Open Access Symposium, 2017

Today we celebrated all things open with our 3rd annual Open Access Symposium at Stony Brook. This year I moderated the poster session:

After opening remarks by Darren and Constantia, Nicole Allen from SPARC was our first speaker. She spoke about open educational resources. Her presentation is here:

Our first panel was Open Sciences & Biomedicine and the Acceleration of Research moderated by Jessica Koos and featuring panelists Dr. Chrisa Arcan, Dr. Bruce Demple, and Dr. Thomas Woodson. It was so interesting to hear about the potential positive impact of timely open data and open health science information for the public and for other academics.

Next we had the Open Access Policy & OERs panel moderated by Shafeek Fazal and featuring panelists Mark McBride, Library Senior Strategist at SUNY’s Office of Library & Information Services; Jennifer Kaari, Medical Librarian at Mount Sinai Health System; and Darren Chase, Head of Scholarly Communication at Stony Brook University Libraries. All of the panelists talked about inspiring OER and open projects that they are currently working on, including great stats from Stony Brook.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Elliot Harmon from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He made the excellent point that open access is essential in the context of the missions of universities to serve the public and to increase knowledge. His slides are up here.

The last session of the day was the digital humanities panel moderated by Victoria Pilato and featuring panelists Peg Christoff from Stony Brook’s Department of Asian & Asian American Studies, Andrew Newman from Stony Brook’s Department of English, and Anne Donlon, Community Manager of the Humanities Commons at the Modern Language Association. This panel focused on the importance of public digital humanities projects and touched on several from Stony Brook and elsewhere. I particularly loved looking at Digital Harlem and the history of the area around my old neighborhood.

After the Symposium, we all decamped to a wonderful Club Red for networking.