Openness as a Career Asset: Erin McKiernan - SPARC

lterrat's bookmarks 2016-12-24

Summary:

"Challenge

Competition is intense for academic jobs. And it can be an additional struggle for young researchers to get exposure for their work, especially if they are in a specialized field with a limited audience.

Solution

Erin McKiernan, 35, who works primarily in experimental and theoretical neuroscience and has made a personal commitment to broaden access to the outputs of her research – including publishing articles only in open access journals. She reached that decision in 2012 after hitting pay walls doing research while working at a small institution in Puerto Rico. McKiernan experienced first-hand the 'heart-wrenching' frustration that she and her students experienced in effectively doing their work with limited access to scholarly journals. So McKiernan decided to take action. She became active on Twitter, blogging about the problem and engaging with the open access movement.

Impact

In the Fall of 2015, McKiernan became a professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She used a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation to develop a series of educational materials to promote the value of openness in conducting and communicating science (whyopenresearch.org). McKiernan says she has been encouraged by the increased awareness that she sees being paid to the issue of access, and is particularly pleased that Mexico recently passed its first national level public access law, requiring research results to be made freely accessible."

Link:

http://sparcopen.org/impact-story/erin-mckiernan/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.journals

Date tagged:

12/24/2016, 12:44

Date published:

12/24/2016, 07:44