Month: May 2012

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Take our poster, please!

What are among the stickiest, most strangling tentacles in the world?  That’s right, the tentacles of profiteering journal publishers!  (Why am I saying such nasty things about them?  Well, because they charge huge fees for access to articles that researchers give them for free and other researchers peer review for free.  That’s right, they get articles, copyrights, and labor for free, and then they make a fortune charging the (often nonprofit) institutions that employ those researchers for access to those articles!)

For Brooklyn College’s Faculty Day Conference this week, a few colleagues and I made a poster illustrating just that predatory behavior and introducing open access as an alternative. But we didn’t make the poster for in-house use only!  No, we want to share the files with you.  Change them a little or a lot and use them for your educational campaigns about open access!

(The octopus image is adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/luca-beanone-barcellona/4776886666/ (CC-BY-NC))

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Today, not tomorrow: Sign the whitehouse.gov petition in support of open access!

Please consider signing the petition at whitehouse.gov in support of open access to taxpayer-funded research:  http://wh.gov/6TH

This isn’t just another petition about just another topic.  No, this offers the chance to change the conversation.  Why?  Because the White House makes a formal response to any “We the People” petition that reaches 25,000 signatures in 30 days.  (The petition closes on June 19, so there’s still some time, but, even so, don’t delay!)

There is the very slight nuisance of having to create an account on whitehouse.gov (basically, you give them your name and email address), but if you were ever going to put up with some nuisance in order to sign a petition, this just might be the petition to do it for!

Go! Sign! Share broadly! Soon!