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Opportunity Knocks

A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously).

I didn’t need to give this talk. Neither the OKF nor my academic progression required me to give this talk. I just felt it might be helpful to let my friends and peers know who the OKF are, what they’re trying to achieve, and what my Panton Fellowship is about.

That optional talk has now paid HUGE dividends: enabling me to talk live on BBC Radio 3 last night about Open Access and the beneficial impact this will have on research with our Minister for Science & Universities, David Willetts MP & Dame Janet Finch (writer of ‘the Finch report’). I got some good time at the end after the show to speak with David about encouraging efficiently run ultra low-cost journals like the Journal of Machine Learning Research. I hope this will have had some influence, if not, I certainly tried!

So how did this come about?

Nick Crumpton, PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and one of the student organisers for Progressive Palaeontology 2012 (ProgPal) is also a BBC Online British Science Association Media Fellow and thus has good contacts at the BBC. They were apparently looking for a young scientist to come on the show and give an informed opinion from ‘the coalface’ of research so Nick kindly remembered my impassioned talk from ProgPal on OKF & openness in academia and recommended me.

I got in touch with the programme producer, and was invited to join the live radio debate later that night.

Image © British Broadcasting Company. Click through to listen to the radio programme. The Open Access discussion segment occurs from about 6min40s in

…and that’s how it happened.

With Open Access Week coming up very soon, 22-28 October, I guess the point of this post is:

No matter how small your contribution towards the advocacy of Open Access might seem; every little helps. Keep at it. Keep speaking out about OA until all publicly funded research everywhere (glares at the US) is Open Access.

Postscript: That same day Sir Mark Walport was also interviewed on BBC Radio, partly about Open Access – I highly recommend & agree with his opinions; the link is here. Listen from 11.38 to 15.10 for the OA bits h/t Steve Hitchcock @stevehit


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2 responses to “Opportunity Knocks”

  1. Carl Boettiger Avatar

    Wow. Well done, sir!

  2. […] The most exciting outreach I did for the fellowship were the ‘general public’ opportunities that I seized to get the message out to people beyond the ‘ivory towers’ of academia. One such event was the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, September 2012 (pictured above). Another was my participation in a radio show broadcast on Voice of Russia UK radio with Timothy Gowers, Bjorn Brembs, and Rita Gardner explaining the benefits and motivation behind the recent policy shift to open access in the UK. This radio show gave me the confidence & experience I needed for the even bigger opportunity that was to come next – at very short notice I was invited to speak on a live radio debate show on open access for BBC Radio 3 with other panellists including Dame Janet Finch & David Willetts MP! An interesting sidenote is that this opportunity may not have arisen if I hadn’t given my talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation at a relatively small conference; Progressive Palaeontology in Cambridge earlier that year – it pays to network when given the opportunity! […]