A thread for getting to know each other

[carroll.davide]

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

All of this interest in Openness began about 18 months ago and since then, my interest in open access, open issues and things that should be open has grown exponentially. These areas include copyright, free and remix culture, the free and open internet and digital civil liberties.

Looking forward to getting to know you all,

David

[Renata Aquino]

Hi everyone

I think it's a great idea we get to know each other more. Plus my
written English is a little better :-D

Who am I?

I am Renata. I am from one of the smallest states (Ceará) of a huge
country (Brazil) and I did a PhD in one of the hugest states (São
Paulo) but now I've been back in my state for 1 year now as a
Researcher in a project on education, technology and development. Love
cats, tapioca, making friends and creating projects, specially
international ones :)

What do I do?

I research, write, supervise and teach undergrads and occasionally
postgrads about online research and sharing knowledge through
scientific social networks and specific academic portals such as those
selected by our National Council of Research. I also have a blog
http://pesquisaeducao.wordpress.com with some content in English and I
write edtech articles w/ other researchers

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My PhD was about best practices for edtech for teachers and I realized
that many teachers wanted to share their knowledge but were afraid,
didn't know how or even were under a wrongful assumption that "sharing
wasn't ok". When that barrier came down, teachers could learn from
each other and edtech initiatives could thrive much more than before.
The hard part now would be to try to get organizations on board.

[Mitar]

Hi!

Who am I?

My name is Mitar and I am coming from small country in Europe, Slovenia.
Currently I am doing my PhD at UC Berkeley in California, third year,
and I am interested in various ways how to use web technologies for
making people collaborate with each other, even if they might don't know
each other in person.

What do I do?

With others I am working on the project called PeerLibrary, which is
aiming to provide and open space for people to discuss academic
publications:

https://peerlibrary.org/
https://vimeo.com/93085636

Somehow idea is to create an open platform (in contrast with many closed
ones), but also to create space where people can meet virtually and help
each other understand academic literature. I believe open access is just
the first step and we should start making publications also accessible.
And there are many more researchers and potential readers outside
academia than they are inside. So how to make publications so that they
can understand them as well. My proposal is to build a community where
those who would like to understand a given publication can easily find
somebody else who can help them in that. Or maybe even simply past
discussions about the publication, so that they can just read them.
Publications are just a seed of knowledge and we want to build much more
around them for them to become more accessible.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I would say I was born into it. This is simply a way how communities I
have been part of operated since I remember things, and when I came to
do my PhD to UC Berkeley it surprised me how closed is academia. So I am
trying to change that and make it an environment which is more familiar
to me. :-)


Mitar

--
http://mitar.tnode.com/
https://twitter.com/mitar_m

[Meggie Mwoka]

Hello everyone

Who am i

My name is Meggie Mwoka, a fourth year medical student at the University of Nairobi. I am a curious mind and would like to be a researcher. I love comedies and i laugh all the time, its a problem :)

What i do

I am currently the president of the Medical Students Association of Kenya and the Regional Coordinator for Africa-elect for the International Federation of Medical Students Association. 

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

My interest in Open Access began 2 years ago when i heard about it from a member of MSAKE and it became too real when i was carrying out a research for my public health report. Ever since then i have been interested and amazed at the opportunities it has to offer. Wanting to be a researcher i cannot wait to learn and share with others about Open Access.

Can't wait to see you all.

Meggie

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[ivonne.lujano]

Hi everybody!

Who am I?

I am Ivonne from Toluca, Mexico. I come from the Humanities: I have a bachelor in Education and Dance, at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico. I studied my Masters in Social Sciences & Education in Argentina, where I learned a lot of Open Culture. I'm very interested in Open Access because I have no doubts that the best way to learn is sharing knowledge with others, and building together.

I love dancing, of course :D


What do I do?

I lead workshops with college professors about some topics of Open Access (like using OAJournals and other resources in the classroom). I have taught  these courses in Mexico and Peru, and I have realized professors sometimes don't know how to approach to Open resources or where to find them in every specific area.

I also work in Dance research projects. Do you imagine how relevant is to have open resources for this field of studies? In many universities around the world, dance research is increasing and sometimes it's hard to access to journals and papers.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I worked in Redalyc (redalyc.org) for three years. I led the Journal's assessment department, and I learned a lot of scholarly publication. We worked with many editors from Latin America and I realized we, in the region, have many challenges to put our academic output in the world eyes. But at the same time, there are many scholarly publication projects that are having wonderful results. I would like to continue collaborating with them.

Looking forward to getting to know you!

Ivonne.

[Lauren Maggio]

Who am I?

I am Lauren a student, librarian, teacher and researcher. I live in Berkeley, California where I love to ride my bike, go to farmer's markets, knit things and read children's books.

What do I do?

I am a PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and University of Utrecht in the Netherlands studying health professions education. My research focuses on connecting physicians with information to care for patients through the design of information literacy education and by facilitating public and professional access to knowledge. Related to this, I am co-directing a randomized trial to monitor physicians’ use of primary literature in clinical care. Fingers crossed - we hope our findings will provide an evidence for the NIH Public Access Policy. 

As a librarian at Stanford’s University's medical library, I train medical students, staff and faculty to effectively and legally locate, manage, and share information for clinical care, research, and teaching. My training takes place at the patient bedside, in the classroom and increasingly in faculty offices, where faculty are struggling to locate course materials that are “legal” for use in our curriculum that now has a global reach through massive online open courses (MOOC).

I am also a co-creator and instructor of the course "Open Knowledge: Changing the Global Course of Learning" that is happening right now. This course is an international, bilingual cooperative MOOC, involving institutions in Canada, Ghana, Mexico, and the United States. This course, which has enrolled over 20,000 participants, is offered for credit for library, business, publishing, and education students at each institution and globally to a digital audience. After a lot of legal wrangling - we licensed the course with a CC license. Additionally, at UCSF, I co-teach a credit course to train medical students to act as digital citizens and to edit Wikipedia.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest in Openness stems from my personal mission to connect people, especially students and health care providers, with information through education and technology. I initially became interested in Openness when I figured out that my library was not going to be able to keep up with journal costs. Then as I became increasingly involved in patient care, openness became much more about the right to information for patients, researchers, and teachers. 

I look forward to meeting you all soon! 

Cheers, 

Lauren

Lauren A Maggio, MS (LIS), MA

Lecturer, Department of Medicine

Director of Research and Instruction

Lane Medical Library & Knowledge Management Center 

Stanford University Medical Center 

300 Pasteur Drive, L109, Stanford, CA 94305-5123 

lma...@stanford.edu

@laurenmaggio

650.725.5493 (phone)

781.572.4116 (cell)

lauren_maggio1 (Skype)

Lauren A Maggio, MS (LIS), MA

Lecturer, Department of Medicine

Director of Research and Instruction

Lane Medical Library & Knowledge Management Center 

Stanford University Medical Center 

300 Pasteur Drive, L109, Stanford, CA 94305-5123 

lma...@stanford.edu

@laurenmaggio

650.725.5493 (phone)

781.572.4116 (cell)

lauren_maggio1 (Skype)

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[Collister, Lauren Brittany]

Hi everyone,

 

Thanks for the great idea, David. I’m really enjoying reading everyone’s bio.

 

Who am I?

I’m Lauren, I work in the Office of Scholarly Communication & Publishing at the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. I also hold a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics, and in my research work I study online communities and multimodal communication. I can be found on Twitter @parnopaeus, where I tweet about things like open science, language, anthropology, video games, and obligatory photos of my cats.

 

What do I do?

I work on our e-journal publishing program, but I am also active in outreach and education around Pitt’s campus on open access and electronic resources for making scholarly work more open and accessible. I am active in publishing the results of my Ph.D. research projects in various outlets (in Gold OA outlets these days, although I make sure to deposit my work in my institutional repository for those old closed-access publications).  I am also starting my first online class as an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University’s College of Online and Continuing Education, where I will teach the occasional linguistics or anthropology class online. In my copious spare time (ha), I play the trombone in a community orchestra, practice my recently-learned bicycle riding skills, and happily lose myself in a science fiction or fantasy novel, film, television series, or RPG (tabletop or video game).

 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

This comes from my experience as an academic and meeting people from all around the world in my discipline who had trouble accessing research in their fields due to paywalls and other barriers. I dug deeper and learned more about the injustice in the system and committed myself to openness as a researcher. Then this job at the ULS at Pitt appeared, and I saw it as a timely suggestion from the universe that it was time to get involved on a bigger scale. I’m still on that journey and will continue it at OpenCon.

 

Please feel free to follow me on Twitter (@parnopaeus) or connect with me on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/lbcollister).

 

Thanks!

 

Lauren

 

 

 

--

 

Lauren B. Collister

Electronic Publications Associate

Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing

University Library System

University of Pittsburgh

E-mail: lb...@pitt.edu

Twitter: @parnopaeus

Phone: (412) 648-3155

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[Alejandra Manco Vega]

Hi,

 

Who am I?

My name is Alejandra and live in Peru. I have a bachelor degree in Information Science and currently pursuing a master degree in History at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP).

 

What do I do?

I'm working a consultancy at Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) about its open access publications and internal documents repository. Also, i'm editor of the journal 'Alexandria: Revista de Ciencias de la Información' and editor for Peru at E-LIS, Eprints in Library and Information Science.

Finally, i'm involved in a research project entitled 'Acceso, uso y publicación en revistas científicas entre los investigadores en ciencias sociales de Latinoamérica' (Access, use and publishing of scientific journals among social science researchers in Latin America).

  

Where did my interest in Open come from?

It began when i started working as editor for Alexandria, i began reading about scientific communication and of course open access. 'Alexandria: Revista de Ciencias de la Información' is obviously an open access journal =)

 

 

Looking forward to meet you all!

 

Best,

Alejandra Manco Vega

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencon-discussion-list/845b00e8a6364143a006f8923fdfa68c%40pitt-prodx-07.univ.pitt.edu.

[CelyaHYPhd]

Hi everybody, 

It's great to see so many nationalities represented. Thanks a lot to the OpenCon team to make it happen and I'm looking forward to meeting you all soon.

Who am I?

My Name is Célya and I live in Paris. After a master degree in neuroscience, I did a specialization in Digital Science communication . I worked as a community manager of a scientific social network called MyScienceWork, then I co-founded  an Open Science community HackYourPhD.  Now, I share my time between HackYourPhD and my job as a research engineer for a french-german Public Health Institute ( Centre Virchow-Villermé) where I'm in charge of the MOOC. I will also "hack my PhD" by studying Open Science in an interdisciplinary doctoral program between France and Québec. I'm also a yoga teacher and I teach Yoga classes in a biohackerspace in Paris :)

What do I do?

With the HackYourPhD community composed of students, young researchers but also designers, entrepreneurs and citizen, we promote Open Access, Open Data and in general Open Science with a collective daily curation around these topics shared on social networks ( Facebook, Twitter). We organize events in several cities in France ( Workshops about specific topics (legal aspect in Open Access.), introduction to OpenScience topics). We produce contents to help researchers and students to understand what is Open Science and how they can participate. 
Our blog contains various articles ( interviews, opinions) but also creative format as Open Science flyers in french and in english. 
During the summer 2013, I did a OpenScience tour across the USA to meet Open Science Actors. Funded by a successful crowd funding campaign, the interviews, Travel log and pictures are available on HackYourPhD aux States website. 
I’m also a member of the Open Knowledge foundation France. As a research engineer, I work on producing MOOCs in public health in french and english. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest in Open Science came from a lack of understanding of the current research system. When I was in master, I did not understand and accept the competition and the pressure in research. I thus decided to not do a PhD at this time. Nevertheless, I discovered two different things: the sociology of science and new ways of doing Science with the web. Today, I try to understand how the economical and legal framework in research evolve with Open Science. I'm looking forward to discussing with you about these topics ! 

Thanks

Célya 

@celyagd 

linkedin

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--

Célya Gruson-Daniel

Co-founder of HackYourPhD, #OpenScience community

"Lets invent a research more open and transparent!" 

Web : HackYourPhD.org | Facebook Group | Google Group

Twitter : @celyagd / @hackyourphd

[León Felipe Sánchez Ambía]

Hi David, hi all!

Great idea to have ourselves introduced this way David. Thanks for starting the thread.

Who am I?

I am León. I am an Intellectual Property Attorney in Mexico City. I am a passionate for IP and finding new ways of opening knowledge while being respectful of IP rights. My aim is to find balance between the exercising of rights of IP rights holders and users rights. 

What do I do?

I practice law an I am also  a Law Professor at the National University in Mexico (UNAM) and a Lecturer for the Master in Internet Business program at the ISDI Mexico. I also provide legal advice to different Universities and governmental institutions that include the Mexican Senate, the House of Representatives and the Mexican Presidency. I have been legal co-lead for the Creative Commons Mexican chapter for the last 9 years and have worked close to RedALyC too.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest in open comes from my passion to find balance between IP rights and users’ rights. I am interested also in finding new creative ways to add value to information that it’s been always there but there hasn’t always been a safe enough way to use and share that information. For example, Government information is meant to be used by people but people often find legal barriers to do so in some countries. My aim is to solve that equation an let both ends happy and legally secure.

I look forward to meet you in person and have a very fruitful meeting.

Best regards,

León

[Karin Purshouse]

Hi everyone!  Really enjoying reading everyone's biogs, feeling woefully inadequate but excited to meet you all!

Who am I?

I'm Karin, a junior doctor from the UK.  I did my medical degree at Newcastle University with a brief detour to Imperial College London to do a science degree in Surgery and Anaesthesia.  Deciding that neither of these latter two is my calling, I've since been pursuing Oncology and combining clinical medicine with nerding out in a lab. 

What do I do?

I've been working in Oxford since I qualified two years ago, enjoying the ups and downs as a junior doctor, and doing lab-based oncology research.  To that end, I'm moving to the USA this year as a Fulbright scholar to do brain tumour research at Yale University.  So at the time of the conference I will be settling in as a new American which is both exciting and terrifying!  I've also been doing a part-time MSc in Translational Medicine at Edinburgh University which involves distance learning with other students from a range of disciplines all over the world.  Open access has been a hot topic, no surprises!

From an OA viewpoint, I write a blog (www.kpurshouse.blogspot.com) I mostly write about my experiences as a junior doctor and any hot science/medical topics. I experience the 'pay wall' on a daily basis, and have been raising awareness of OA amongst medical students through writing articles in student journals, contributing to a range of other blogs (I LOVE blogs.  I think they are such a good way of showing how educational info can be free - a blog post has made its way into a local medical textbook for medical students on professionalism, for example) and changing institutional policies to outline explicit support for OA.  The challenge of starting work means I have slowed the pace a little in terms of my OA work, and I'm excited to be reenergised in this regard, learning from everyone else's ideas and sharing some of my own.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I 'discovered' issues around Open Access as a medical student involved with the International Association of Medical Student Associations (IFMSA), Medsin (a global health organisation) and the British Medical Association (BMA).  Medsin is an amazing student movement, and I helped to develop a link between Medsin and PLoS on their Speaking of Medicine blogpage.  I am also one of those boring people who believes you have to target policy as well as shout loudly, so we made it BMA policy to support OA, giving the medical profession a clear voice of OA support. The article I wrote on Open Access was published in Student BMJ which is distribution to medical students around the world.  I think it's really exciting what medical students can do, and now as a junior doctor I can see it doesn't need to stop now that I'm qualified.  Particularly I think it's important to target people who are at the start of their publishing career, so they can challenge the status quo in their publishing decisions.  

Looking forward to meeting you all soon!

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--

- Visiting Researcher, Yale University 2014-15 - MBBS (Hons) BSc (Hons) -

- karinpu...@gmail.com - come along and read my blog at www.kpurshouse.blogspot.com

[shruti ranade]

Hi all,

Who am I ?

I am Shruti and I am from India. I have a Bachelors degree in Information Science and Engineering. I have been an open source entuhsiast since past 5 years. I came to know about the idea of open access about  more than an year back and it has interested me a lot. I am also a music lover (of all genres). I have read everyone's post so far and I am sure I can learn a lot from all of you.

What do I do ?

I am currently working as a network enginner in one of the MNCs in Bangalore. I am mostly active on twitter (@simpsade). I am planning to dedicate my free time in promoting open access and use my technical skills and knowledge to build anything that would benefit open access, open data and open education.

Where did my interest in open come from ?

As I mentioned earlier, I have been an open source enthusiast since I joined as an engineering undergrad but had very less info on open access. On Jan 11, 2013 my TL got flooded with RIP tweets. It was of Aaron Swartz. I had only heard of him before (since he cofounded RSS) but knew nothing about his contribution in bringing down SOPA and PIPA. As a student I had faced some difficulty in downloading IEEE reserach papers for projects and had to pay for some of it. After getting to know of internet freedom, I got curious and started digging in. The entire idea of having access to research articles open to everyone in every part of the world inspired me a lot and motivated me to do something about it. I have a copy of 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto' pinned to my office cubicle all the time :-)

Shruti.

[Joachim Bibuli]

Who am i ?

My name is Joachim Bibuli from Kampala,Uganda.I work with an NGO called Center for Information Policy in Africa.I have lectured library and information science students at Cavendish University Uganda , worked as an information officer for a women's rights NGO in Uganda and records officer for the Government of Uganda.I hold a bachelor of library and Information science degree and master of science in information science degree of Makerere University.

What do i do ?

I coordinate the Center for information Policy in Africa, an NGO that me and like minded colleagues set up to empower communities to access information and participate in the development process.I also do private consulting for a number of  in civil society entities in Uganda.My research interests are mainly in information use,copyright, traditional knowledge , scholarly research and communication,open education , mobile technologies and social networking and legislation affecting access to information.

Where did my interest come from?

As part of my work on human rights i was involved in advocacy on access to information legislation in Uganda.However my interest in open access was tickled by a workshop organised by EIFL and Consortium of Uganda University Libraries that introduced me to the concept of open access.Open access i realized is firmly ingrained in African culture where knowledge was in the public domain.

Look forward to meeting you all.

Joachim Bibuli

[aisha.gharaibeh]

Hi everybody! 

A middle eastern lady is over here. Thank you David for this initiative and thanks to all those who responded so far. Reading this thread makes me more excited about OpenCon 2014 :)

Who am I?
I am Aisha, a final year medical student Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan, in the heart of the Middle East. I'm a dreamer who believes that all the crazy conflicts in my region will end one day so that I have to be prepared for building a better life and future for the region, with focus on education and research. I'm hardworking and do not take no for an answer. Being raised in a scholarly family with higher degrees in various subjects, including geography, computer science and information management among others, I was exposed to the various issues a scholar would face. My preferred communication means is email. Finally, you can expect from the lengthy paragraphs I write that you'll meet a talkative person who likes to share openly.

What do I do?
I was a co-founder of the standing committee of research exchange (SCORE) in 2012. I am currently the NORE (national officer on research exchange) of IFMSA-Jo (International Federation of Medical Students' Association-Jordan) for 1 year and a half. I have been an editor at the IJMS (International Journal of Medical Students) since April 2013, an online open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal, created to share the scientific production of medical students and young physicians worldwide. I am a student member at the JSSR (Jordan Society for Scientific Research)* which holds a conference every 2 years with sessions on several topics. Next conference will be in November 2015. *Sorry, JSSR website is only available in Arabic.

Where did my interest in Open come from? 
First time I heard about Open was 2 years ago. The concept quickly caught my eyes and mind. It used to make me wonder why do investigators have to pay for journals to publish their novel findings and then have to pay more to get proofs of their published work. I couldn't believe the figure once a librarian mentioned on how much my university paid yearly to make updated and reliable information available on campus. I am especially enthusiast about open research and education and copyrights.

See you soon!

Aisha

[lilia Cheniti]

Dear all

Thank you David for this excellent initiative.

Who am I?

I am Lilia Cheniti, I’m Tunisian assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Sousse in Tunisia,in North Africa  and head of online learning Department in my University. I graduated of the University of Braunschweig in Germany where I read for a master’s degree in Computer Sciences. I’m a member of the PRINCE Research group at the University of Sousse and my PhD was realized in collaboration with the Semantic Web group at the Institute of Information Systems of the University of Hannover in Germany.

 What do I do?

 I have great interest in open access in general and in open educational resources in particular. I am currently a researcher at the University of Sousse in Tunisia, and co author of four online courses. May research interest span a vast array of web based learning methodologies and in particular web-based assessment.

I’m also expert trainer for University lecturers  in the online learning and instructional design of educational online resources. For the past two years I have focused on MOOC and I am currently setting up a MOOC for project-oriented design and specification alongside three other colleagues. The project, which is mainly addressed to computer sciences students, will be one of only two currently being developed in Tunisia and will be launched by the end of this year. Open resources are a fundamental component of these courses.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My  interest in Openness, and  in particular open education began about 24 months , as I’m involved in projects related to MOOCs and instructional design  of educational resources.

A culture of open access and open resources is lacking in Tunisian universities. This is particularly true in my university, where I’m lecturer and Head of Online Learning Department. It is part of my terms of reference at the level of my department to foster a culture of open access and facilitate a rethinking of learning methods both at the level of students as well as faculty. This includes encouraging my colleagues to use open education resources in their courses and inviting students to

I am also attending this conference to enhance my academic credentials among the vibrant community of African and Arab computer scientists. Exposure to other experiences from around the world will help me update my course materials and offer my students new sets of learning resources that are available elsewhere. In this respect, Open Educational Resources could offer me a very useful entry point to foster pedagogical innovation in my department, enhance the quality of materials and references, and develop links with academic centers of excellence beyond this country

and region.

I look forward to meeting you all soon! 

Lilia

[Brady Wallace]

Hi all,

Who am I?

My name is Brady and I am an undergraduate student studying Political Science and Development and Sustainability at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada. 

What do I do?

I am involved in student governance and currently hold a Board of Director position on the Simon Fraser Student Society. As the Arts and Social Sciences Representative on the SFSS, I work to represent the interests of all Arts undergrads at SFU. As an active director on our Advocacy committee, I am currently pursuing the first campaign supporting the BCcampus Open Textbook Program and usage of open educational resources. 

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

My interest started two years ago when BCcampus first released it's pilot project making e-text's available to address the forty most popular first and second year courses taken at post-secondary institutions across British Columbia. This opened my eyes up to the world of open educational resources and their ability to make post-secondary education more accessible.

[Marcin Wojnarski]

Hi Everybody!

This one is a bit longer, but you asked initially for a blog post, so here you are! not me to be blamed ;)

Who am I?

Marcin from Warsaw, Poland. A scientist, entrepreneur, programmer, data miner. Graduated from Warsaw University in Computer Science and Mathematics, still doing PhD there. Chief Data Scientist at a Finish-Singaporean startup, Wall of Sport Ltd. (working from Poland, luckily, thank you Internet :)). In the good old days, a laureate of the EU Contest for Young Scientists for a project on artificial neural networks, and a medalist of the International Mathematical Olympiad (I remember close to nothing, so don't ask help with your math assignments ;)).

What do I do?

The most important thing now is developing Paperity: the 1st multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers, a "PubMed Central for all disciplines". Paperity will be launched very shortly, in the coming days. Just like PMC, Paperity indexes peer-reviewed literature directly from journals and keeps a tight link between the paper and its journal, thus ensuring high quality of the contents and giving credit to journals for their work. But unlike PMC, Paperity is easy to join for every journal, without the need to produce a dedicated XML feed; and covers all academic disciplines, not only bio-med: Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities... In the future, Paperity will provide social features, too. You can follow us already now on Twitter and Facebook.

Earlier, I founded and ran TunedIT website for data scientists. It provided support for reproducible experiments in data mining, and hosted online data competitions, for didactic purposes and for crowdsourcing of algorithms.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

Open Data

When I started TunedIT 6 years ago, the term "open data" was not yet known. At that time, my motivation was to improve reproducibily of experimental results in Data Mining: lots of people publish new algorithms and results in DM, but very rarely these results can be verified, because datasets used in experiments are not publicly shared, not to mention the code of the algorithm itself. Certainly, this makes such experiments worthless and leads to a flood of "easy" publications that have no scientific merit but clutter the publication landscape and make it damn difficult to unearth the good papers or to get through with good ideas.

TunedIT not only provides a public Repository for sharing datasets and algorithms, but also gives a companion tool, TunedTester, that automatically runs experiments using resources from Repository, and runs them in a controlled way, according to a test specification of a standardized form. The results are stored back in TunedIT, in Knowledge Base, where they can be browsed and analyzed online in aggregated form. These 3 elements: Repo, TunedTester and Knowledge Base constitute a complete framework for running experiments in a fully reproducible way. Sharing of datasets and algorithms is the key to achieve this.

Open Science (meant specifically as "doing research in the open")

Before founding TunedIT, I participated in Netflix Prize - a very famous data mining contest with the main prize of US$ 1 million. It attracted a huge number of participants: 50.000 over 3 years, not only due to high prize, but also because it was organized in a very innovative way: there was a live Leaderboard on the web (search for "datcracker", that's me :)), updated immediately after a new solution was submitted. Participants were allowed to re-submit solutions many times, so everyone knew his - and others' - current standings and had perfect motivation to keep improving his algorithm. This was great fun for everybody, even those who didn't hope for the prize (imagine that adrenalin, when you submit your 100-th solution after 6 months of work and you wait impatiently to see that - yesssss! - it's 0.001% higher than the 99-th was ;)). The problem we were solving was a scientific one and required lots of research and experiments. Many brand new algorithms were found along the way. This was one of the best examples of "open science" and "crowdsourcing" in science - without this kind of rivarly, sparked by live leaderboard and continuous evaluation, none of us would have ever put so much effort and made such valuable discoveries on his own.

Later on, I decided to employ the same idea in TunedIT. On top of the research infrastructure (repo+tunedtester+KB), we developed the 2nd part of the system: a platform for launching online data mining competitions, Challenges, with live leaderboard like in Netflix. It was the 1st platform of this kind in the world, allowing everybody to launch a new contest in a relatively simple way, for any type of data mining problem. We hosted a number of large competitions in different topics (sound recognition, traffic prediction, chemistry, recommender systems etc.), with several hundred participants each and in partnerships with renowned organizations, like the biggest producer of GPS car navigation, TomTom. After 3 years, we were forced to suspend the project due to lack of funding.

Open Access

I started my own research very early, when still a teenager (I gave my 1st conference talk and presented my own original research at the age of 20, it was on Sep 11, 2001 - easy to remember, yeah). So, when starting PhD studies, I already had a pretty broad experience in research. Having published dozen of peer-reviewed papers, in various journals and conferences, I discovered that there's something wrong with the system: I realize that not every paper of mine must receive a Nobel prize on the spot, but I would expect at least a little bit of feedback, even if it sounded like "oh shit, how can you publish such crap?". Unfortunately, almost never I have received any feedback at all, even critique, which indicated that either the "forward" connection of the system was broken and my research had never reached the target audience; or the "backward" connection - the feedback loop - was broken, preventing the readers from sharing their impressions with me. (Now I know that both are broken, yep)

This was very discouraging and made me start wondering whether doing research in the current form makes any sense at all? For, if nobody hears about your results, your research is a waste of time, no matter how much effort you put in it, and even if you discovered a perpetual motion machine or had received millions in grants. Research unshared is research futile, and life is too short to be wasted on futile activites.

Let me tell you an anecdote. In computer science, there is a classical algorithmic task known as the "readers-writers problem". It is a question of how to synchronize access of multiple users - readers and writers - trying to read or modify a shared resource at the same time. This problem has been taught to every student at every univesity for the last 30 years as a main part of parallel programming curriculum. One day, at a banquet during a scientific conference, me and my supervisor, prof. Andrzej Skowron, were discussing about deficiencies of scholarly publishing system and how hard it is to be an author these days. At some point, Professor raised his voice with a big concern and said: "You see. In the old days, we used to solve the 'readers-writers problem'. Today, sadly, only the writers remained."

It was a perfect windup. I think many scholars feel similar today: it is easy to publish an article and there are many people out there to write, but there seems to be nobody to read. We, scholarly authors, for a long time have blindly assumed that a paper published was a paper read. That's no longer the case. Although the traditional system is still in place - still cashing in on our publications, like it have done for decades - its efficiency is no longer what it used to be 30 years ago. Our classical ways of publishing became outdated, and the curriculum of successful dissemination has to be rewritten anew, no matter for how many decades it was taught.

Surprisingly, there are some folks among academics who take the lack of feedback - or even the lack of readership! - as a natural state of things and hold that nothing can - or even should! - be done about it. I don't agree. I'm a reader myself and I do need and want to read new papers, but in many cases I can't, because I lack easy access to them (paywalls and dispersion of literature are primary causes); and when I come across a good paper, I would be more than happy to share my impressions with the author and other readers, but most often there's no way to do this (again, paywalls and dispersion are responsible, at least indirectly). So it's not like that, that scholars have no interest in someone else's work. It's only a problem of communication channels, that they became inefficient in today's world and instead of connecting authors with readers, disconnect them. Science has grown big over the years. The volume of papers published each year has increased 100-fold (!) over the last century or so, and the scientific community is no longer centered around 100 different journals in total, one for each discipline - like it was in the past - but is dispersed over 30.000 outlets. That's a big difference. The old system has clogged up.

Still, the question remains: what to do if you're a scientist and have to publish somehow? I'm a scientist by heart and I can't just stop doing research and stop publishing. Wherever I work and whatever I do, I carry out some research along the way, even if not asked - that's addictive, you know, something hard-wired in the DNA that you can't switch off. (Even if I were a taxi driver or a garbage collector, I'm sure I would keep researching things in the meantime, there are so many exciting challenges a taxi driver must face ;)) Thus, publishing is a matter of biology to me and I can't avoid it. Already now I have a pile of projects which I could publish right away, but I don't know where, because I can't find any place where I could say: "Here are the readers with whom I'd like to share my findings, let's submit!". In 99% of cases, I just don't know anything about the readers of a given journal, because they are anonymous and speechless: only the authors have a voice. So I don't know who the readers are; I don't know what they are interested in; I don't know what types of research they do; honestly, I can't even say for sure if there are any of them out there!? Except for vague citation metrics, I have no other proof that the journal has a real reader base of a size exceeding 1 (the editor in chief)... But I have to make a choice, and if I choose wrong, I risk that many months - or years - of my work that I spent on research and on writing and polishing the paper - will be wasted. It's a Russian roulette. You, life scientists, are lucky guys: you at least have a chance (1/1000?) of getting to Nature, which is read by "everyone" (or at least everyone believes that :)). But in computer science, there is not even a toll-access journal that would be recognized universally as the leading one, read by "everybody" - so more often than not the authors are left totally in the dark ("here's the gun, you have one chance... publish or perish!").

That's why a few years ago I started looking for alternatives and discovered Open Access. This was something I needed. By tearing down the paywalls, OA substantially improves the "forward" connection in the scholarly communication system and gives authors a chance to reach potentially much broader audience. It creates opportunities to improve the "backward" connection, too.

But OA is much more than this. Open Access for the first time makes it possible to build add-on services on top of scholarly literature, without paying a tribute to every single toll-access publisher (1000+) who happened to be on the market. Thus, in the world of Open, lots of new things are possible that were just unthinkable in the world of Closed. These new initiatives can grow up organically, in a bottom-up way, built by small teams with personal interest in a given project, not by behemoths of the Elsevier type. So, OA is not a small fix here and there. It's democracy in publishing. A revolution that will turn the entire system upside down.

In particular, with OA it becomes possible to fix all the problems that I mentioned earlier: the huge dispersion of literature, low discoverability of most journals, the lack of feedback and true bi-directional communication between authors and readers. These issues are not solved by OA itself, but thanks to growing popularity of OA it is possible now to build services that will tackle them successfully. This is what I want to do in Paperity.

OpenCon

At OpenCon, I hope to meet great people with big passion for openness - I'm sure I will, given all the fantastic bios that you're posting here. I believe that together we can change the world of scholarly communication for the better. It's not that difficult, actually. For example, a year ago, during Berlin 11 - the predecessor of OpenCon14 - I met a director from an OA journal for undergraduate authors, the Journal of Young Investigators. We discussed together, and shortly afterwards we came up with an idea of collaboration between the journal, Paperity and the EU Contest for Young Scientists, to help them publish and disseminate best projects of this year's finalists. This cooperation is underway just now and we hope it will let most talented young scientists from all over Europe learn about Open Access and publish their first papers in OA form.

I'm looking forward to a great conference again.

Cheers,
Marcin

@wojnarski
LinkedIn

-- 
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder of Paperity, www.paperity.org
www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
www.facebook.com/Paperity
www.twitter.com/Paperity

Paperity. Open science aggregated.

[Beck Pitt]

Hi everyone!

Great to meet you all and thanks to David for starting this thread.

Who am I? I'm Beck Pitt and I am a researcher on the Open Educational Resources (OER) Research Hub project based at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), The Open University (UK). I am also trained philosopher and completed my PhD on Jean-Paul Sartre a couple of years back. You can read more about the project I work on here: http://oerresearchhub.org. I also hang out on Twitter: @BeckPitt 

What do I do? 

The OER Research Hub is an open research project and we work collaboratively with organisations, projects and initiatives around the world to investigate the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices. I focus on informal learning and open textbooks and work with lots of fabulous people including OpenStax College, BCcampus, Siyavula and P2PU/School of Open. I also have overall responsibility for the delivery of our School of Open "Open Research" course (you can check out the course here: https://p2pu.org/he/courses/2377/open-research/) 

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

Good question! I joined the Open University (UK) a couple of years back... one of the first things I worked on was a project called Bridge to Success, which created whole course OER on math and learning/personal development for use in community colleges. Working on this project and at the Open University encouraged me to explore "open" further and thus the journey began! : -) 

Looking forward to reading more about you all and to meeting everyone in Washington!

Beck

[hdegiorgi]

Hi everybody.

Who am I?

I am Horacio Degiorgi, I am a librarian/programmer from Mendoza, Argentina. I have a degree in  "Documentación y Gestion de información" ("Documentation and Information Management"). Developer of http://bdigital.uncu.edu.ar (digital repository of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo). Also I am part of the Expert Committee on Repositories at MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA, TECNOLOGÍA E INNOVACIÓN PRODUCTIVA.

What do I do?

I am the main developer of http://bdigital.uncu.edu.ar and an enthusiastic open access promoter at Mendoza, Argentina. From 2006 at university where are working in open access initiatives mainly with researchers and teachers. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

During the crisis of 2001 the Argentine public universities discovered that we had no access to research material (journals, papers etc), since then have developed open access policies to guarantee the rights of citizens to publish and access to publicly funded research. In the past we have participated in Open Access week, support the new law "creación de repositorios de acceso abierto de ciencia y técnica " (creation of open access repositories ) and other open access initiatives.

Horacio Degiorgi
Director SID/UNCUYO
http://sid.uncu.edu.ar
http://bdigital.uncu.edu.ar

[natalianorori]

Hi everyone :)

It has been great reading your bios and about your amazing projects, I am humbled to be among this group of people. 

Who am I?

I am Natalia, a Nicaraguan medical student at Universidad Latina in San Jose, Costa Rica. I am interested in science and in promoting research in my region. I strongly believe people should not settle for less than what they deserve, and we all deserve open access to information. I believe the people in my region have the potential to create wonderful pieces of work  to contribute to the world of science, however, they  need the tools to do so. Through my work, I plan on spreading the world about Open Access, Open Data and Open Education to make people in my country aware of the advantages they could get out of these three concepts in order to make their learning process a lot easier.

What do i do?

I am a Corporate Officer at the Journal of Young Investigators,  an undergraduate peer-reviewed research journal that publishes the work of undergraduate students from every corner of the world . besides publishing their work, JYI also lets the young researchers participate in the editorial proces, acing their editorial skills. They have several projects and volunteers that promote research among the youth. We are currently collaborating with European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) and Paperity to share the work of all EUCYS competitors, among other projects.

One of my projects with them involves promoting research in Costa Rica and Central America. Costa Rica has a lot to develop when it comes to research, we are trying to create collaborations with  universities in the country to promote investigation courses and other tools necessary to show young undergraduates why researching matters. 

I am also volunteering for the Open Access Button as a member of it funding team, I believe the Open Access Button has the power to show how paywalls affect students, researchers and professionals around the world. the Button helps you tell the world whenever you are being denied access to knowledge, which is your personal right. 

Where did my Interest in Open Come from?

I have been interested in Open for about a year now. My parasitology teacher had given us an assignment to read about a clinical case and discuss it in class. I had a hard time looking for open research about the specific topic my teacher had assigned us, I finally found the case I needed at an open access journal. Curious about the concept of "Open access" I started researching more about the topic and haven't stopped ever since. Working with the Open Access Button team has helped me learn more about this concept. Open Access is a not so known term in Central America, through Open Con, I expect to learn from all of you guys and come up with new ideas to make my country more open.

[Arslan Inayat]

Dear All 

It was such an amazing thread, So glad to know about all of you with beautiful passions and projects for open access.


Who Am I ?

I am Arslan, An Intern Medical Student from Khyber Medical College Peshawar, Pakistan and National President of IFMSA-Pakistan.  IFMSA is my passion. I like doing awareness campaigns and projects and love to motivate Medical Students across the country to think and work out of the books. I want to give my vision of openness to every person with whom I meet. I am a young researcher and I want to foster the culture of Research and Development in the Medical schools/hospitals of my country.   

What do I do ?

I am joining my hospital duty in medicine from tomorrow (Its going to be my first day as intern). Apart from it Since 2008 , I have been working in IFMSA at multiple positions starting from LORA (Local Officer on Reproductive health including AIDS) to Local Council President to National Public Health Officer to Project Coordinator for AIDS Prevention Project to Development Assistant for Asia Pacific for two terms and finally to National President for IFMSA-Pakistan for two terms. Executed dozens of projects in Public health, Medical Education, Reproductive health , human rights and Research and development.

Where did my interest in Open came from 

Well, the day I started my first research in Pakistan, I had no access to articles and my university library has also not purchased any journals. I didn't know there can be any solution to that, and I thought we have to live with this limited access to educational resources and I accepted the reality. Through IFMSA I got an opportunity and ray of hope to work on this wonderful project. My utmost effort is to sensitize all the medical Students in Pakistan to this very serious issue which is hindering us to utilize updated data/knowledge in the patient care.


I wholeheartedly looking forward to learn and bring home a huge message that is Openness/open access / Open resources

Excited to work with all of you. 

Hugs and  Best wishes

  

Arslan Inayat


President of IFMSA - Pakistan

International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA)

E-mail : ifmsa-p...@ifmsa.org
Alternative E-mail : arsl...@hotmail.com
Skype: arslan.inayat
Cell Phone:   (+92) 333 9245 136

---

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 10:50:02 -0700
From: natali...@gmail.com
To: opencon-dis...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [OpenCon] Re: A thread for getting to know each other

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[Anamika Karn]

Namaste to all of you from beautiful Nepal,

Thank you David for the superb initiative and for giving us the opportunity to get to know each other prior to OpenCon 2014.  I have been reading all of your amazing projects and interests and I am pleased to be a part of this group.

Who am I?

I am Dr. Anamika Karn, a medical graduate from Institute of Medicine, Tribhuwan University in Nepal. I am a researcher and I am obsessed with open-ness. I am quite dedicated towards promoting Open Access in my region through multiple initiatives. I believe that no student should be refrained from their right to do research and everyone should have an open accessibility to educational resources, data and scholarly articles. Through the triad of Open Access, Open Data and Open Educational Resources I look forward to advocate and promote the policies and principles of Open Access in my region.

What do I do?

I am the founder member and assistant director of Open Access Nepal. Open Access Nepal was established in 2014 as a result of the mandate provided by the Berlin 11 Satellite Conference for Students and Early Stage Researchers. Since its establishment we are actively involved in advocating and promoting open access and its entities through means possible. We have planned great events for the Open Access Week and we're working hard on that right now. We have formed alliance with different organizations such as Open Knowledge, Open Learning, NeLIC, EIFL and many more and I am trying my best to push some concrete policies in the field of Open Access on the national level.

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

All of this interest began since my involvement in Open Access Nepal. I had an opportunity to meet stakeholders involved in this field and this has motivated me to work for Openness with even more vigor and zeal. Through OpenCon, I intend to enforce the activities that we're currently doing in Nepal. Interacting with all of you will help me to come up with innovative ideas which will enhance our work here in Nepal and magnify the impact of Openness.

Looking forward to getting to know you all, (can't wait)

Regards from sunny Nepal,

Anamika

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[evans678]

Hello all!

Who am I?

I am a native Minnesotan (no, not like the movie Fargo) passionate about reforming education - with a focus in higher education.  I recently graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in urban studies and sociology.  I focused primarily on how people interact with their surroundings and with each other.  This led me to travel to Brazil, South Africa, & Vietnam where I became interested in user-centered design of urban spaces and places. This led me into the design thinking world - which lead me back to higher education.  I think we can create a better higher ed experience and I think design thinking tools (or their synonymous counterparts) can be part of the answer. I also spent much of my studies in the social justice world and worked at an affordable housing nonprofit. As you can see my interests are many, but I think they all center around creating open, accessible and user-friendly learning in order to make the world better for everyone.  

Personally, I am trying to re-discover my hobbies now that I am no longer a student.  Joining a roller derby team, adopting a dog and reading my un-read bookshelf are at the top of my list. 

What do I do?

I work at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. The Opencon related work is with the Hubert Project: an open and accessible repository of learning materials for instructors/trainers & learners in the public affairs world. We are a small team working to change the way public affairs learning and training is hosted.  The Hubert Project collection includes e-cases, video briefs, and e-studies - and all content is CC licensed.  Check out our site!   http://www.hubertproject.org/

I am also working on a social welfare re-design project with the Minnesota Department of Human Services.  Both projects rely on system change in order to fully function so I spend a lot of my day dealing with ambiguity! 

Where do my interests in open come from?

My interests in open likely stem from my experience as a learner and now as a creator of learning materials.  I just knew there had to be more to education than with my 10 year old history book in elementary school and with $200 psychology textbooks in college.  Open principles just make sense if we (meaning all) are going to try and solve some tough challenges that are facing our world.  So for me, open is not just a concept or idea - I see it as a necessity.

Very much looking forward to meeting you all in November! And thank you David and team for this opportunity. 

Shannon

[Penny Andrews]

Hi everybody,

Who am I?

I'm Penny. I'm a research assistant on this project and I just finished my MSc in Digital Library Management. I spend most of my time thinking about open stuff, tech, accessibility, the lack of diversity in "open", critical and radical librarianship, non-binary gender and disability activism. Oh, and Doctor Who. Obsessively. For 30 years. My research interests are the management of research and researchers, open access, true universal design in library spaces and the application of critical theory to library and information science. I am also a para-athlete. 100m and shot put are my events. I have cerebral palsy and autism.

What do I do?

I'm Strategy Lead for the Open Access Button, and Director of OpenCPD - a MOOC and set of OERs for information professionals. I also create OERs, volunteer for Open Knowledge and work to make sure that "open" doesn't just mean "middle class cis het scientists".

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

This article here describes my position pretty well.

Thanks all,

Penny

[Marcin Wojnarski]

Hi All!

A week ago, when writing the bio, I mentioned to you that I was developing - with a team of collaborators - a new web service for scholars, Paperity, that would facilitate access to OA literature. I can share now the good news: Paperity has been launched just today, with 2,000 journals and 160,000 open papers present already in the system. It's available at http://paperity.org/.

We invite all of you to try it, tweet about it and share the news with all your friends who're looking for easier access to scholarly literature. Let us know what you think, all feedback is very welcome!

Cheers
Marcin

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[Heather L. Wiencko]

Heya everyone,

I've enjoyed reading the introductions so far, and I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone in person. This thread has been fantastic for getting to know at least a little bit about everyone before we see each other in DC. :)

Who am I?

I'm Heather. I live in Dublin, Ireland, but I did my undergrad in DC and I'm excited about getting to visit again. I'm a bioinformatician in the Trinity College Bioinformatics Core. My formal training is in chemistry, but when I got a postdoc in systems biology I ran gleefully into the world of genetics and biology and data science and have been revelling in it ever since. I can be found on Twitter as @HLWiencko.

What do I do?

As a staff bioinformatician, I provide support for researchers in whatever capacity they need, be it advice on setting up experiments or full analysis of data sets. I work with geneticists, microbiologists, chemists, and medical researchers on a dizzying array of projects including sequencing, proteomics, regulatory genomics, and more.

That's the official line, anyway. I think what I actually spend most of my time on is converting files from one format to another.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

A few years ago the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of certain kinds of research in the US, started requiring that all peer-reviewed articles coming from its grants be publicly accessible. "This should be a no-brainer," I thought. "Of course the public should be able to access results from the research they paid for." Once I realised that this was not self-evident, my interest was piqued. That was 2005, when I was a PhD student. My involvement has ramped up from there, especially now that it's easy to do and learn so much *if* data is available.

As someone who works on a lot of different projects, I get opportunities to talk to researchers about where they're going to publish, where and how to release their data, and to help address their concerns. It's the perfect chance to (gently) encourage people to publish openly and think about open dissemination of results. I ask a lot of awkward questions in the hope of getting answers I can take back to my colleagues, hopefully convincing them that openness is just as good for them personally as it is for society.

I hope you all have a great weekend. :)

<> )-(eather <>

[Emilie Champagne]

Hi everybody !

Who am I?
I'm Emilie Champagne, a Ph.D. student in Québec, Canada, at Université Laval. I'm studying associational effects between plants and how they influence the susceptibility to browsing by white-tailed deer (http://www.chaireanticosti.ulaval.ca/en/personnel/emilie_champagne/). I'm an enthousiast ecologist but I have a lot of interests. Speak to me at the conference to find out which !

What do I do?
My Ph.D., on work days. But I also blog in french (http://survivreasondoctorat.blog.com/) about student's life. I also tweet (@MissEmilieC) and try to keep updated about sciency subjects.

Where did my interest in Open come from ?

In my master degree, I was interested in Open access, but it's mainly the rejection of my article by non-open access journals that led me to publish with Plos One (I'm really honest here). I believe in open access, open education and open data, but as many ecologist, I still have concerns about open data. I want to learn at Open Con, maybe change my ideas. I won a travel award to be with you and I want to share my experience on my blog, in my lab and on twitter.

I look forward to meet you all!

[april.clyburne.sherin]

Hello OpenCon-ers!

Who am I?

My name is April, and I live in Toronto, Canada. I am an MSc student studying epidemiology at the University of Guelph. I love statistics, riding my bike, and making radio! Find me on twitter @april_cs .

What do I do?

I am an epidemiologist at The Hospital for Sick Children (aka SickKids) at the EnRICH Lab, a methodology lab where we are working to increase the quality of pediatric research. I am currently working to extend reporting guidelines for pediatric trial reports and trial protocols - reports need to be accessible AND complete!

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I worked a field job in the Yukon Territory, Canada, after my undergrad. I started reading every science book I could get my hands on, and listening excessively to Radiolab (a science podcast). Over the years, I would learn about disparate issues in science - reproducibility, publication bias, independence - but slowly I learned the connections between them. 

When I returned to civilization to earn my MSc, I was convinced that Open Science was the system-level movement that science needed to address these issues. This is also when I returned to making radio as a co-producer and science correspondent of the now-defunkt Pioneer Radio. I am starting a new podcast called The Method - help me crowdsource my state of science wikimap here!

Can't wait to meet you all!

[Silviu Vert]

Hello, 

OpenCon2014 is about to start in a few days and I'm very excited to meet all of you!

Who I am?

I'm Silviu, I'm 28 years old and I live in Timisoara, the second biggest city in Romania. I am a curios mind and I often get engaged in various activities that take more than 24 hours per day :)

What do I do?

I am currently pursuing my PhD studies at the Politehnica University in Timisoara, exploring the potential of linked and open data in augmented reality scenarios. Also, I work at the eLearning Center of the same university. Besides, I am active in some non-profit organizations and networks that promote Open Knowledge and particularly Open Government Data.

In 2013 I co-founded the Smart City Association. We engage with the local government authorities, tech communities, companies, universities and non-governmental organizations to open up the public data of the cities and to build upon it useful services for the citizens. With our help, Timisoara became the first city in Romania to publish open datasets, around the International Open Data Day (22 February 2014). 

In May 2014, I was appointed ambassador of the Open Knowledge Foundation for Romania and coordinator of the newly formed Open Knowledge local group. The Smart City Association and the Open Knowledge Romania group are members of the recently established Open Data Coalition in Romania, which is comprised of organizations activating in the open data space from all over the country. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest in Open started 1 year ago, when I thought that I might be able to use Open Government Data to make my city more intelligent and more friendly for its citizens.  

Gradually, I extended my interest towards more Open things. At OpenCon2014, I want to learn about Open Access, how to publish in open journals and how to promote Open Access in my university. I believe that the conference will provide us with concrete steps and advice on how to be more open in our research activities.

Keep in touch and see you in Washington!

Silviu

--

Silviu Vert, Ambassador

Open Knowledge Romania

ro.okfn.org | @okfnro

Co-founder Smart City

PhD Candidate @ UPT

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[Kurtis Baute]

Who am I?

My name is Kurtis Baute, I'm exactly 25 years old and I'm a Masters of Science candidate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. You can find me on many social media sites, but I'm most active on Twitter (@kurtisbaute).

I am big into science communication, and access to knowledge. I think science is incredible, but to most people (including myself until a few years ago) it is intimidating. We need to communicate science with fun stories, and do our research out in the open.

What do I do?
This spring I launched a blog about making science more accessible, called The Scope of Science (www.ScopeofScience.com). More recently, I started a YouTube Channel of the same name (youtube.com/ScopeofScience) where I have started to make videos communicating science (such as a music video about my MSc thesis), as well as talking about science communication and openness.

While at OpenCon I will be making a video about Open: Access, Data, and Educational Resources. I would love your help, OpenCon-ners!! All I am looking for from you is to have a casual chat lasting a few minutes, talking about why these topics are important, what they are, and how researchers can take part. Feel free to email me (kurtis...@gmail.com), tweet me, or just ask in person if you want to take 5 minutes to help me with this little advocacy project. The more people, the merrier :)

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

Scientists are bad communicators, and unfortunately this means they are bad at sharing most everything. I've known of the gap between the sciences and the rest of society ever since I first discovered science. That was bad enough. When I found out that scientists were just as bad about sharing information with each other, I knew I had to get involved in the Open movement.

Super excited to meet all of you later this week! Swift travels everyone!
Kurtis

[sarah.melton1]

Hi, all!

Really looking forward to seeing everyone in a few days. Here's a bit about me!

Who am I?
I'm Sarah, a PhD candidate in public history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I'm also a full-time staff member in our library's Center for Digital Scholarship. I tweet entirely too much at @svmelton.

What do I do?
My job involves coordinating the various open access publications that our Center produces. I've spent the last 5 years as an editorial staff member of the open access journal Southern Spaces (http://www.southernspaces.org), a humanities journal about the US South. I'm working on launching several new humanities journals right now, which I'll be happy to talk endlessly about. I'm a huge advocate for humanities open access publishing!

In addition to my work & studies, I work on several projects that support open* work. I'm the community + advocacy coordinator for the Open Access Button (hi, David!), a board member + the treasurer for the Library Publishing Coalition, and a community representative for the Digital Library of America.

Also, I love puppies (and kittens). Last year for Halloween I dressed up as an open access dinosaur, stomping out restrictive author agreements. (Here's the proof.)

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I initially began working at Southern Spaces because I was interested in publishing and editing. As I spent more time there, though, I realized the tremendous ethical obligation we have to make our scholarship public. Much of my research is in South Africa, as well, and I became particularly interested in open* movements across the Global South.

See y'all soon!
Sarah

[sni...@gmail.com]

Hi everybody!

Who I am?

My name is Sonja Buijs and I am the president of the Dutch national organization of Psychology students (SPS-NIP), that is part of the professional organization of psychologists in the Netherlands.  

What do I do?
I just finished my two bachelors at Utrecht University, one in Psychology and the other in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, so I work full time for SPS-NIP. I am looking for a spring semester internship (any tips welcome!) and I will start my master degree in Sweden next September. 

As a member of our Task Force on Open Access I work together with other members of SPS-NIP and EFPSA (European Federation of Psychology Students’ Associations). We would like to serve as an example for the other EFPSA members when it comes to taking action on Open Access. The Task Force was very active in the international Open Access week . Also, I put a lot of energy in lobbying so that other organizations will support our ideas and maybe also take some action.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

At the EFPSA Congress in Romania last year, I got very inspired by the lectures and workshops about OA and OER. Considering we are one of the organizations forming the (EFPSA), which has taken a firm standing on Open Access as a member of the Right to Research Coalition, we have naturally included Open Access into one of our goals.

Looking forward to meet you all!

Best,

Sonja Buijs 

E-mail: voorz...@spsnip.nl 
Tel: +316-26512377
Website: www.spsnip.nl

[Ross Mounce]

Wow, this is such an *excellent* thread. Here's my intro:

Who am I?

My name is Ross Mounce and I'm a postdoc at the University of Bath, currently working on a BBSRC-funded phylo-informatics project called PLUTo. I was one of the first Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellows for Open Data in science back in 2012. I'm also a council member of the Systematics Association and a prolific twitterer @rmounce. I'm also one of many on the organising committee for OpenCon 2014.

What do I do?

For my PhD I studied the impact of fossils in phylogenetic studies. I love evolutionary trees and the methods used to create them. I'm also a big fan of synthesis and content mining, which is closer to what I'm doing now for my postdoc. My first published contribution to science was a small rebuttal letter pointing out that a previously published paper in Nature (a front page study!) was completely, unambiguously, mathematically, wrong. The data & described methods couldn't possibly have given the results they said it had - it was irreproducible. Don't believe everything you read, folks -- especially if it's in Nature or Science! That, combined with the severe difficulty I was having getting data from published studies, led me on a path to the Open Science community, in particular through the Open Knowledge Foundation (now called just Open Knowledge). 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

Whilst I might be known on Twitter as 'OA person', my path into Open came from the desire for open data / (post-publication) data sharing. I was horrified by the way academics in my field seemed not to publish their underlying data, or if they did it was published in unusable obfuscated formats, and in a PDF. No data type should be published as PDF, ever! It made my PhD research sooooo much harder. I swear I spent half my time just copy and pasting data out of PDFs; data that should never have been PDF'd in the first place. I was doing 'digital data archaeology' rather than science. But I did convert some of that angst into research: I helped an international team estimate that just 4% of phylogenetic data from papers published in the year 2010 were publicly archived online for re-use. Science without data isn't science, if we don't publish the underlying data from most studies* we aren't doing it properly.

*obviously, certain data e.g. personal medical data shouldn't be shared, but the vast majority of scientific research deals with non-sensitive data & that can and should be shared online, if possible!

See you all soon!

Ross

-- 
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Ross Mounce, Ph.D.
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- 

[Haley Walton]

Great thread! Thanks for starting it!

Who am I?

I'm Haley, Outreach Coordinator for Open Access at Duke University Libraries in Durham, North Carolina, USA. A newly minted librarian (as of August 2014), I'm starting my career as an advocate for open scholarship and open access! Unsurprisingly, I'm an avid reader (let's share books on Goodreads), and I'm also a gamer and movie-lover. Right now, I'm helping host the Scholarly Communication Institute in Chapel Hill, NC. We're live-Tweeting our un-conference, so follow me @hmwalts or @TriangleSCI.

What do I do?

I am a scholarly communications librarian at Duke University and coordinate Open Access advocacy and outreach on campus. I mange our @DukeOpenAccess Twitter, where I post open access links to Duke scholarly publications in our repository DukeSpace. I work with faculty and students to make their scholarship open!

Where did my interest in Open come from?

In library school, when I started as an intern at Duke in the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication (just over a year ago)! I was immediately sucked into the world of OA and am thrilled to be able to advocate full time now.

Can't wait to meet you all in D.C. this week!

Cheers,

Haley

[Sridhar Gutam]

Better Late than Never!!! Apologies for being too Late!!

Who am I?

I am Sridhar Gutam (@gutam2000), Senior Scientist, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR http://www.icar.org.in/) and Convener, Open Access India (https://www.facebook.com/groups/oaindia/). 

What do I do?

I am a Scientist working on Plant Physiological aspects of Horticultural Crops (Mango) at ICAR Research Complex for Eastern Region, Research Centre Ranchi (http://icarrcer.in/research-centerranchi/) and I am doing advocacy of Open Access among my peers and others through Open Access India online Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/oaindia/), blog (http://oaindia2013.wordpress.com/) and twitter (@OpenAccessIndia).

The community of practice, Open Access India is participating in the Open Access movement in India by actively contributing to the discussions/debates about Open Access policies being made by various research organizations/councils in India. It has actively contributed for the process of development of Open Access policy of the ICAR (http://icar.org.in/en/node/6609) and is also member of GODAN (http://godan.info/)

As of now not all the institutes under ICAR have institutional repositories, I am advocating and helping the authors to share their scholarly outputs on OpenDepot.org (http://opendepot.org/view/authorInstitution/ICAR_Research_Complex_for_Eastern_Region.html and http://opendepot.org/view/authorInstitution/Central_Institute_for_Subtropical_Horticulture.html)

Where did my interest in Open come from?

While I was posted at DMAPR (www.dmapr.org.in), I was introduced to the concept of Open Access in 2005 and since then I am practicing and contributing for the Open Access movement in India. We have started an Open Access journal from DMAPR known as OAJMAP (http://epubs.icar.org.in/ejournal/index.php/JMAP).

Now that Open Access India had grown into a big group with about 7257 members, would like to register it and take up large advocacy campaigns in India impressing the scholarly community and policy makers to the need of National Open Access Mandate and also would like to work for the Global Alliance for Open Access taking on board all the community of practices of Open Access.

Eagerly waiting to meet you all in Washington D.C. OpenCon2014 and also by virtually at the OpenCon2014 Delhi Satellite event http://opencon2014.org/delhi!

Best
Sridhar

Sridhar Gutam, PhD, ARS
Senior Scientist (Plant Physiology)
ICAR Research Complex for Eastern Region Research Centre Ranchi
Tata Road, Rajaulatu Post, Plandu, Ranchi 834010, Jharkhand, India
Phone: +91-651-2260207; Fax: +91-651-2260141
Mobile:+91-8002678768/9005760036
Publications: http://works.bepress.com/sridhar_gutam/

Convenor, Open Access India

http://oaindia2013.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/oaindia/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/oaindia/

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[Chris Noone]

Who am I?

Hi, I'm Chris. I'm from Clare in the west of Ireland but I now live in Galway (not far away!) after a brief stint living in the Netherlands. I'm really looking forward to meeting you all in DC this weekend.

What do I do?

I'm a PhD candidate at the School of Psychology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. My work focuses on the mechanisms underlying the relationship between mindfulness and higher-order cognition. I've been involved with organisations supporting psychology students in the past and am now part of committee in the Psychological Society of Ireland that represents the concerns of early career psychologists. Also, I'm working with my friends and colleagues Ivan Flis and Jonas Haslbeck on finding out more about how the traditional publishing approach is affecting students through a study we are currently conducting on access to scientific literature for European students. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

As an early-stage researcher who does a lot of teaching work, open access, open data and open educational resources are very important to me personally. However, I initially became aware of these important concepts through my work representing psychology students at local, national and international levels. Much of my work in both the Board of Management and Social Impact taskforce of the European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations (EFPSA) involved education and advocacy in the area of Open Access. The Right to Research Coalition has been very helpful to EFPSA and I was lucky enough to represent EFPSA at the R2RC GAs in 2012 and 2013 while we had the pleasure of hosting Nick at our congress in Denmark in 2012 and both Nick and Nicole at our congress in Romania earlier this year.

Chris Noone
Ph.D Candidate at the School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway

mail:  noo...@gmail.com| mobile: +353 86 063 0498| skype: chris-noone1                                              

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[Nicholas Weber]

Who am I?

Hi. I am Nic Weber [@nniiicc] a PhD candidate in Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I like to run, bike, and generally get the hell out of Illinois as much as possible. 

What do I do?

I research the impact of federal policy on the practice of science.

I teach data curation, digital humanities, and science/ technology policy to graduate students at UIUC. 

I contribute to a bunch of software projects related to the R programming language. 

I try to push the envelope with respect to working in the open (i.e. code / data / writing / etc.)

I'm trying *really* hard to get a faculty position where I can push this envelope even further. 

*I also have this idea for a Firefox extension that calculates an "Openness" metric based on a google scholar profile. If you're interested come talk to me at OpenCon about it. (PLEASE!)

Where did my interest in Open come from?

Before starting my PhD I was *very* lucky to get mentored by a talented scientist who produced an open-notebook. I saw the huge impact this had on her work ... So, I was an easy convert. 

In grad school a lot of my policy research has focused on issues of reproducibility - so the open access / sharing  / licensing of research objects has become even more important to me and my work.

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Chris Noone <noo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Who am I?

Hi, I'm Chris. I'm from Clare in the west of Ireland but I now live in Galway (not far away!) after a brief stint living in the Netherlands. I'm really looking forward to meeting you all in DC this weekend.

What do I do?

I'm a PhD candidate at the School of Psychology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. My work focuses on the mechanisms underlying the relationship between mindfulness and higher-order cognition. I've been involved with organisations supporting psychology students in the past and am now part of committee in the Psychological Society of Ireland that represents the concerns of early career psychologists. Also, I'm working with my friends and colleagues Ivan Flis and Jonas Haslbeck on finding out more about how the traditional publishing approach is affecting students through a study we are currently conducting on access to scientific literature for European students. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

As an early-stage researcher who does a lot of teaching work, open access, open data and open educational resources are very important to me personally. However, I initially became aware of these important concepts through my work representing psychology students at local, national and international levels. Much of my work in both the Board of Management and Social Impact taskforce of the European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations (EFPSA) involved education and advocacy in the area of Open Access. The Right to Research Coalition has been very helpful to EFPSA and I was lucky enough to represent EFPSA at the R2RC GAs in 2012 and 2013 while we had the pleasure of hosting Nick at our congress in Denmark in 2012 and both Nick and Nicole at our congress in Romania earlier this year.

Chris Noone
Ph.D Candidate at the School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway

mail:  noo...@gmail.com| mobile: +353 86 063 0498| skype: chris-noone1                                              

On 11 November 2014 16:13, Sridhar Gutam <guta...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Ph.D Candidate 
the iSchool @ University of Illinois; Urbana Champaign

[swati chawla]

Dear all

Excellent initiative! Thanks everyone for sharing. 

Who am I?

I am Swati Chawla, a graduate student in history at the University of Virginia. I work on Tibetan exile in India, and am curious about why and how people make their homes in new places.

What do I do?

I work on Tibetan exile in India, and am curious about why and how people make their homes in new places. I am also a Praxis fellow in digital humanities, and am excited about if and how new technologies can transcend resource and knowledge asymmetries.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I am excited about the potential of Open Access, Open Data and related movements in leveling disparities such as access to education, resources for research, and government services in the developing world. I have over a decade of experience working with non-governmental organizations in India, and have spent twelve years as a student and assistant professor at the University of Delhi. I have observed that easier, cheaper and more transparent access to government data can go a long way in strengthening democratic institutions, particularly in developing nations where such access is precluded by long and expensive bureaucratic processes, and is a function of literacy, economic status, and proximity to seats of power. The Right to Information movement in India, and the legislation it led to, changed some of that. Such legislations should be complemented with technologies that people can access cheaply and easily, which would reduce the gap between the citizen and information.

I look forward to meeting everyone!

Sincerely

Swati Chawla

Graduate Student
Corcoran Department of History

University of Virginia

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[Martin Bentley]

*Who am I*

I am Martin Bentley (@astonsplat), a MSc student in geophysics and computing science at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. I am affiliated with an inter-faculty research institute, the Africa Earth Observatory Network.

*What do I do*
I am working on (semi-)automated data processing of geophysical data, which will combine data from multiple data sets collected using different methods. I am also involved with the Open Access Button, for which I am on the tech team. I also juggle, unicycle and do a bunch of other stuff.

*Where did my interest in Open come from?*
Directly, Ross Mounce and Jon Tennant, who kept nattering on about it on Twitter (followed them for the fossils, ended up here, go figure...).
However, while being outside academia for a while, I was trying to do stuff but kept hitting paywalls, despite not trying particularly hard. Now that I am back at university, I want to try and change things.

See you all on the weekend. (Anyone up for a Museum crawl when I arrive on Friday?)

mtb
--
Be the absurd, surrealist humour that you want to see in the world.

[Ivan Flis]

Who am I?

I am Ivan Flis (@ivanflis), a PhD candidate in history and philosophy of psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I was trained as a psychologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, and that's where I come from too! I am also a member of the European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations (EFPSA, and phew, that's a long name) team on Social Impact, specifically tasked with Open Access. I am also a transient and erratic member of the OpenCon organizing committee.

What do I do?

I'm doing a few things that are quite connected to each other. I am a an early-career scholar interested in the development of what we recognize as the discipline of psychology. I'm looking at it in the period from the 1950s to today, trying to understand how psychologists think about other people thinking and behaving; looking at their methodologies, journals, textbooks, and institutions like universities and professional organizations. This also includes publication cultures and journals (a large chunk of my research is based on the idea of data mining the abstracts in PsycINFO, a large database of the American Psychological Association, to create scientometric maps of psychology). So, this comes to the second part of my work, and that's on Open Access. Chris Noone (*waves at Chris*), who's also attending OpenCon, mentioned one of the biggest things we're working on OA related, and that's the literature access study aimed at students in Europe. I also try to manage and organize EFPSA's activities centered around Open Access.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

As a wee small bachelor student years ago, I started volunteering as an editor in this really cool service provided by EFPSA, called the Journal of European Psychology Students (http://jeps.efpsa.org, also, look for Katharina Brecht at OpenCon, its current Editor-in-Chief, to talk about student science and open science and all kinds of stuff, she is awesome!). We didn't know much about anything, but through a couple of years, we got organized and vocal and with a lot of help from guys like Chris and other executive people in EFPSA, and through getting connected to Nick and the Right to Research Coalition, we got the whole organization on board to promote and support Open Access. In a way, my main research interest and personal philosophy was highly influenced by this experience of student open science. 

Looking forward to meeting you all in person in a few days!

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[Roxanne Moore]

Who am I?

I am a second-year Master in Public Health (MPH) candidate in Global Epidemiology at Emory University.  Specifically, I am leveraging innovative data-mining surveillance techniques to facilitate infectious disease tracking in complex humanitarian emergency i.e. West African Ebola.   

I have previously worked with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) in innovative technologies for crowd-sourcing emergency information, and will hopefully continue supporting these agencies in the coming months regard the Ebola response efforts in West Africa.  

What do I do?

I began working in open data surveillance during Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan (2013).   During this time, I worked with Standby Task Force (SBTF) in data-mining and tagging infrastructure damage, displaced populations, and request for help from in-country Tweets.  These tags were then geo-located and placed on a map to facilitate humanitarian logistics and in-country coordination.  Currently, I am working with open data streams from the World Health Organization (WHO), Liberian/Guinea/Sierra Leone Ministries of Health (MOH), and news media to determine daily source variability in reported case and mortality information.

 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I am a huge Open Data advocate, especially within my two fields of health and emergency response both which have large ethical components.  All of my work is dependent upon open-source analytic tools and access to redistributable information.  Without persons advocating upon the continuation of open-source technologies and information this work would not be possible.  I would love to chat with more people regarding the ethics of open data, data privacy, data protection, right to share, and open government initiatives. 

[juretriglav]

Awesome thread, I'm amazed at the variety of people coming together for OpenCon!

Who am I?

Jure from Slovenia (https://twitter.com/juretriglav), an MD in a previous life and an open science software developer in this one.

What do I do?

In the past few years, I've stared a number of projects in the open science (and open source) space, project such as:

- ScienceGist (http://www.sciencegist.com) simplified summaries of scientific papers

- ScienceToolbox (http://www.sciencetoolbox.org) open index of scientific software

- Scholar Ninja (https://github.com/ScholarNinja/extension) distributed search engine for science

As I'm almost at the end of a year-long transition from medical software into open science software, expect to see a lot more from these projects soon.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

From many sources, really. From a rather prolonged experience of publishing a finished paper. From the frustrating experience of finishing university and suddenly not being able to read science anymore, as I no longer had access to the library's subscriptions. From the agonizing experience with government PDF documents. From not being able to query Google Scholar programmatically for a project. And from many more such experiences that have no place in the age of open.

Happy to chat at length about all of this when I see you all there! Now I need to Instapaper this thread so I can read it on the plane - so many interesting stories and people.

Jure

[Culmer, Kristofferson R. (MU-Student)]

Hello All,

 

I’m excited to meet all of you at OpenCon14 this weekend.

 

Who Am I?

 

Kristofferson Culmer from the Bahamas.

 

What Do I Do?

I’m currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Missouri in the United States. I’m also the President-Elect of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS). I currently serve this association as the Director of Outreach.

 

One of the projects we are currently working on is partnering with the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition (SPARC) in getting the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bills passed through the US Congress and also educating to academic community on Open Access policies and the overall Open Access movement.

 

Where did my interest in Open Access (OA) Come From?

I became aware of OA through my participation in NAGPS. In short, NAGPS is the national voice advocating for graduate-professional student well-being in the United States. One aspect of that is keeping the cost of higher education as low as possible and also removing impediments from the research process. Larger universities currently can spend millions of dollars per year on academic journal subscriptions and researchers are often frustrated when they run into a pay wall while attempting to access research articles.

 

The federal government adopting OA policies would free up millions of dollars for college/university budgets that could be redirected to other needs like graduate stipends J or other needs throughout the university. Researchers would also always have access to the most current research articles.

 

I look forward to seeing you all this weekend. Safe travels and I’ll see you in DC!

 

Take care

 

Kristofferson Culmer
PhD Computer Science Student
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science
Graduate and  Professional Council (GPC) President 2012-2013

UM System Intercampus Student Council (ISC) Chair
The University of Missouri
krc...@mail.missouri.edu

 

GO TIGERS!!!

 

 

[Daniel Mietchen]

Dear all,

thanks for this thread. It smells passion; I like that.

Who am I?
A biophysicist and currently a postdoc at the Natural History Museum
in Berlin, focusing on adapting its workflows to the Web.

What do I do?
Much of my work at the museum is centred around increasing openness -
I helped turn all three of our research journals to CC BY as of this
year, organize a culture-focused hackathon (
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/16/results-of-the-first-german-culture-hackathon/
), or draft a declaration on open data in biodiversity research (
http://bouchoutdeclaration.org/ ), of which the museum is a founding signatory.
But most of our collection (over 30 million objects) is yet to be
digitized, and we're trying to inject openness into that as well, to
the extent possible in an environment where open is still the
exception rather than the norm.

Apart from work, I am active within the Wikimedia and Open Knowledge
communities, mainly around open science, open access, open GLAM and
citizen science. For instance, I am involved with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access ,
advocating for the use of OA materials in educational contexts (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/World_Open_Educational_Resources_Congress_2012/How_Open_Access_and_Open_Science_can_mutually_fertilize_with_Open_Educational_Resources
), trying to get research funding to become more open (
http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12589 ), editing a manuscript series
of review articles destined for Wikipedia (
http://wikiambassador.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2014/03/28/publishing-scholarly-wikipedia/
) and running a bot that imports multimedia from openly licensed
scholarly publications into Wikimedia Commons (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Open_Access_Media_Importer_Bot
). An extension of this project is that I am now involved in making
JATS (the XML standard used in the PubMed Central database) more
reusable (cf.
http://jats4r.github.io/ ). Another extension (currently in a
prototype stage) of the bot project will be the subject of a workshop
on Sunday (cf. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Open_Access_Media_Importer_Bot
): it has some similarity to Paperity and the Peer Library that Marcin
and Mitar mentioned earlier in this thread, but it explicitly uses the
XML (i.e. JATS) and converts it to Wiki text (so that the articles can
be put up on Wikisource and perhaps even reworked for Wikipedia or
Wikibooks), and the idea is to signal the availability of the full
text on Wikisource and of the images on Wikimedia Commons as part of
the citation in Wikipedia articles (cf. https://vimeo.com/109435794 ).

Where did my interest in Open come from?
From multiple ends, and even though we now call many of these ends
"open", this was not the case when I initially came across them, and
in some cases, it took me a decade or more to realize that two
different sets of problems - e.g. access to the literature or
reproducibility of studies reported therein - were actually just
shades of the same bigger problem.

Let me try to go a little deeper here in terms of my history with just
two of these aspects:
(1) Open Access
In biophysics, the few textbooks that exist are hopelessly outdated,
and have been so for decades. So we studied it using research articles
right from the first week on. The problem was that there was no single
library from which we had access to all the literature we needed for
study. As I minored in maths, medicine and Asian studies, the overall
access situation was even worse, and I quickly became a frequent guest
at many libraries. When these library resources gradually became
available online, my access problems were eased a bit, but much less
than I had expected, since each discipline came online in a different
fashion - e.g. arXive had maths and physics but no bio or medicine
back then, and other preprint services simply did not exist. This
difference got me thinking, and I brought if up with some of my
professors, but basically accepted their reply along the lines of
"that's how we do things in [insert discipline]". Then BioMedNet came
around, which provided some online articles for free to members (i.e.
without me having to go through a library's subscriptions), and
membership was free. Being online, it also reached me earlier than
other journals, to which my libraries or professors typically had only
print access. So I included it in my weekly browsing of the
literature, even though the topics covered had little overlap with
what I needed. Then I went abroad for two years (Yemen, France, Japan,
South Korea) and experienced many more nuances of access problems and
approaches to them.

When the Budapest Open Access Initiative went public in 2002, it
resonated well with me, and I signed it immediately. From there, it
took me a few more years to really appreciate the subtleties of the
uses that are included there beyond reading. For instance, I only
became aware of Creative Commons licenses through the first issue of
PLOS Biology, of which I received a paper copy (don't remember why),
and I did not fully understand them until I started to blog and reuse
OA images there.

(2) Reproducibility and modeling
Our department of biophysics was divided into chairs for Experimental
Biophysics and Theoretical Biophysics, and a third one on Membrane
Biophysics, with both experimental and theoretical aspects. The same
with the curriculum - experimental and theoretical parts, occasionally
brought together by applications, e.g. in membrane biophysics or
biomechanics. During journal clubs, a typical complaint about
experimental papers was that the underlying data was not published or
only incompletely and thus useless for replication or modeling
purposes, whereas theoretical papers triggered similar complaints
about missing code (and membrane papers about patents). Now, all of
this could be described in terms of openness, and biophysics is still
not exactly at the forefront of openness, nor are related fields that
I have ventured in.

Ooops - that's a bit longer than I had intended, but your intros
stimulated me - looking forward to meet you over the next few days!

Daniel


--
http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/en/institution/mitarbeiter/mietchen-daniel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Publications
http://okfn.org
http://wikimedia.org
https://twitter.com/EvoMRI

[Angelica Tavella]

Who am I: 

I am a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where I studied "Changes of Copyright Law in a Digital Society" (for my BA), and co-founded the Open Access Initiative at Berkeley (http://oa.berkeley.edu/). I also worked at the Wikimedia Foundation for the last year, and am now doing freelance IT work before applying to graduate schools next year. I want to talk about University OA policies, open annotation, Public Access legislation and mandates (on all levels), and anything copyright related. Let's talk.

What I do: I am currently in a transitional period in between undergraduate and graduate school, and am living Los Angeles doing freelance IT and system administration, focusing on learning and implementing open systems. I also do various work for the Nexa Center for Internet and Society at the Politecnico of Turin including translating and supplementary research on Italian Cultural Heritage Laws. But for now what I really do is spend most of my time playing with music and electronics, until applying to graduate programs next year.

Where did my interest in OA Come From? 

I took this from a blog post I wrote for the PLOS Student Blog: When I began my undergraduate career at UC Berkeley and tried to familiarize myself with the functioning of the world of academia, and one things that I could not wrap my head around was fact that academics, researchers, and scientists have to assign the rights of their published works to their publisher, yet there are certain funding mandates like the National Institute of Health Public Access Mandate that require you to make your research available to the public (after giving away your copyright), and unlike other copyright-related industries, academics are not making their primary revenue from these copyrights in the first place.  I then spent the following year researching how commercial publishers are affected by the federal NIH Public Access mandate , which since 2008 requires all NIH-funded research (largest body of scientific and biomedical research) to be published on the Pub Med database within one year of publication", and since then co-founded that Open Access Initiative at UC Berkeley.

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[Juan Pablo Alperin]

Who am I: 

I am the guy that was on stage giving the first panel a hard time for not sending me their bios. I am also a PhD Candidate at the Sanford University Graduate School of Education and an instructor (to be Assistant Professor when I finish that PhD) in the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. I have also been a team member of the Public Knowledge Project.

What I do: 

Of all the things I do, the one I like the most is the research I do about scholarly communications in Latin America. My dissertation is on the public use of Open Access research from Latin America, but I have also been observing and writing about OA in Latin America since 2008. I used to write open source software for managing and publishing journals (now used by over 7000 journals worldwide!) 

In terms of my OA advocacy, one of the things that I did was to spearhead a student OA policy within the School of Education at Stanford. I'll talk about this briefly tomorrow, but feel free to chat me about it! 

How I became interested in OA:

A little by chance. I took a job in Toronto working for an OA medical journal because the technology and the scholarly publishing problem seemed interested from the software perspective (I am a CS undergraduate). The more I learned about it, the more important it seemed to become, especially in the developing country context. 

Look forward to chatting with you all! Find me in the hallways! 

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencon-discussion-list/CAPV0MbE8cK77G4DApwF5E6%2BVtPtZU%3D%3Dyx_S8Y5ZZR9YTYhHfxA%40mail.gmail.com.

[ayoub_msalilwa]

who am I:

My name is Ayoub Keneth Msalilwa, A fourth year student doing Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery(MBBS) at the International Medical and Technological University(IMTU) in Dar es salaam Tanzania. I have interests in various things in life like media, music, and technology. I also love interacting with others.

what do i do:

I am currently the Informacist and publicist of Tanzania Medical Students Association(TAMSA),

Tanzania Open Access Champion,

R2RC Tanzania Ambassador,

County Research Coordinator for Federation of Medical Universities in Africa,(FAMSA)

creator and admin of facebook page of OPEN ACCESS TANZANIA:

see here:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Open-access-Tanzania/1470572093182477?ref=hl

Also admin of Tamsa official website and facebook pages.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

 In 2013 I attended OA trainings in one of the TAMSA's scientific conferences where I came to realize how important OA is to a medical student and early researchers. since then  I became a front liner OA advocator to everyone and to wherever conference I attend. I  am ready to train any one any where in a specific time.

we formed OA groups and network which is expanding daily in Tanzania and East Africa.

I also attended Berlin 11 satellite conference in Berlin in 2013. learned alot and also made great professional friends there.

looking forward to working with each and everyone of you.

 

 

 
On Sunday, September 21, 2014 at 12:00:55 AM UTC+3, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

[Mass Tapfuma]

Hi Colleagues

Who am I
I am Mass, a lecturer in Publishing studies at the National University of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe. I am a librarian by profession and PhD student in Information Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Much of my time is spent talking open access in disseminating knowledge in academic libraries.

What do I do

I am an HIV/AIDS activist in my workplace and spend time in awareness discussions with students and staff, on the subject.

Where did my interest in Open come from

Having been a librarian in an academic institution where issues of open access are at the forefront, I developed interest and started engaging in creating awareness through information literacy training sessions. In publishing, open access is one of the scholarly communcation publishing models.

Let's get to know each other more as we engage in discussions. See you at the OpenCon.

[Therese Schedifka]

What a wonderful Idea, 

Hi everyone, 

Who am I?

My name is Therese and I am 27 years old. Currently I am a PhD Candidate at the Westfaelische Wilhelms Universtität, Muenster Germany. Before I studied in Utrecht ' New media and digital culture' in a master program. 

What I do

I mainly focus on my PhD thesis and my volunteering jobs for politics and civil society. My research field is science communication of the humanities in the digital world and how this is related to trust and digitalization. I concentrate on the digital communication of scholars and what kind of fears and inhibitions appear in the communication with the non-academics. In general scholars seems to be very sceptical towards communication with the lay public on- and offline but even more in the digital communication. I research if a lack of trust in digital media and its terms of communication can be the reason for this. 

Where did my interest in Open come from ?

In Utrecht I worked for the centre for the Humanities and organized conferences and the communication strategy about the events. In the communication I devoted all my interest in bridging the scholars with the lay public and so interest the public in the conference. With an cool culture program around the conference days and before I managed to spread the academic ideas in the media and the public. This was the beginning of my interest in Open. I discovered how much joy, creativity and acceptance can be occur when both spheres come together and this is why I put all my effort in creating a discourse between the lay and academic person. 

Looking forward to meeting you all 

Therese

[Ruth Tillman]

Introducing myself because even if I don't get accepted to OpenCon I hope to do local events in DC (yes, I know!! I missed it last year and was really sad about that)

Who am I?

My name is Ruth Kitchin Tillman, I live just outside the DC area. My hobbies include tabletop and video games, crafting, a bit of writing, and experimenting with coding projects from time to time. The link on my name's to my Twitter profile, which is a great place to find me. I've got a Master's Degree in library science with a focus on archives and personal focus on metadata.

What do I do?

I'm the metadata librarian at NASA Goddard (through a contracting company, like 70% of Goddard). I'm on the Code4Lib Editorial Committee and a co-chair of the Society of American Archivists' Encoded Archival Description roundtable. I've created EADiva, a tongue-in-cheek tag library designed for people who wanted to learn more about Encoded Archival Description but couldn't handle the tech-heavy focus of the official tag library (it required you to be able to read a document type declaration, etc.). Now that I write it out, it sounds like a lot but there is so much more that I want to do. I've been out of library school for a little over a year and in two weeks I'll have been at this job for a year.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I've been interested in Open Access for years now, ever since I started working handling law journal subscriptions at a law school's library and realized how much libraries were being charged and how strongly they were being restricted in what they can do with what they were buying, how tenuous the access was (buying back catalogs vs. just renting access for a year, what back catalogs actually mean in terms of usability if you don't renew the subscription---they mail you CD/DVD-ROMs with PDFs of the journal issues, horrible organization and no overall description).

In the last few years, as I've been focusing more on Open Data initiatives, although I feel pretty new to that compared to a lot of people. The more I learn, the more potential I can see in people working with each other's data to create amazing things---but only if that data is open and shareable. I wish I could say I'm making any strides related to that here at Goddard, but what I'm working on isn't really in that area.

[Nick Shockey]

Thanks for introducing yourself, Ruth!  This would be a great time for another wave of introductions.  It’s been wonderful to see more and more people joining the community, and we’d love to hear a bit about you if you haven’t already introduced yourself!

Nick

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[Rifqi Aulia Destiansyah]

Hey ! I hope my very first post on this group finds you all well. I would like to introduce myself also !

Who am I
My name is Rifqi Aulia Destiansyah. I'm from Indonesia. I live on the capital, Jakarta. Recently I just graduated from Brawijaya University, Indonesia where i studied and got my Medical Degree a few months ago. Now I'm one of the Supervising Councils of CIMSA Indonesia, one of IFMSA's National Member Organization. And my term will end on the first day of July 2015.

What I do
For now, I'm waiting for the Internships for Doctor's fresh graduates (it's compulsory here anyway), my internship periode will come on this November. 6 more months, and while waiting, I also fill Health Clinics on the remote areas of my University take place. I feel that the General Practitioners on the remote areas is on emergency needs for access of, for example, educational materials, updates on treatment and managing diseases, clinical materials and updates etc. Therefore this come to my attention and that's why I'm bery interested on OA

Where dis my OA interest come from
It was started when I fill Health Clinics, like I stated above, I saw that we, General Practitioners, in needs of clinical materials that will help us to manage patients and diseases mor up to date, more effective and more comprehensive. We know that Medical field is growing very fast everyday, and there's no doubt that we need a system to access the information, any information we need, any subjects we want. For one reason : Patients get better and healthy.
I scrolled IFMSA-General mailing list on my device, and our Officer, Ivana, posted about OA and right to it I think that this would be the solutions to our problems.

Thank You,
Best Regards from Indonesia,

Rifqi Aulia Destiansyah, MD

[Abdulai, Mohammed Sadat]

Hello all,

Just got here.

Who am I
My name is Mohammed Sadat Abdulai. I am Ghanaian and  I live in Accra-Ghana. I have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from University of Ghana and presently studying towards a Masters in Statistics at Regent University College of Science and Technology also in Ghana.

What I do
I am presently a student and a part time data analyst. In my spare time you will find me editing Wikipedia with the username Masssly.

Where dis my OA interest come from

For me OA is a personal thing of a sort. I come from a part of the world where internet is still too expensive and access to knowledge is a reserve for the privileged. When you happen to get onto the internet, most of the good stuff are locked expensive pay-walls beyond the reach of majority of the population. These academic work could easily addressed poverty, illiteracy and diseases that have embroiled population. For example, this [1] 32 year old Elsevier paper could have averted the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014.
My hope is that, academic work will be made freely available to the general public one day. This is what really interests me about OA.
And I hope to learn more about how this will/can happen by joining this group.

Many Thanks

-Masssly

[Viktor Grønne]

Hi all,

I might as well join this thread as well!

Who am I?

My name is Viktor Grønne, I live in Copenhagen, Denmark, though I also spend a lot of time travelling across Europe as an elected representative of the European Students’ Union (ESU). Besides my work in ESU I am also a student in International Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School.

What do I do?
As I said, I am an elected representative of ESU. I have been the Human Rights and Solidarity Coordinator for the past year, but from 1^st of July I will step into the Executive Committee working primarily with the social dimension and internationalisation of education. We are an umbrella organisation of 47 national student unions from 39 different countries (we don’t limit ourselves to EU countries only) representing approximately 15 million students in tertiary education. ESU works to represent and promote the educational, social, economic and cultural interests of students at the European level towards all relevant bodies, this is primarily done through actions targeted at the European Commission, Parliament and Bologna Follow-Up Groups, but of course also through an impressive network of partners and projects.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I guess my own personal as well as ESU’s interest and/or knowledge in the Open Access area can still be considered somewhat as a novice, though before joining university I did do some coding, which is where my personal experience comes from. However, the reason why we find Open Access to be so important is because we believe in education and research as a public good, something the state should make available to its citizens. Not all students have access to a wide selection of research journals and this is inhibiting the quality of studies and academic integrity as we see it right now. Further, there is no reason why the greater public should not be able to access the research results freely.

 

I look forward to getting to know more of you and meet you at the OpenCon!

[David Carroll]

Welcome everyone!!!

When I started this thread I never thought it would be so successful!! If you're out there and haven't introduced yourself, I would love to hear from you 

David :) 

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[Gennie Gebhart]

So many intros! Love it.

Who am I?

My name is Gennie (pronounced like "Jenny," short for Genevieve) Gebhart. I live in the beautiful Bay Area in northern California, and I am a Master of Library and Information Science student at the University of Washington Information School.

What do I do?

My interests lie in international digital divides, open access and other Open movements, and how they all interact. My research is in Internet implementation in developing countries, especially Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. In that same vein, I am currently doing research with TASCHA (the Technology and Social Change research group at the UW) on information/digital literacy in Myanmar. This summer, I am gearing up for research on zero rating and Internet.org in Ghana, also with TASCHA. In terms of work, I intern for Beyond Access's projects in Myanmar and the Philippines, and do impact data analysis for San Francisco-based social enterprise Samasource. Most of my volunteer time is dedicated to OA - I am a leader of the University of Washington's open access initiative and also volunteer for the DOAJ and the Open Access Button. I also spend a fair amount of time exchanging encrypted texts and book recommendations with David Carroll, the most handsome, charming, funny OA advocate around. ;)

Where did my interest in Open come from?

The UW Libraries first introduced me to the concept of open access when I was a sophomore in college. Around that time, the head librarian at the University of South Africa, Ms. Buhle Mbambo-Thata, was visiting the UW, and she gave a talk on her open access work. She began the talk with, "In most presentations, I tell you about my work. But today I am telling you about open access, and that means telling you about my heart." Aaaaaaand I was hooked.

[Sarah Hoskins]

Who am I?

Hi! My name is Sarah Hoskins and I am from Philadelphia. I have a BA in ancient Greek history from Boston University, an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, and am currently working on an MA in history from Rowan University. I love participating in community theater, playing kickball and making dinosaur shaped cookies!

What do I do?

I run the library's Digital Scholarship Center at Rowan University. I am a one-person department, so I end up doing a bit of everything, from equipment circulation and maintenance to building web tools to teaching Digital Humanities classes. I work with faculty and students on finding new and creative ways to present and share their research. It is super exciting and I am currently preparing for a kick-ass Open Access Week! I also work on Openness and Digital Humanities with other schools in the area. As a part of PhillyDH, I am developing a one-day, hackathon style group project to run alongside THATCamp focusing on visualizing and sharing an Open Data set.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I've been interested in Open Access since first learning about the movement in library school. My interest really took off while working under the data management librarian at an engineering library. Looking at data management plans really got me thinking about how research is funded and distributed. Luckily, I have been able to continue working on research sharing, something I hope to make a lasting part of my career.  

[CIZA Bonne]

Hi ladies gentle men, I am happy to join this to day.

Who am I

My name is CIZA Bonne from southern part of Burundi(Makamba) boarder to Tanzania.I  am a Clinical and nurse officer by profession currently managing the KABONGA rural health facility taking undergraduate studies in Public health at the Distant Production House University(DPHU) http://dphu.org/
I also work in volunteerism and occupy various positions(See below)

What do I
-Student taking Public health
-Country coordinator at the International Youth Alliance for Family Planning(IYAFP) http://iyafp.org/
-Deputy legal representative at the Nurses solidarity for promotion of maternal and children health which a grass-root local NGO
-Work for the Ministry of public health and AIDS Control in Management position at a public health facility located in remote-settings
-Mentor at different local organizations
-Mentor/trainer in different community health interventions

Why am i Interested to join

-Open access, Data and education inspired me very much
-In our country, an adage says that'' If you want t hide a truth to Burundians, just write it in a Book, they will not be aware of it'' This means that Burundians are used to read and develop further them selves through existing opportunities or open resources.
-Why? May be because of ignorance, lack of information/awareness, bad or lack of enabling environment, lack of relevant policies
-Being aware of that, i could not wait to be part of those benefiting from Open learning, to date i have some certificate and diploma degrees earned through Open learning
-Again being aware of it, i cannot wait to help my fellows young professionals, students, colleagues and peers to take advantage of open learning
-So i have so far exchanged and shared with different people out here existing open education, Data and access and are benefiting of them
-But, i and others still need to do more especially in poor countries like mine where literacy and internet issues exist.
-But, i am optimistic as i believe that positive change doesn't come by it self, it's brought forth me-you.

Ciza Bonne

Clinical and Nurse officer
Manager of KABONGA Health center
IYAFP Country coordinator
Deputy legal representative of Nurses solidarity for promotion of
maternal and children health

M. +257 69 070 132 or +257 79 968 136
E. ciza...@gmail.com or sipr...@gmail.com
S.ciza.bonne V.+257 68 901 289

[ADEYEMO AYODELE OBA]

Hello Everyone,
Who Am I?

I am Ayodele Oba Adeyemo, 20+, Nigerian by nationality. I am a young GeoGeek, Data Junkie, serial entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, unconventionally thinking of ways to proffer solutions to human, social and environmental challenges. I am passionate about social change and development as well as the impacting the world. I am a final student of remote sensing and GIS from Nigeria.

What I do?

Basically I solve problems with IT. I leverage on available skills to proffer solutions to human, social and environmental challenges. For a period of 8 months now, I have been wokrking with a team on the Nigeria Open Data Access portal. Available at www.opendata.com.ng. I am a GIS expert, creative and free thinker, business developer and agile product developer. I used to code but now I focus on the developmenal management of startups. I love working with maps and locational entities... I free style on a blog www.gistme247.blogspot.com and ayodeleadeyemo.strikingly.com/blog/ .....

What drew my Open Data Interest?

Right from when I was younger I understood what freedom means and I understand the social /ethical dilemma behind the openness of data and information. I have always wanted a means where everyone have access to the datasets that they need. My experience as a programmer/ developer was not too good because at everytime I wanted to build local content applications that are focused at solving problems, I couldn't 'cos I don't have access to the data. Even as as student I do not have access to enough resources for asssignments and exam preparations. So I got to find a solution to this problem. Thats why I started my open data campaign.

[ADEYEMO AYODELE OBA]

[ADEYEMO AYODELE OBA]

[Ilia Nadareishvili]

Hello dear friends,

let me introduce myself.

so, Who I Am? & What Do I Do?

My name is Ilia Nadareishvili and I am a public health specialist (might sound ambitious :) ) from Georgia. I have graduated from a medical school 3 years ago as an MD, but decided to change course and dive dipper into science, public health and medical education. My usual day starts with teaching at the medical school for the first 4-5 hours and then working in the medical education center combining various project coordination activities with research process and studies. Apart from this I am proud to be the president of Georgian Medical Students' Association, expecting to become IFMSA member this August (fingers crossed). 

 

My free time is usually spent with my girlfriend ^_^ :) , cycling (mad about this sport), music (I play piano : www.youtube.com/hellenigma and compose electronic music (not published yet), with my friends, dreaming and all the other things we all do :)

Me and the Open Data/Access/Education

The problems connected to paywalls, enormous textbook and journal prices and closed access to resources has affected my personal learning and research process from the time I had learned to read I think. Seriously, books were so expensive, that hardly any family could afford fresh information in my country. This became extremely difficult during my student life. An up to this day, I face a lot of restrictions for example with my PhD project due to these issues. When I first learned about Open, I saw a hope in this movement. And so, for the last few years, I am trying to be involved in it, and believe we can bring changes. 

Regards,

Ilia

--
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[Bethelhem Teka]

Hi everybody


Who am I?

I am Bethelhem, I am lecture at Addis Ababa University Department of Computer Science.

What do I do?

I have a research that indirectly make use of open data, which requires open access.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest about openness of data started while working on the thesis work. However I did not know to the degree of today at that moment.

Can't wait to see you all,

Bethelhem

[Carlos Diego Andrade]

Hi, my name is Diego Andrade. I am Software engineering undergraduate course coordinator of UFC (Federal University of Ceará).

I work since 2013 on an countryside thematic university campus that brings technology to one of poorest areas of Brazil and i love what i do. Bring hope and future to the students by teaching "IT" is amazing. My students can't pay to much to use anything then all the open opportunities that they have to do something significant it's an opportunity to change yours lives.

I have intrest on open because on Brazil we have a federal law that obligates the government to provide all your data (open data) to the people what give us the opportunity to make products that can supervise and charge politicians to do everything right. Brazil is going through a political crisis because of corruption and such softwares and products can help to solve this problems.

I work with Renata Aquino and found out the event because she writed about it on our email group. I am very excited about the opportunity to join.

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 6:00:55 PM UTC-3, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

All of this interest in Openness began about 18 months ago and since then, my interest in open access, open issues and things that should be open has grown exponentially. These areas include copyright, free and remix culture, the free and open internet and digital civil liberties.

Looking forward to getting to know you all,

David

[David Carroll]

Thanks for introducing yourself, Carlos! It’s been great to see this wave of introductions, if you’re still out there and haven’t introduced yourself, I’d love to hear a bit more about you!

David :)

> --
> OpenCon is empowering the next generation to advance Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. This group is for participants of the conference and community, either in person, at satellite events or through the webcasts, videos (etc) to interact, share updates, ideas and discuss relevant topics. So please, join in the discussion!
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[Ricardo Hartley]

Hello, 

I’m Ricardo Hartley from Chile. I am finishing my PhD in Biological Sciences and trying to introduce the Open “spirit” in my University (Universidad of La Frontera) and as much communities as possible.

I have no experience yet giving talk about the topic but i want to consolidate a group in my University, also applying to OpenCon2015 and bring that experience to Chile.

Until now i have been following twitter and webpages discussion about the topic, among other topics why it is so important and how to differentiate the necessity to patent from necessity to communicate new Knowledge.

I hope my english is adequate to communicate in the group.

Open to new collaboration!

Best regards!

Ricardo

Ricardo Hartley Belmar

ORCID 0000-0001-5058-9309

@cridhe

[Lilian Starobinas]

Hello everybody!

My name is Lilian, I'm from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'm a teacher and a researcher, History is my first field, and I latter I've got my PhD in Education, researching teacher's interactions in discussion groups.

I'm a member of OER-Brazil, and some other groups connected to Open Content and Open data in the country. 

I work with teacher trainning, and keep my position at a High School, and I'm glad to introduce my students to Creative Commons and the ideia of Openness.

OER entered in my life since the UNESCO Forum on 2005, and since then I've been contributting in several groups to foster the use of open licenses.

I'm one of the authors of OER - Collaborative Practices and Public Pollicies (http://www.livrorea.net.br/livro/home.html), that has English and Spanish versions as well.

I'd like to be closer to the group, to get inspired by the current iniciatives and to give my contributtions to Open Content projects.

Warm regards,

Lilian Starobinas

[Sarah Kiden]

Hi everyone,

My name is Sarah Kiden; I work at Uganda Christian University in Uganda with the ICT Services department. The university is about 70% open source and there are plans to completely move open source.

Open Source technologies speak to me :-).

I am happy to be part of this community.  

Best,

Sarah 

On Saturday, June 20, 2015, David Carroll <carroll...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for introducing yourself, Carlos!  It’s been great to see this wave of introductions, if you’re still out there and haven’t introduced yourself, I’d love to hear a bit more about you!

David :)

On 18 Jun 2015, at 21:56, Carlos Diego Andrade <carlos...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi, my name is Diego Andrade. I am Software engineering undergraduate course coordinator of UFC (Federal University of Ceará).
>
> I work since 2013 on an countryside thematic university campus that brings technology to one of poorest areas of Brazil and i love what i do. Bring hope and future to the students by teaching "IT" is amazing. My students can't pay to much to use anything then all the open opportunities that they have to do something significant it's an opportunity to change yours lives.
>
> I have intrest on open because on Brazil we have a federal law that obligates the government to provide all your data (open data) to the people what give us the opportunity to make products that can supervise and charge politicians to do everything right. Brazil is going through a political crisis because of corruption and such softwares and products can help to solve this problems.
>
> I work with Renata Aquino and found out the event because she writed about it on our email group. I am very excited about the opportunity to join.
>
> On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 6:00:55 PM UTC-3, David wrote:

> Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) Hi Everybody. Hi Dr. Nick,

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencon-discussion-list/E21288EE-ED6B-4923-BC89-01DFDF83AB45%40gmail.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Sent from Gmail Mobile

[usym...@gmail.com]

Hi All,

My name is Orsolya (Uschi) Symmons and I'm a postdoc in genetics. I'm Hungarian by passport, but did my PhD in Germany and am currently transitioning from my first postdoc in France to my second one in the US (Philadelphia). I love my research, in part because it opens a window to understand the world around us, and in part because doing research allows me to do something different everyday. I find that creative aspect of science absolutely wonderful.

I originally became interested in Open because I come from a poor country (and within that a really poor area), and I believe that access to data and resources has the potential tosustainably  improve living standards . Besides that I think sharing openly is the best way to transmit how exciting science can be, day after day. I've been involved in lots of activities to help with science engagement, and this year I launched an open science project with two friends of mine (it's called the LilBUBome).

However, so far I haven't really been able to do a true open science project, because my supervisors have been rather resilient to the idea (fear of getting scooped etc). This is something I would like to change in the future.

Best wishes,
Uschi

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 11:00:55 PM UTC+2, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

[Alisson Barbosa]

Hi everyone,

Who am I?

My name is Alisson Barbosa. I am professor of Federal University of Ceará/Brazil. I teach in the city of Quixadá (city in the central zone of Ceará - a northeast state of Brazil). I love music and board games. I play guitar in a cover band of The Beatles. I like to share knowledge with other people, make new friends and study...

What do I do?

I write, research, teach and supervise undergrads and co-supervise postgrads about computer networks, protocols, algorithms and I incentivate to share the codes and the research in open way and to publish in international journals and conferences.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I always liked of open source initiatives and open and shared information. Also, recently, PhD. Renata Aquino made to me an invitation to participate of the OpenCon. I am very interested because I want to develop several projects in this area.

[stellahmu...@gmail.com]

Hi Everyone!

I am introducing myself. I am stellah Mungaila currently doing my PhD at the University of Zambia. I am interested in shariung new ideas in various fields and hou as academicians can make an everlasting impact on develpoment in our various nations.

Hope this platform will provide me with exciting opportunities to be a better researcher.

I was recently introduced  to this platform and I guess I have a lot to learn and contribute.

 

Stellah

.

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 11:00:55 PM UTC+2, David wrote:

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

Who am I?

I am Jonathan Gray, Director of Policy and Research at Open Knowledge, a global civil society organisation dedicated to opening up public information, research and culture to benefit the lives of citizens around the world. I am also Doctoral Researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London; Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam; and Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. More about me can be found on my website, and I'm on Twitter at @jwyg.

What do I do?

With my Open Knowledge hat, I oversee policy and research activities around many different areas that we work in - including open access, open government data, open cultural material and other things. Most recently this has recently included launching a new initiative on the Future of Scholarship to build a stronger, better connected network of people interested in open access in the humanities and social sciences. There's a Twitter list in progress for people, organisations and intitiatives interested in OA in HSS disciplines here. We have various things planned on this front - and if you're interested in OA in HSS and you're based in the UK, we'd love to hear from you!

Where did my interest in open access come from?

I can't recall how I first became interested in open access. Possibly through my early involvement with Open Knowledge around a decade ago. Possibly through Peter Suber (who is on our advisory council). Several recent pieces - here, here and here - say a bit more about my interests in this area, and in particular about the importance of open access in the humanities and social sciences!

I'd love to talk with others who are also interested in OA in HSS! And really looking forward to OpenCon to meet you all. :-)

Jonathan

--

Jonathan Gray

Director of Policy and Research | @jwyg

Open Knowledge

okfn.org | @okfn

[Anuradha GUNGADEEN]

Warm Greetings!

Dear Colleagues

Who am I?

Im Anuradha Gungadeen. Currently a PhD Candidate and working at Mauritius Institute of Education (Teacher Education Institute). An advocate for open learning and lifelong learning. 

What I do

Presently focusing on my PhD thesis, research papers and collaborating with colleagues at my institution in the design n development of online courses. My research field is blended learning in this digital era and how it impacts on motivation & ultimately on achievement. Emphasis is laid on sustainable open source digital technologies; sound design of e-learning landscape; key roles of course designers; roles of learners.

Where did my interest in Open come from ?

Beginning of my interest: My interest arouse when I was working at the University of Mauritius where I was involved in the design of techno-pedagogical learning spaces and a lot of emphasis was laid on Open Learning Resources (OERs). Later, participating in Boot Camp organised by the University & CoL, boosted my interest & motivation for Open Education and its potential gains. During my master degree, a wide spectrum of opportunities was given to us as learners to incorporate OPen in the educational field. After my OLNet-TESSA scholarship at the Open University UK, my learning experiences in OERs broadened. OERs has provided me with professional learning experiences.

It would be an immense pleasure to meet so many advocates of Open and 

Anu

[Eranga Samararathna]

Hi,

I am a part time lecturer (in University of Moratuwa and Victoria Higher Education Campus ), civil society worker ( at www.slng.asia) and a professionally qualified Software Engineer.  As a person from developing country I want to be part to open everything in academia, open educational resources, open data and open science. I am more than happy to lead the initiative in my country with the next generation of researchers.

The access to information is a biggest problem I face as a teacher and citizen of a developing country. A huge portion of the academic literature is locked behind pay walls that many people in developing countries cannot get past due to higher costs.  As a result our universities in Sri Lanka is lacking of access to latest and accurate information. 

At SLNG (http://www.slng.asia) we are running programs to promote open access to Internet. 

Thanks

Regards,

Eranga

--

OpenCon is empowering the next generation to advance Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. This group is for participants of the conference and community, either in person, at satellite events or through the webcasts, videos (etc) to interact, share updates, ideas and discuss relevant topics. So please, join in the discussion!
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[Camila de Ávila]

Hi David, thank you for this initiative! 

Who am I?

I am Camila and I am a master’s student in neuroscience field at Laval University in Québec city, Canada. I did my Bachelor in Brazil, in biology and I decided to move to Canada looking for new challenges, new culture, etc. I really like to exchange experiences and traveling, so I’m trying to do it as much as I can! Open information and open access is all about exchanging experience and that’s why I totally agree with this initiative! Furthermore, I’m interest especially in biology and gastronomy/nutrition and I’m trying to put it all together.

What do I do?

My research is on obesity, I'm especially interested in food addition induced by stress in women . The aim of my project is to find a drug to block this kind of behavior. I’m very happy to be able to put together biology and gastronomy/nutrition! I have fun doing my job and I’m planning to start my PhD next year. Open information is a great initiative to make projects advance faster and it can have an impact on finding new treatments for diseases faster as well!.

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

Since I started my master I found very difficult this story of access… and talking to my friends I realized how difficult it is for people out of university or institutes to have access to all work that have been done or is being done on research. In fact some people even don’t know that they can have the access. Since this time, I’m looking for option to spread information to the community.

I' looking foward to met you!

Camila Avila

Master student

Laboratory of Dr Elena Timofeeva

CRIUCPQ

Le samedi 20 septembre 2014 17:00:55 UTC-4, David a écrit :

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

[Raniere Silva]

> My name is Alisson Barbosa. I am professor of Federal University of
> Ceará/Brazil.

You are the four people from Federal University of Ceará/Brazil
that I know involved with open practices.

Will be awesome if OpenCon 2016 be in Fortaleza. =)

[Ravi Murugesan]

Hi everyone!

Who am I?
I'm Ravi Murugesan and I've been working with open source educational technology, particularly Moodle, for more than seven years. I live in Mumbai, India, and work from my home most of the time.

What do I do?
I'm a consultant with INASP, an international development charity in the UK. A big part of my work involves developing and facilitating online courses for INASP's audience spread across the world in developing countries. For example, http://www.authoraid.info/en/news/details/914/

Where did my interest in Open come from?

Among other things INASP runs the Journals Online project, a network of mostly open access journals in developing countries. I've been following open access closely ever since I joined INASP four years ago. My own work is moving into the realm of open education, involving open source software and open licensing.

Best wishes,

Ravi
http://turn-editing-on.blogspot.com/

--
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[Iara Vidal]

Ooops! Just realized I did not introduced myself yet, here we go.

Who am I?

I'm Iara (pronounced "yara", after a mythological water creature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iara_%28mythology%29 and a guerrilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yara_Yavelberg - I just love my name so much!). I'm a phd student from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Curiosity is what moves me. During my free time I like to read, listen to podcasts, watch tv series, sing and dance. I also procrastinate a lot, I'm trying to deal with that. You can find me on Twitter, where I spend most of my time - @iaravps. Oh, this year I'm a member of the OpenCon Organising Committee, which is an honor and an amazing responsibility.

What do I do?

I describe myself as a non-practicing librarian and a researcher in training. I have worked in a library for about 6 years, then left to start an academic career. Got my master's last year, and now I'm on my phd. I study research evaluation metrics, focusing on the potential of alternative metrics to evaluate the research done in peripheric countries. I believe impact has multiple dimensions, and we should not focus on just one (like citations). I believe research evaluation is a way to not only see the impact science has in the world, but also to make science itself better by encouraging behaviors that make it more open and valuable. I'm also very interested in ways to better measure, understand and represent the impacts of the science done in peripheric countries, the ones underrepresented in glamour journals and international citation databases.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My first contact with the idea of open came through the open access movement. I think researchers and the public should have access to research, specially when this research was paid for by the public. More recently I became interested in open science. I've been learning a lot with this community, and I hope to take a more active part in it.

Love,

Iara Vidal

Doutoranda / PhD Student

PPGCI/IBICT-UFRJ

http://iaravps.wordpress.com

[Emmanuel Acha]

I am Emmanuel Acha, I am young activist, entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of Entrepreneurship Initiative for African Youth (EIFAY). We are youth entrepreneurship development nongovernmental organization based in Enugu, Nigeria. As an organization, we are highly involved in open access, ICT4D, open education and open data activities. I have training in Computer Science from the Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, Nigeria. Our organization is a member of Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), Nigeria Chapter and we have involved in several local and international ICT conferences such as TechCamp West Africa, Accra, Ghana 2015; eLearning Africa's International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training Addis Ababa, 2015. We coordinate local ICT programmes such as hosting zonal workshop on sustainability of Community Resource Centres at Abakaliki, October 2015, participating in South East Internet Policy Training at Enugu, Nigeria etc. We are planning to host the first ever OpenCon Satellite event in Nigeria by December, 2015. You can reach me via mobile +2347081816961 or email me directly at acha.e...@yahoo.com. Thank you!

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 10:00:55 PM UTC+1, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

[ratan...@bonikbarta.com]

Greetings to all! Thank you OpenCon for giving me the floor!

Who am I?

I am Ratan Kumer Das, from Bangladesh, I am a librarian and a volunteer. I do love volunteering. From my student life, I involve in various outside activities. As a Rover Scout I have done social work with the poor and women. I am a teacher of night school where I serve for the homeless people. I like reading, writing feature for newspaper-magazine, traveling and exploring. You can find me on Facebook- ratan...@rocketmail.com.

What do I do?

I have more almost five years of work experience in library sector. I am a librarian with expertise in the delivery of comprehensive reference services, maintaining accurate data and building a strong knowledge base of the library&#39;s materials, utilizing a wide variety of technologies and formats, take all necessary steps for establishment of Modern Digital Library and supervise and improve the library facility for all. Researched and assisted in getting information, effective tracking and reporting skills, using databases and developed training materials and conducted technology related training including unique and dynamic courses in all aspects of Information Technology (IT).

Where did my interest in Open come from?

The open access movements attract me most. About one year ago I began to start my interest in Openness. I hope to take a more active part in it.

 Open regards,

Ratan Kumer Das|Assistant Librarian|The Daily Bonik Barta|Dhaka|Bangladesh

 

[Kennedy Kwati]

Hi everyone, it’s a pleasure to have read your bios and get to know something about all of you. I thought it fit to follow the trend and tell you guys a little about myself as well.

Who am I?

I’m Kennedy Kwati, student at the University of Botswana reading for my Bachelors in Management (Strategy). I’m also a young professional working as a development officer with a young, vibrant team of amazing youth in Botswana, Young 1ove, an NGO with the mission to connect young Africans with proven life-saving information. We take programs that have been proven to work via rigorous research, contextualize them and massively scale them to reach thousands of kids. Our current flagship program is a sexual health class shown via a randomized control trial to reduce teenage pregnancy by 28% in Kenya. We took the same programme- contextualized it to the Botswana scene and massively scale it. We gather evidence even as we scale- the next step is to evaluate our impact (in Botswana) in collaboration to the Jameel Poverty Action Lap (J-Pal) and Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence .

What do I do?

I work with different societies and associations in the University including the Society Against HIV/ AIDS (SAHA), UB Workcamps and the UB section of the Youth Alliance for Leadership and Development in Africa (YALDA) just to mention a few. I’m a strong advocate for young people and all things open. I believe access remain at the brink of untapped young talent and is our responsibility as fellow young people, both figuratively and realistically to bring about change.

As a Development officer at Young 1ove my work encompasses a lot of interesting things however the things that stand out the most is Partnership Development and Management, Fundraising and internal Operations management. I develop and oversee fundraising projects, funding partnerships etc. I also have an extra dabble in Research mainly working on the management and analysis of data- as well as design and reporting. I have ever since joining Young 1ove develop an inner eye that has appreciation for the deeper meaning of life and how we can use data to explain some of society’s challenging problems. I believe evidenced based education, especially open education is a key to unlocking Africa’s potential.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

My interest in Openness and all things Open stems from my lifework to connect young people and students to proven life- saving information. This all started about 5 months ago as I was sitting in the library with my lecturer doing preliminary reading on a particularly intriguing topic I was doing for my term paper. I kept hitting paywalls and was duly frustrated, I read about Open Access during one of these episodes and I have been swallowing every bit of information on this ever since and hoping to continue to learn more. I believe there is a lot of research and literature that is sitting gathering dust in shelves whilst it could be used to save thousands of lives around the world. This is why I’m a strong advocate for all things Open particularly Open Education. 

[Paweł Szczęsny]

Hi,

Who am I?

I'm Pawel Szczesny, President of Open Science Foundation, an organisation based in Poland that was just founded to built an infrastructure for large scale citizen science projects. Also, I'm a bioinformatics researcher working at University of Warsaw and Polish Academy of Sciences. I can be found on Twitter at @freesci, my personal website is www.pawelszczesny.org.

What do I do?

As I'm interested mostly in systemic benefits of openness, my focus is on platforms, policies and processes. For example, my advocacy work led to first in Poland institutional OA mandate. Now, at Open Science Foundation, I'm building an infrastructure for open citizen science projects that will be funded from corporate social responsibility programs. Therefore the community I'm building here isn't only limited to scientists but involves non-govermental organizations, bussiness societies and marketing agencies.

Where did my interest in open access come from?

Since beginning of my PhD studies I was interested in doing science faster and better. Openness was a natural solution to the issues I was facing. OA was always just an element of a large puzzle of creating new and efficient knowledge flows.

See you in Brussels soon!

Best wishes

PS

[Marcin Wojnarski]

Hi Paweł, Great to see you on OpenCon list! :)
-M

--
OpenCon is empowering the next generation to advance Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. This group is for participants of the conference and community, either in person, at satellite events or through the webcasts, videos (etc) to interact, share updates, ideas and discuss relevant topics. So please, join in the discussion!
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[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

My turn!

*Who am I*

Grad student in computer science at ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in
Paris. I am working in the field of natural language processing (where
all publications are in open access, without any fee!)

*What do I do*

With a few friends of mine, we are working on a platform to help
researchers make sure that all their articles are available in open
repositories. When they are not, we want to enable them to upload them
very easily to a well-established repository (such as Zenodo).
We plan to open the platform during the Open Access Week and are working
hard to prepare the launch. For now, you can check our demo here:
http://dissem.in
Please do join the project! :-) We need all sorts of skills, and if you
are on this mailing list you definitely have precious ones.

*Where did my interest in Open come from*

I am trying to become a researcher but am disgusted by many aspects of
the dominant publishing system. And I think any taxpayer should be
shocked too. So we need to demand and foster change.
Having been involved in (and making intensive use of) free software, I
am appealed by open access publishing (without absurd APCs).

I hope to meet you all in Brussels!
Antonin

On 13/04/2015 22:20, Mass Tapfuma wrote:
> Hi Colleagues
>
> *Who am I
> *I am Mass, a lecturer in Publishing studies at the National University
> of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe. I am a librarian by profession and
> PhD student in Information Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal,
> South Africa. Much of my time is spent talking open access in
> disseminating knowledge in academic libraries.
>
> *What do I do
>
> *I am an HIV/AIDS activist in my workplace and spend time in awareness
> discussions with students and staff, on the subject.
>
> *Where did my interest in Open come from*
> Having been a librarian in an academic institution where issues of open
> access are at the forefront, I developed interest and started engaging
> in creating awareness through information literacy training sessions. In
> publishing, open access is one of the scholarly communcation publishing
> models.
>
> Let's get to know each other more as we engage in discussions. See you
> at the OpenCon.

>
> On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 11:00:55 PM UTC+2, David wrote:
>
> Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick)
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I

> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I>,

>
> I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce
> ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.
>

> *Who am I?
> *

> I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but
> currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my
> time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I
> talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web,
> evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be
> found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter

> <http://www.twitter.com/davidecarroll> is where I spend a lot of time.
>
> *What do I do?*

>
> I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button

> <http://www.openaccessbutton.org>. The Open Access Button is a

> browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to
> research articles and report when they are denied access to research
> (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee

> of the Open Policy Network <http://openpolicynetwork.org>. I also do

> some other activism-y stuff from time to time.
>

> *Where did my interest in Open come from?*

>
> All of this interest in Openness began about 18 months ago and since
> then, my interest in open access, open issues and things that should
> be open has grown exponentially. These areas include copyright, free
> and remix culture, the free and open internet and digital civil
> liberties.
>
> Looking forward to getting to know you all,
>
> David
>

> --
> OpenCon is the Student and Early Career Researcher Conference on Open
> Access, Open Data and Open Access.
>
> This group is for participants of the conference, either in person, at
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> updates, ideas and discuss relevant hot topics. So please, join in the

> discussion!
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[Marcos De Oliveira]

Hi people!

*Who am I* 

Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Federal University of Ceará - Quixadá Campus in Quixadá City - Brazil.

I hold a Phd in Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems done at Otago University in New Zealand.

*What do I do* 

One of my projects involves the application of AI in Open Education thought adding Software Agents to the Moodle Platform.

In Brazil the Government has created the Open University of Brazil (UAB) to reach people that can not go fiscally and attend classes in a traditional university, and I am involved with the UAB base managed by the Ceara State University (UECE). They have many distant learning courses and my team is trying to make the moodle platform more robust to enhance the experience os the parts involved in the distant learning process, teachers, students, tutors and managers.

It is a very exciting project that can help many people in a Open Education Approach.

*Where did my interest in Open come from* 

My main interest is on Open Education so that Education can reach as many people as possible. Here in Brazil the people need that kind of approach so that the youth do not get involved in crimes and actually have a chance to live a good life using the right weapon which is the Education!

The doodle platform is well used over the world and here in Brazil 95% of the UAB bases use Moodle in the distance learning courses.

I am very excited with the chance to participate in such an event! Fingers crossed! 
Marcos 

[MiMi Spjut]

Hi y'all! 

Who am I- 

My name is Madeleine and I am a student at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. I am a senior American Politics major and a Spanish minor, and I plan on graduating in May. As Student Senate President, it goes without saying that I love my school and I am always on the look out for opportunities to improve campus life for students, staff and faculty. I'm looking forward to learning much more at Open Con and implementing that knowledge at my school and area.  

*Where did my interest in Open come from* 

I learned about this through a visiting librarian at my college. I didn't know much about the topic initially, but it fascinated me so I studied up on it. I am so excited for OpenCon and the opportunity to learn more. 

Thanks! 

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 4:00:55 PM UTC-5, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

[Samuel Van Ransbeeck]

Hello

I am Samuel van Ransbeeck. I am belgian, 30 years old. I am a PhD graduate in Computer Music/Interactive Arts at the Catholic University in Porto, Portugal.before that i did a Bachelor and Master in Composition. I have always been interested in using extra-musical elements to control the compositional process and used for example cellular automata to create music. 

My work

I have always been interested in the stock markets, how they moved and how the dynamics had a profound influence on the world. I thought on how to include the stock markets in my musical practice and decided to sonny the market data: I downloaded stock market data from Yahoo in real-time and translated indices in real-time to music. So you could listen to the Dow jones and hear some interesting musical sequences. You can download the Stockwatch app on my personal webpage www.samuelvanransbeeck.be

Stockwatch is a bit limited and I wanted to develop it further so for my PhD, I developed DataScapR, a toolbox for composers to create music. You can use real-time and historical data and control DAW/synthesizers via MIDI or as a VST-instrument. Furthermore, you can create traditional musical scores so you can write for a string quartet. You can download the toolbox at datascapr.wordpress.com

Future work

In September I will start working at the Open University in Milton Keynes. I will adapt my DataScapR toolbox and let the general public listen to datasets related to the city of Milton Keynes. By manipulating the musical parameters (pitch, duration, et cetera) the people can create their personal comment on the data they hear in conjunction with the pictures they see. 

Why is this relevant for OpenCon?

I believe that sonification is an interesting way to engage people in experiencing and studying data. While visualization is a very big branch in data science, sonification has not yet reached the very large public. With my contribution, hope to make people more interested in data. DataScapR is a very specific toolbox, yet it can be adapted, extended and transformed to be used in a variety of settings.

What do I want to achieve at OpenCon?

I want to meet different people, exchange experiences and see how sonification can be used in open data. I hope to be able to connect people and set up interesting projects. From the receiving end, I would like to learn more about data analysis and how it can be used in practical settings. 

I hope that this is a good introduction,any questions, just ask!

See you in November

Samuel

[Chris Frew]

Hi All,

Who am I?

I've been in the life science services field for more than a decade and am the founder of the BioBuzz Workforce Foundation - a 501c3 focused on workforce development and networking within the biotech industry.  I've spent the past 5 years building a vibrant offline community of biotech professionals in the Washington, DC region and I've not joined a new company that is fostering vibrant knowledge sharing communities.  I'm on LinkedIn and often on Twitter so feel free to connect with me there.

What do I do?

I'm with Breezio, a new startup located just outside of Washington, DC that has built a platform for research teams or communities of practice to share and grow knowledge faster than ever before. 

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

Our mission is to transform the culture of how communities exchange and build common knowledge to advance the pace of innovation and discovery.  

I'm looking for some feedback and evaluation from the open science community on our new collaboration platform.  We also want to align with all of the important Open publishing platforms which we hope to integrate into our product and would like to know which ones are most important at this point. 

If you are interested in seeing the product and providing me feedback, this product video gives a very high level overview of the features.  Or, we have 3 open demos scheduled this month that you can also join. 

Open Demo Times:

1. Wed Sep 09, 2015 1:00 PM EDT
2. Tue Sep 15, 2015 1:00 PM EDT
3. Wed Sep 23, 2015 4:00 PM EDT

We are in the process of hosting an online "Team Science" collaboration community platform and would be open to discussing also hosting an "Open Science" platform as well if it would be beneficial to this community.

Thanks for setting up this great group and I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone better.

Best,

Chris Frew

chris [at] breezio.com

[Brooke Miller]

Hello everyone! 

Who am I and What do I do?

My name is Brooke Miller and I am a doctoral student at the university of Texas at Austin in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology. I study authenticity and the role that authenticity can play in education. In addition to this, I am a content creator at Khan Academy in the medical division where I create video content related to the social sciences. I am also an informal educator- teaching students and teachers about psychology and neuroscience in addition to topics like circuits and scratch programming. You can find some of my videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxc5v4U8wC4bTdOBRF6936w/videos?flow=list&sort=p&view=0 (obligatory 'Please Subscribe' statement) and you can follow my on twitter here: https://twitter.com/BrookejMiller

Looking forward to meeting all of you at OpenCon! 

[Juliya Ziskina]

Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for organizing this - so many amazing people here!

Who am I?

I am Juliya, I'm a law student in my last year at the University of Washington in Seattle, but currently working at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division in New York City. I'm interested in both corporate criminal law and copyright law. I'm fascinated by remix theory, and can talk about mashups (especially Girl Talk) for hours on end. When I'm not working or studying, I love to paint (with anything from acrylics to coffee), take pictures (you'll probably see me with my giant, obnoxious camera), and read and write (anything from historical fiction to David Sedaris). I drink way too much coffee.  

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the University of Washington Open Access Initiative. UW OA is a self-assembled group of students, librarians, and faculty advocating for an OA policy at the University of Washington. My partner in crime, Gennie Gebhart, will also be here at Open Con! 

I also advocate for the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), pending legislation that would make articles reporting on publicly funded research freely available online.  

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

My interest in all things Open came from two things: remixes & copyright, and an important conversation with a friend (Gennie!). I didn't understand how information and media could be locked down so that new and creative uses of it were forbidden. Plus, I really liked catchy hip-hop and indie mixes. Gennie introduced me to the idea of "Open Access," and it seemed like a no-brainer. I started to think local, and was shocked to find out that the University of Washington didn't already have a policy. What I thought would be a simple project turned into a multi-year adventure and a lifelong passion. 

[Rachel Obbard]

Hi OpenCon Community!

Thanks for starting this thread, David. It's fun (and a little intimidating) to read everyone's introductions. I look forward to meeting you all and hope this makes it easier (name tags with fun facts on them would too (hint hint).

Who am I?

Wow, where do I start? At the most obvious, I guess: I have green hair. This is the result of a Halloween in Antarctica - a story I'll save for you. I'm a youthful middle aged woman who spent ten years learning that she hated the corporate life before starting graduate school. I have two sons (one no longer with us), a dog, and a British husband who I met while living in Cambridge. I'm a reader, a bicyclist (amateur), a gardener, and a snowboarder. I live in the (nearly socialist) state of Vermont, home of Bernie Sanders, in a close knit intentional community, where our shared intention is living sustainably. So open everything is kind of in my DNA...

What do I do?

I'm a research professor (which if you aren't from U.S. academia means I mostly do funded research, and am not "tenure track"). My funded research is in ice and snow (sea ice mainly, but also glaciology), and some parts of it take place in Antarctica and in the Arctic. I think interdisciplinarily, and tend to write what are seen as high risk, high reward proposals. I consider myself a world citizen first and like to work on international projects, one reason I'm looking forward to OpenCon.

I'm also a snowboarder and I teach a class on sports engineering for non-engineers (which fulfills a distributive requirement for humanities students). This was my son Theo's idea, and a brilliant one. I've taught it for five years, and learn new things every year. Dartmouth College has lots of athletes, and students enjoy learning about something that they are interested in. I like that I can make engineering more accessible for people who see themselves as nontechnical (and even math-phobic), and that I help improve their technical literacy - something I think is important. I'm now considering developing a MOOC based on my course. One of the challenges (or maybe opportunities) in teaching it is that there is no one best text. So I pull material from all over. Open content makes this possible.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

Well, as I say, sharing and working toward the collective good is kind of what I'm all about. I started making a point of publishing in open  access journals a couple of years ago, and my interest has grown from there. I've been doing some presentations at Dartmouth about data management planning for proposals, and it's changing how I plan to do data management for my own grants.

Cheers! - Rachel

[Zack Batist]

Hi everyone! I've been reading this discussion list for a while not and I guess it's time for me to pipe in.

Who am I?

I'm Zack, an archaeology PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I also have strong interests in information science, data management and other library and museum related work. When I'm not hitting the books I enjoy playing board games, watching sci-fi movies and playing with my cat. 

What do I do?

My dissertation is focused on the ways in which archaeologists organize and derive meaning from their data and through aggregation of data from multiple other sources. Naturally, this has led to my fervent interest in Linked Open Data and the development of online semantic networks. My prior graduate research involved the aggregation of data for analysis using network analysis and GIS, which really got me thinking about the comparability of datasets and the theoretical baggage that underpins them. I'm also webmaster for Nexus: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology, put out by graduate students in my department. My role has been to oversee and manage the transition to the open source OJS journal publishing platform, and I am very proud of the fact that every issue from its 40 year history is now openly accessible online and that we attract readers and submissions from all over the world. 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I tend to keep my eyes open for cool alternative ways of representing heritage (i.e. other than through text) and various projects of the burgeoning digital humanities, and these often depend upon the accessibility and availability of relevant scholarly information. I've come to realize that open access allows for the reclamation of heritage by laypeople, and the potential development of novel and innovative applications by people who might not typically work with this information. Also, as mentioned above, I had to deal with the frustrations of compiling datasets from dozens of sources, which has slightly impacted my sanity. 

Hope to see you all at OpenCon soon!

Zack

On 10 November 2014 at 15:11, sarah.melton1 <sarah....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, all!

Really looking forward to seeing everyone in a few days. Here's a bit about me!

Who am I?
I'm Sarah, a PhD candidate in public history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I'm also a full-time staff member in our library's Center for Digital Scholarship. I tweet entirely too much at @svmelton.

What do I do?
My job involves coordinating the various open access publications that our Center produces. I've spent the last 5 years as an editorial staff member of the open access journal Southern Spaces (http://www.southernspaces.org), a humanities journal about the US South. I'm working on launching several new humanities journals right now, which I'll be happy to talk endlessly about. I'm a huge advocate for humanities open access publishing!

In addition to my work & studies, I work on several projects that support open* work. I'm the community + advocacy coordinator for the Open Access Button (hi, David!), a board member + the treasurer for the Library Publishing Coalition, and a community representative for the Digital Library of America.

Also, I love puppies (and kittens). Last year for Halloween I dressed up as an open access dinosaur, stomping out restrictive author agreements. (Here's the proof.)

Where did my interest in Open come from?

I initially began working at Southern Spaces because I was interested in publishing and editing. As I spent more time there, though, I realized the tremendous ethical obligation we have to make our scholarship public. Much of my research is in South Africa, as well, and I became particularly interested in open* movements across the Global South.

See y'all soon!
Sarah

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[Neo Christopher Chung]

Who am I?

I'm Neo Christopher Chung, a visiting professor in the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences (Poland). I obtained a Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology, focusing on statistical learning and large-scale genomic data, and completed a post-doc in Zambia, analyzing longitudinal data from a large number of HIV clinics.

What do I do?

I work in a wide range of biostatistical problems, from developing computational methods in genomics to analyzing longitudinal data from HIV clinics. I also have developed and taught statistics, data analysis, and programming (R) courses.

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

When I started my Ph.D. in 2009, I made a switch from Matlab to R. Then, soon enough, my appreciation for open source packages in R grew and I started writing a R package. As a biostatician/bioinformatician, my work would be impossible without open source software and open research data.

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 11:00:55 PM UTC+2, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

[Neo Christopher Chung]

 

Who am I?

I'm Neo Christopher Chung, a visiting professor in the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences (Poland). I obtained a Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology, focusing on statistical learning and large-scale genomic data, and completed a post-doc in Zambia, analyzing longitudinal data from a large number of HIV clinics.

 

What do I do?

I work in a wide range of biostatistical problems, from developing computational methods in genomics to analyzing longitudinal data from HIV clinics. I also have developed and taught statistics, data analysis, and programming (R) courses.

 

Where did my interest in Open come from?

When I started my Ph.D. in 2009, I made a switch from Matlab to R. Then, soon enough, my appreciation for open source packages in R grew and I started writing an R package. As a biostatician/bioinformatician, my work would be impossible without open source software and open research data.

[Mohamed Hegazy]

Who am I?

I am Mohamed Hegazy, hold a Bachelor in Economics and in Rhetoric, and live in Cairo. I care deeply about understanding the world around us, and how knowledge and data come together to form understanding.

What do I do?

At present I am creating a digital map of all of Cairo's public transportation systems and publish it under an open standard and license, in addition to being a part-time researcher with the SITC, an Egyptian NGO that promotes the right to knowledge and freedom of information.

Where did my interest in Open come from? 

Traffic congestion in Cairo is horrendous, so 3 years ago I created a prediction algorithm for Cairo traffic using a sample of crowdsourced data. The developers of the application in question balked at opening up access to their data, which frustrated me immensely. In Egypt, data and knowledge are treated as treasures to be locked away. That must change!

On Sunday, September 21, 2014 at 12:00:55 AM UTC+3, David wrote:

Hi everybody (Hi Doctor Nick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmECL2ED2I,

I thought I would start up a thread so that we can all introduce ourselves and get to know each other a little better before OpenCon.

Who am I?

I am David, I am a medical student in Queen's University Belfast but currently studying in the University of Copenhagen. I spend all my time thinking about and talking about (this is a warning because I talk a lot) all things open, things that should be open, the web, evidence-based medicine, Doctor Who, Girl Talk and cats. I can be found on the internet in various places but this part of Twitter is where I spend a lot of time.

What do I do?

I am co-founder and co-lead of the Open Access Button. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet that lets users search for alternative access to research articles and report when they are denied access to research (we have a new one coming soon). I am also on the steering committee of the Open Policy Network. I also do some other activism-y stuff from time to time.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

[kasberger.stefan]

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Stefan Kasberger and I am from Austria. I study right now environmental systems science in the University of Graz and am mostly interested in network analyses and computational social science in general.

What do I do?

I am coordinating the Open Science working group of Open Knowledge Austria and am a training manager for ContentMine. http://contentmine.org/
I also founded together with Christopher Kittel openscienceASAP.org, a project where we share our experiences and offer open science trainings to research departments. http://openscienceasap.org/
And I write right now my bachelor thesis about territorial behaviour of editors on Wikipedia.

Where did my interest in Open come from?

The first and basic impact rose out of the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, when I got my head into the problem and were looking for some solutions. During this I got into touch with the concept of commons, and as an educated programmer to digital commons as an important thing to counter-balance the nearly infinity surge for commodification and its concentration/exclusion. Later on when I started to study, I applied this concepts of commons and openness to research.

Am looking forward to meet some of you next month in Brussels!

Cheers, Stefan

[Atila Iamarino]

Hi Open community,

I hope it's not too late to present myself before OpenCon

Who am I and everything else, as I'm terrible in separating Results and Discussion

I'm a postdoc in Microbiology at Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'm interested in science outreach and education.

As my grad student scholarship prevented me from teaching (we have to have exclusive dedication), I started a biology blog (circa 2007). Soon, a friend suggested to create a blog network such as ScienceBlogs that inspired us to begin. We ended up co-founding ScienceBlogs Brazil, the Portuguese branch of ScienceBlogs.com. 

As I wrote about virology and epidemics such as the swine flu of 2009, I started to realize the importance of science outreach and how academics can contribute to the public scientific understanding and also open access communication. Because of this motivation, in 2013 I started to write and narrate a scientific themed YouTube channel called Nerdologia, which grew to have >1M subscribers (Brazilians love social media). 

Recently I began to join both passions, science outreach and education, by using open tools as wiki and video production to motivate undergrad students to communicate to the public. The results have been great, as not only they learn and produce much more, but they also get a grasp of the importance of open content.

We have a great public funded education system in Brazil, in the sense that people have (or should have) access to free higher education. I'm anxious for OpenCon and open initiatives to give back to society the knowledge we're gaining for free at academia.

Looking forward to meeting you all,

Atila