OpenCon 2015

In this session, the presenters will be:

- Stuart Lawson / Uncovering journal costs

We all know that the cost of subscription journals to the research community is high - but exactly how high? There is usually no easy way to find out how much an institution or entire nation is spending.

That's why I (and others) used Freedom of Information requests to find out how much the UK academic sector spends (http://f1000research.com/articles/3-274/v3). Let's do the same for every country! If we create a brief how-to guide, we could uncover the costs of journal subscriptions to legacy publishers worldwide. 

- Cailean Cooney / Engage OER

The purpose of this project idea is to present a familiar entry point for faculty to engage with OER through a critical and practical exercise. The objective is to recruit faculty to evaluate the quality and viability of open educational resources (OER) as potential alternatives to currently assigned textbooks. Resulting OER reviews will be posted for all to read.The goal of this project is to increase faculty awareness and familiarity with OER, particularly regarding subject coverage and content quality of existing open educational resources. 

See here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/oer/

- Aline / DropDeadPaper

For a variety of reasons, only a fraction of all academic studies end up as a formal publication in scientific journals. With DropDeadPaper, we want to raise awareness about #openscience and the importance of making results available, even if they are not suited for publication, or have been rejected. We believe this initiative will help increase transparency in science. However, we know that “failed” research is a sensitive question among researchers. OpenCon offers a great opportunity to discuss the challenges involved in this topic. 

See here: www.dropdeadpaper.com

- Jan Gondol / OpenCon Rating App

Do you love coding and enjoy Python programming language? Let's meet and talk! An application has been developed (using the Django framework) to support the OpenCon 2015 registration process (there were thousands of applications which needed to be reviewed) and it would be great to extend this app to make running the future OpenCons easier.

See here: https://opencon2015brussels.sched.org/event/e191f9a35fe044e42fa5cd2cfa7f1765

- Daniel Himmelstein / Integrating "Public" Data

We recently created a network for drug repurposing with 3 million edges. Creating the network brought together 27 collaborators who communicated via 266 CC-BY posts. The network integrates data from 28 public resources. However, each source imposes it’s own (often incompatible) restrictions, implicitly by copyright or explicitly by licensing. We’ve contacted 10 resources, with only a single affirmative response. We’re currently exposing the harms of transferring data copyright to publishers as well as Universities that seek to profit from publicly-funded databases while preventing reuse.
 
See here: https://doi.org/10.15363/thinklab.d107