The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Right to Research Coalition have announced that OpenCon 2016 will be returning to Washington, DC on November 12-14, 2016, where it will be hosted at the American University Washington College of Law.
OpenCon is more than a conference. It's a platform for the next generation to learn about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, develop critical skills, and catalyse action toward a more open system for sharing the world's information—from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital research data. OpenCon 2016 is at the center of a growing community with thousands of students and early career academic professionals from across the world.
Applications to attend OpenCon 2016 in Washington, DC will open on June 6th. More information about the conference and to sign up for updates, interested parties may visit www.opencon2016.org/updates.
Organized by the Right to Research Coalition and SPARC, OpenCon 2016 builds on the success of the first two OpenCon conferences held in Washington, DC and Brussels, which collectively convened approximately 300 participants from more than 40 countries. OpenCon's 41 satellite events have reached approximately 2,000 attendees across 25 countries, and throughout the year, hundreds are engaged with monthly community calls and webcasts along with an active community discussion list.
OpenCon seeks to bring together the most energetic, engaged students and early career academic professionals—regardless of their ability to cover travel costs. Because of this, attendance at OpenCon is by application only, and the majority of past participants have received travel scholarships.
OpenCon has made significant progress in its mission to catalyze and support collaboration and projects led by the next generation. Initiatives that have been founded by OpenCon alumni with support from the community include the Open Access Button, Open Access Nepal, Open Access Nigeria, the OOOCanada Research Network, Open Access Sudan, WhyOpenResearch?, the Open Access Academy, Dissem.in, the Open Research Glossary, and many more.
OpenCon 2016's three day program will begin with two days of keynotes, panels, and interactive workshops, drawing on both the knowledge of leading experts and the experience of participants who lead successful projects. The third day will provide a half-day of advocacy training followed by the opportunity for in-person meetings with relevant policy makers, ranging from the US Congress and federal agencies to embassies and key NGOs.
Speakers at the first two OpenCon conferences have included Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia), Amy Rosenbaum (Director of Legislative Affairs to the President of the United States), Mike Eisen and Pat Brown (Co-founders of PLOS), Julia Reda (Member of the European Parliament), and Phil Bourne (Associate Director for Data Science of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), and more than 15 students and early career academic professionals leading successful initiatives.
Satellite events will continue to be central to the success of OpenCon in allowing the community to scale. OpenCon satellite events are independently hosted meetings that mix content from the main conference with live presenters to localize the discussion and bring the energy of an in-person OpenCon event to a larger audience. These events are an excellent way to discover those interested in Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data within your community, build support, and catalyze action. For those interested in hosting a satellite event, more information is available at www.opencon2016.org/satellite.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
