Why Open Research? | Erin C. McKiernan

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-12-01

Summary:

"In May of this year, I was awarded a flash grant by the Shuttleworth Foundation to make an ‘open’ project of my choosing a reality. On November 14th, at OpenCon 2015 in Brussels, I announced the launch of Why Open Research?, an educational resource for researchers to learn about the benefits of sharing their work. This is the story of how the project was born and what I hope it will accomplish. For the last 20 months, I’ve traveled to conferences and universities, speaking to scholarly communications professionals and researchers about open access, open data, and open science. Many of these events were excellent and have been crucial in shaping my thinking about open scholarship. But after awhile I became frustrated that I was often ‘preaching to the choir’. The scholarly communications people in the room needed no convincing that ‘open’ is the way to go, and the researchers in attendance were often there because they already had an interest in open practices. The very people I needed to convince – the most traditional researchers, those skeptical about ‘open’ – were rarely in the room. How could I reach new audiences? I needed to go where researchers go, to their scientific meetings. But even if I could get there, how was I going to transmit my message? Open scholarship isn’t usually on the agenda at most scientific meetings. I wouldn’t be able to show these audiences a slide deck. I needed new and creative ways to reach more researchers. After discussion with several people in the open community, I decided print materials were the way to go. If I could do something as simple as drop leaflets on tables and chairs at conferences, I could reach potentially hundreds of researchers. Even better, if I could get these leaflets into publisher booths at conferences, I might potentially reach thousands .. I’m fortunate to have a talented artist in the family. Over the last few months, when I couldn’t find the right image to emphasize a point in a talk, I asked my dad, John McKiernan, to draw something. He came up with a small series of cartoons that brilliantly portrayed some common myths about open access. These cartoons were hugely effective in talks – they got people’s attention, made them laugh, but also got key points across. After talking to my dad, we decided to make his drawings the heart and soul of the project and to extend his series ... You can download the complete Why Open Research? cartoon card sheets directly via the websiteor via figshare. Text on these cards is modifiable, allowing publishers, libraries, and others to customize before printing. More cards are currently in the works, as are plans to translate these materials into several different languages ... Print materials weren’t enough, though. After getting people’s attention with the cards, we would need a place they could go for more information. So I set out to create a website, again centered around the cartoons, linking the print materials with the online resources. And sowhyopenresearch.org was born. The information pages are written with minimal text and include additional visuals, like figures from published articles, showing the benefits of open practices ..."

Link:

https://emckiernan.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/why-open-research/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.advocacy oa.open_science oa.data oa.publishing oa.resources

Date tagged:

12/01/2015, 09:01

Date published:

12/01/2015, 04:01