Below is the beginning of a blog post composed from the transcribed audio of interviews at OpenCon 2017
Who?
The researchers who agreed to share their thoughts on open media and OpenCon are: Gary McDowell(@BiophysicalFrog), the Executive Director of Future of Research, a non-profit that aims to champion, engage and empower early career researchers with evidence-based resources about the scientific enterprise; Claire Coulter, an Instructional Technologist from the University of Guelph; Ricardo Hartley (@ametodico), a Researcher in the Universidad Central de Chile, where research activity is just beginning; Dr. Rachael Ainsworth, a Research Associate in Radio Astronomy at the
University of Manchester in the UK, an Open Science Champion, and in the current cohort of
Mozilla Open Leaders; Jack Reid, a graduate student at MIT in the aeronautics and astronautics department and the technology and policy program; Laurent Gatto (
@lgatt0), who is at the University of Cambridge and an open advocate; Sam Hindle, a professional researcher at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF); and, Luis F. Medina Cardona, associate professor at the school of arts, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (@luscus9).
Thoughts on open media
TBD
Thoughts on open con
TBD
Gary McDowell is the Executive Director of Future of Research, a non-profit that aims to champion, engage and empower early career researchers with evidence-based resources about the scientific enterprise. Coming to OpenCon overlaps directly with Gary's work and interests. "I really enjoy OpenCon because there's sort of two facets in which I'm interested about open science. The first is practicing open science myself, and that has been the case in both when I was a bench researcher but also in what I'm doing now. Part of the whole premise is to make academia more transparent and putting data out there, making it openly available, open for critique." Future of Research has
data open for analysis right now on postdoc salaries in the US. "We have already had some cool people sharing code and excellent plots of distributions or salaries, which is really awesome."
But there is also a higher level aspect, under Future of Research's mission "of trying to help early career researchers practice science...we are thinking how to enable people to practice open science and act as a group that can try and push for that as part of the policies that we are trying to implement. And so trying to figure out how a lot of the same issues come up again in all these different themes of open science: struggling for independence, trying to find what kind of job you want, regardless whether it's academia or not, these things all have the same kind of issues coming up for early career researchers."