Playing nice with others in research – Open Access Preview – Higher Higher Ed

Playing nice with others in research – Open Access Preview October 16, 2017 By martiles in GRAD 5104 No Comments I was planning on posting this information later on in the semester but given the direction of tonight’s discussion I was hoping a few of you could run into this information before the panel. It’ll help the discussion on Monday have more context around what is open access and why does it matter. Last year, I had the opportunity to attend OpenCon – a global conference where academics from all over the world got together to share and learn about each others’ efforts towards Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. Among the many things I learned at this conference, the thing that most stuck with me was that the mainstream ways of sharing research in R1 institutions have very real consequences for everyone else. A Nature paper sure is nice for tenure but it does not contribute to the research going on in institutions that don’t have access to Nature. A real consequence of this problem is the disconnect between the global south from the research in the global north. While changing the way we publish in academia is a very political process, there are ways to be open as graduate students and early career researchers. I shared this in the VT library’s open blog but I figured I could self-plagiarize and post this here too: — How can we, as Hokies, be as open as possible with our research? While fighting the academic tenure process and breaking the paradigms of open access journals is an endeavor of huge proportions, we can take small steps on being more open every day. We need to be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. It is for this reason I have made a list of steps on how we can be open today. The best part is that all these resources are open: