For two or three years now, the volume of OA-related news has outstripped the time I could give to finding and blogging it, not to mention the time I needed for digesting it. I responded by narrowing my scope and working too much. Neither solution would scale with the continuing growth of OA.
Friends and colleagues suggested that I hire a blogging assistant. I always liked the idea, but I didn't have funds to pay anyone and I worried that I'd spend more time on training and supervising than I'd save. These two problems were solved back to back when SPARC agreed to pay for an assistant's time and Gavin agreed to join me. I'm very grateful to them both.
Gavin is the founder of the Open Students, the only blog about OA directed to students. He's also the force behind The Right to Research, the SPARC web site on the student campaign for OA, and the author of some first-rate blog posts (one, two, three), presentations (one, two, three), and articles on OA. When he was still a student, he co-founded the Florida chapter of Free Culture, and organized a successful campaign to get the University of Florida Student Senate to adopt a strong resolution in support of OA. It's no surprise that when SPARC honored the student campaign for OA with its Innovator Award in December 2007, it singled out five students as notable agents of change and named Gavin "The Professional". He was interviewed last week in Library Journal Academic Newswire.
Welcome, Gavin!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/03/2008 10:01:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
