Sarah Kearns

Open access is great in concept, but what do we need to do at our universities to make it practical? Written in collaboration with UMich's science policy group, ESPA.

Dr. Stephen Hawking's positivity and humor in the face of a debilitating disease and the black hole of the cosmos serves as an inspiration. Having passed away last year, I reflected on his impact on modern physics and how his life encourages us to stay hopeful.

After I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, I started looking into biological property rights in general and found some interesting overlaps with today's genetic sequencing tools like 23&me.

What makes you, you? Probably a combination of your physical body and your character/personality traits. So much of life scales: proteins make cells make organs make organisms. At a human level, we've heard of existential crises, but can cells have laps of identity too?

So why the heck am I writing a book? Am I the person to tell it? Find out here!

What will this book be about? What's the tone and feel of it? This might not be the final introduction, but here's a draft of it that I wrote for the Flagship ComSciCon workshop in 2019.

Describing the values and practices of Open Source Software, and the scope of the landscape analysis.

Two-column format

Preparing for Peer Review Week 2019, I stumbled across a book, "Annotation," undergoing community peer-review. This got me thinking about the role of marginalia in peer review and how sharing our interactions with scholarly texts will improve research and academic communities.

Executive Director, Riley's Way Foundation

Science as a practice has gone through paradigm shifts, starting as a hobby and becoming institutionalized. Citizen science helps put curiosity and discovery back in the hands of people.

An end-of-year roundup of all our favorite Things

Improving science communication skills and confidence through locally organized workshops.

Looking back at 2021 and forward to 2022

🎧 The authors of Data Feminism reunite to discuss the joys and benefits of community review.

The Commonplace is a space where people discuss the digital infrastructure and policies needed to distribute, constellate, and amplify knowledge for the public good.

A call for contributions. Submissions close on Wednesday, June 23, 2020.

🎧 A conversation about open source funding, the importance of maintaining code, and open access as liturgy.

A letter from the editors

A call for contributions. Submissions close on Monday, September 13, 2021.

🎧 The publishing academic complex is out of control, and current policies will only open future publications and not the backlog of research. How do you change a system which has so much social and economic power over scholarship?

For the Open Publishing Fest 2021, we had a discussion with some of the authors to keep the conversation and momentum going about fair and emergent business models in publishing.

A call for contributions for an on-going series.

College students face big problems ahead. This interview with the Lead Librarian for Public Science at NC State talks about Wicked Problems, Wolfpack Solutions: an online curricula that prepares students both for university and the world beyond.

🎧 A conversation about communicating amongst scientists, clinicians, policy makers, and rural communities with the communications specialist of the Northern New England Clinical & Translational Research Network (1h 15m with transcript).

Note from the editor

🎧 A conversation with some of the folks behind the NERL Playbook and the Backflip deal with Elsevier (1 hour with transcript)

🎧 A conversation with the creators of the immersive found poetry adventure at MIT's Hayden Library (~30 minutes with transcript)

🎧 Creating data provenance standards to combat misinformation and human rights crises (45 minutes with transcript).