User engagement: some updates

[Kyle Demes]

Hi folks,

With the summer and conference season now over, we're turning back to our regularly scheduled user engagement channels-- thanks for bearing with us!

OpenAlex Help Center

We recently started a new help desk system meant to centralize answers for common questions from/for users. If you hadn't noticed it yet, check it out at help.openalex.org and try searching something like "open access". We'll be working to create new entries for recent and forthcoming developments in OpenAlex, but also for common questions in our support ticket system. If you don't see what you're looking for, send us a note at sup...@openalex.org. 

Office Hours

We have scheduled and posted the next few weeks of Office Hours. As a reminder, these are weekly 1-hour sessions for any users or potential users to come with questions about OpenAlex data and how to use it or related topics to discuss. Register to attend an Office Hours session here. You can also search "office hours" in our help desk.

Webinars

We'll be announcing the next few monthly webinars soon. If you have any topics that you think would be of broad interest to our users to suggest or might be interested in participating in a webinar-- let me know by sending me an e-mail. We'll have the new webinars online in the coming weeks on our website. 

User Group Meeting

We were really inspired by the success of the first OpenAlex Virtual User Conference! We'll probably do this annually, but have been hearing lots of interest in more targeted mini-user meetings. And so we'd like to facilitate a virtual user group meeting on dashboards that use OpenAlex to help connect users around the world to share their work, learn from one another, and help inspire other users. If you're interested in that user group, let us know using this form by Oct 11th. 

OpenAlex Advisory Board

We're excited to launch the call for nominations for the OpenAlex Advisory Board (link to terms)! We're looking for 11 Board Members reflecting the diversity of OpenAlex users around the world. If you're interested, use this form to self-nominate by Oct 31st. If you think someone should consider, please send them the link and encourage them to self-nominate.

That's all for now,

Kyle