Culture of Sharing Forum

I came to work on a Saturday for the Culture of Sharing Forum. The keynote speaker was Nelson Pavlosky from Students for Free Culture. The presentation was really good at getting participants thinking about the issues and possibilities. We had breakouts on topics such as YouTube and Mashups and Open Source Publishing. We had an interesting mix of breakout facilitators and attendees from across campus, including Ken Frazier from the Library, Ron Kraemer the CIO, Kristin Eschenfelder from SLIS, a number of graduate students from SLIS and Journalism, and a few hardy undergrads.

In the closing session, Gavin Baker, a former intern at SPARC, talked about the need for a new model to finance the editorial process that will allow us to share the results of research independent from commercial publishers. Open access — no price barriers to access and no permissions barriers to use — provides a set of solutions to these problems. Open access journals can be funded through author fees, grants, or subsidies from parts of the university. The archives route allows the author post a copy of their article online, for example in Minds@UW. This can also facilitate sharing of data sets and theses/dissertations.  Research shows that open access-published research is more used, and there are increasing numbers of open access journals.

Some of us had lunch at Gino’s Restaurant with Gavin Baker, which was interesting to me not just for the nice conversation, but because I used to work there in the early nineties. Gino remembered me (not so many girl cooks, although he has one again now) but still wasn’t so friendly. Just like old times.