Q&A series with ECS OpenCon 2017 speakers

Ashley Farley, open access program associate at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

ECS will be hosting its first ever OpenCon event on October 1 in National Harbor, MD. OpenCon will be ECS’s first, large community event aimed at creating a culture of change in how research is designed, shared, discussed, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster.

During ECS’s OpenCon, Ashley Farley, open access program associate at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will deliver the keynote talk, “The Importance of Open Science in a Changing Scholarly Communictions Paradigm.”

The following conversation is part of a series with speakers from the upcoming ECS OpenCon. Read the rest of the series.

ECS: Why are you interested in OpenCon?

Ashley Farley: I have greatly admired OpenCon, since I first learned about open access of scholarly communications. A critical part of any movement is a strong community and OpenCon has done an excellent job at forming and supporting a community that strives to achieve goals in the open science environment. OpenCon is particularly important to early career researchers or open access advocates starting their career and I have definitely benefited from this network. I appreciate the fact that I can give back to the OpenCon community, while still learning, engaging and partnering with others.

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Co-editor of Interface, Vijay Ramani, talks about open access publishing in this letter from the editor.

The following is an article from the latest issue of Interface by co-editor Vijay Ramani.

Late last year, I accepted the invitation to become co-editor of Interface safe in the knowledge that I would not actually be called upon to do anything for the foreseeable future.* Thanks to the outstanding ECS staff and conscientious guest editors and authors, this happy state of affairs has persisted until now. But just as “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea,” so it is that the inevitable passage of time has brought upon a situation wherein actual effort is required on my part, viz. this editorial. The increasingly plaintive entreaties from our admirably patient Director of Publications seeking the contents of this column can no longer, in good conscience, be ignored or fobbed off with feeble excuses.

Read the rest.