Joe Merante's Blog

Yesterday, I attended a mini hackathon at PLoS in San Francisco to discuss strategies and work on tools to encourage the adoption of open access and shared content policies at research universities, publishers and elsewhere. We hope the event will be the first of many and plan to hold a larger, multi-day event in late June. While some focus on open access to scientific research, it's really part of the broader movement toward opening our entire culture, whether viewed through the lens of OER , Creative Commons , open source software or shared open data. Similar issues are back on the table in Congress with the re-introduced Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would require that taxpayer-funded research is made available to the public, similar to the NIH Public Access Policy . A competing bill in the House aimed at scrapping the NIH policy (to protect publisher's interests) led to a boycott of academic publisher Elsevier . The Right to Research Coalition i...

Since moving within the past year, I've been amazed by the amount of junkmail I get.  So, I started keeping track of it on June 20.   Last week, I looked down at the mounting pile on my floor and assumed it had to be at least one pound.  Easily, about 1.5.  Naturally, I tweeted it: " it took less than a month for me to receive one POUND of credit card offers in the mail from 3 banks. (mostly from chase & citi)."  When I weighed the pile and it clocked in at TWO POUNDS, I opened the draft of this blog post containing my plan to calculate the costs and realized it had been nearly two months - 7 weeks and 2 days - since I started collecting the junk.  Either way, a pound in over three weeks (July 20 - August 8) or two pounds in 7 weeks and 2 days (June 20 - August 8), at least the volume is consistently annoying.  Anyways, Citi had already responded to my tweet so I left it alone.  " @ joemerante I can help stop the offers. Pls DM the nam...