “wins” by being able to get to Z faster.  That can HUGELY impact the notoriety and reputation of a particular researcher or lab (not to mention potential revenue associated with licensing those research results to a biotech or pharmaceutical company that was willing to invest in the results of that research).

 

Best,

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

si-logo-2016-25-mail

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

 

 

 

We’ve been having this conversation on the summit list as well---not to hog all the fun but it was part of the summit meeting follow-up conversation and kind of got 20 replies deep before we could manage to migrate it to the full group. Dovetailing on what Susan is maybe saying here, David Mellor from the Center for Open Science noted this about the fear of scooping issue:

 

FWIW, our (Center for Open Science) two responses to the fear of scooping are:

 

1) Build tools that enable researchers to be open when they are ready to be open (even if that is at the traditional time of publication), but that are built from the beginning to enable sharing, so that extra steps are not needed later on to port data, code, materials, etc onto another platform. This is a slight modification of the "born open" philosophy: if you prepare for openness, your work will be more citable, credible, and reusable once you feel comfortable sharing. Two specific applications of this philosophy on the OSF are that projects are private by default but can be made public with a simple switch; and preregistered research plans can be embargoed for up to 4 years.

 

2) The sooner you create a citable object, the sooner you establish provenance and protect yourself from scooping. A presentation at a conference that you don't post anywhere is scoopable, because you can't point to anything permanent and state "I had that idea first!" On the other hand, preregistrations, data/code/materials in a repository, and preprints all have persistent, unique identifiers that you can point to.

 

Of course, those two arguments will not satisfy someone who is hell bent on looking for excuses not to be more open. But we can't please everyone, we have to work for the 80% of researchers who are open to persuasion and just want to do better science and get the credit that they deserve. Getting that credit is where we as a group can focus, to influence policy that ensures that credit is given for open materials in publishing, tenure, and funding decisions.

.

--

Joyce Ogburn

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Mar 22, 2018, 2:35:35 PM3/22/18
to Glenn Hampson, The Open Scholarship Initiative
Its a big deal in many areas of research, not just limited to biomedical. Not all IP is inventions and patents.

Joyce 

Joyce L. Ogburn
Appalachian State University
218 College Street
Boone NC 28608-2026

Lifelong learning requires lifelong access 

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Glenn Hampson

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Mar 22, 2018, 2:37:41 PM3/22/18
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Speaking of piling on, here are a few other scattered notes from the summit and off-list conversations:

 

  • Improving education about researcher options seems to be an important, achievable way OSI can help advance open.
  • Helping reduce “confusion” about open might also be an important way to break the logjam. When researcher think “open,” are they thinking open lab notes or “just” getting their papers published in venues that other researchers can access in a timely manner? Just as there’s a spectrum of open practices, there may also be a spectrum of open perspectives---what open means, what it requires, the risks and rewards, and so on. And as Rick notes, these aren’t either/or---there are many different valid experiences to put on this spectrum, and these vary by institution, region, field, seniority, etc.
  • Not every issue is a nail for an OA hammer. We’re talking about a wide variety of issues here. The consensus of the summit group seems to be that (1) open is a thread common to all these issues (not necessarily uniting them but in common), and (2) in order to improve open, we can’t leave these connected issues unaddressed (such as the culture of communication in academia, which is truly the elephant in the room).
  • Figuring out how to involve researcher perspectives at this stage of our work is critically important. There is survey data available, and of course a number of you on this list are senior leaders in research. So we really need all hands on deck for this phase of our development. It’s a messy process, but this is new ground here. As Susan notes, we’re largely in agreement about the “what”---it’s figuring out the “so what?” and “what next?” questions that will require our thinking caps and patience (and coupled with this, we’ll also need to figure out a better way to solicit everyone’s feedback and advice than just relying on listserv spam---TBD).

 

Best,

 

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

osi-logo-2016-25-mail

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

 

 

 

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