Save the date: participative Bay Area OA week event for Generation Open

Join us as we join forces with ScienceOpen, ZappyLab and My Science Work (and others to be announced) to celebrate OA with a participative event at Open Access Week in the Bay Area.

A core group initiated by Liz Allen (ScienceOpen), including Lenny Teytelman (ZappyLab), Laurence Bianchini (My Science Work), Peter Binfield and Georgina Gurnhill (PeerJ), brainstormed what our ideal OA week event would look like.

We agreed that we wanted to avoid a traditional format and so we settled on:

– Moderated un-conference where the audience talks and asks questions

– Simple event theme, we picked “#OpenAccess – it’s up to all of us

– “Lightning talks” that anyone can give, 5 image slides in 5 minutes

– Time to chat and mingle over a drink and something to eat

– Ideally, a cool venue with great views (and Disabled Access)

As a group we feel that the program below achieves our vision. We ran it past our academic partners UCSF Library ( Anneliese Taylor ), UAW post-doc union ( Felicia Goldsmith ) and they liked it too. Now all we need is for you all to save the date and make this an event to remember.

Date: Thursday, October 23rd, 2014

Venue: SkyDeck, Berkeley (one of the first research university startup accelerators)

Time: 6.00 pm – 8.30 pm

Theme: #OpenAccess – it’s up to all of us

Format (suitable for global cloning!):

8 mins – relax with a drink, a snack and “What is OA?” video by Jorge Cham (PhD Comics), Nick Shockey (Right to Research) and Jonathan Eisen (UCD)

10 minutes – un-conference OA topic selection by audience

20 minutes – topic discussion with moderation (your host for the evening, Lenny!)

10 minutes – grab another drink (alcoholic or non), stave off hunger with nibbles

40 minutes – lightning talks, “#OpenAccess – it’s up to all of us”

Last 30 minutes or so – greeting old friends and making some new ones

In the coming weeks, we’ll be letting you know where to send your lightning talks and the deadline for doing so. We will be recording them for social media too – so anyone not able to attend in person can listen in. Register now at our Eventbrite page.

Finally, in the spirit of “the more the merrier” other OA Publishers and Academic Partners who want to participate are welcome to email Liz.