EGU Blogs

Open Con

OpenCon 2015 Applications are Open!

June 4, 2015

See this post about Open Con 2014 for more information

Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium are now open! The application is available on the OpenCon website at opencon2015.org/attend and includes the opportunity to apply for a travel scholarship to cover the cost of travel and accommodations. Applications will close on June 22nd at 11:59pm PDT.

OpenCon seeks to bring together the most capable, motivated students and early career academic professionals from around the world to advance Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data—regardless of their ability to cover travel costs.  In 2014, more than 80% of attendees received support.  Due to this, attendance at OpenCon is by application only.

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“Open access wins all of the arguments all of the time.”

November 25, 2014

One is rather inspired. OpenCon 2014 was a wonderful time bringing together the best minds in early career research and the ‘world of open’ to discuss how we make access to knowledge, data, and educational resources better for everyone. It wasn’t so much an event*, as a milestone. Here’s the story of its success.

I don’t want to run through the basics of each aspect of open access, data, and education. Let me instead tell you instead about how we just marked a revolutionary point in making the fundamental right to research a reality. When I use the word ‘publishers’ through this post, I’m talking primarily about legacy ones – those who operate on a paywall-based model and publicly declare themselves to be enemies of progressing research (I’m not going to name names, we all know who they are – PeerJ is clearly safe). This does not include many learned societies, which I think are an invaluable component of academic communities and are a completely separate discussion we need to have.

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