Four of our Max Planck Open Access Ambassadors (OAA) had the opportunity to attend OpenCon, the world’s largest conference on Open Access, Open Data & Open Education, held November 12-14, 2016, in Washington, D.C. One of them is Amie Fairs, OAA from the MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. She provided us with a short personal account of her impressions:

“In November 2016 I was lucky enough to go to OpenCon2016, an international conference organised to advocate for Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. Being a Max Planck Ambassador for my institute, I was really excited to get out there and meet people from the international open community, and I wasn’t disappointed! The conference was amazing: completely inspiring, and full of people working on projects big and small to advance openness with science and education. One thing that I felt awed by was the diversity of these projects. There are people working on promoting open access on country-wide levels, people working on how openness is viewed in hiring and tenure procedures, and people working on creating educational materials completely open and accessible.

The conference itself is organised a bit differently to usual conferences, with a mixture of presentations and hands-on discussion sessions. It really allows for participants to get to know each other and to build up networks to advocate for open once the conference is over. I have taken advantage of this and have started a project with another PhD candidate, Daniela Saderi at Oregon Health and Science University, to educate researchers on how to be open. I was also able to network with the other Max Planck OAAs, and it was great for us to meet each other. I’d really encourage anyone who has any interest in open topics to think about applying to the next OpenCon.

When I came back from the conference, I gave a presentation to my institute to talk about what is happening in the open world right now. You can find the pdf of the presentation here, and if you would like a copy of the powerpoint then please send an email to amie [dot] fairs [at] mpi [dot] nl.”

A detailed report of the conference from all four Ambassadors can be found here.

SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition have just announced OpenCon 2016! It will be held in Washington, DC on November 12-14, and will be hosted at the American University College of Law. The OpenCon is the largest worldwide conference on Open Access, Open Science and Open Education.

More information on the upcoming conference at http://www.opencon2016.org/2016_announcement

On February 16, 2016, our local Open Access Ambassadors at the MPI for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg organized a meeting on “Open Access Publishing and Open Science” in cooperation with the institute library.

After a short introduction and a general overview on Open Access by Head Librarian Kristina Reinhold, it was time for the first talk by PLoS Paleo Community editor and ScienceOpen Communications Director Jon Tennant. In his talk on “Open Access as a junior researcher” he presented an overview on the current state of scientific publishing and made a strong case for why open access publishing is particularly important for young researchers. After a short break for coffee and discussion, Kai Geschuhn gave an overview of the Open Access activities within the Max Planck Society and the role of the Max Planck Digital Library. Key aspect of the talk was the large-scale transformation to an Open Access publishing model promoted by MPDL.
The event was concluded by a short overview of the Open Access and self-archiving services at the MPI library and a presentation about “Paywalls, preprints, science platforms” by the local OA ambassadors Jan Heiland and Robert Flassig.

With its compelling and informative presentations and lively discussion, the event was successful in furthering Open Access in the Max Planck Society and beyond.