Today we host a post by Daniel Goodman, Senior lecturer at Imperial College London and member of the organisation Neuromatch, which recently authored the Open letter to the WHOSTP and Subcommittee on Open Science. The initiatives Daniel describes in this brief post are in perfect alignment with the vision of our own organisation and we therefore recommend our members to read and sign the open letter and support the NMOP platform
Daniel Goodman
Imperial College London & Neuromatch
Neuromatch is a grassroots organization founded at the start of the pandemic to bring conferences and summer schools online. Our experience showed us that making these activities freely available to all, supported by technology designed to empower them, leads to incredible, mutually supportive and self-sustaining communities and the democratization of research.
We believe this model can be applied to academic publishing, one of the least innovative and democratic aspects of research. For the last year, we have been designing a new approach to publishing based on community ownership, free access and open data that we have recently made public at //nmop.io.
We naturally became very interested in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum on public access, which we feel is a step in the right direction but fraught with dangers around article processing charges and transformative agreements. We organized a group of open access advocates and wrote an open letter to the White House, calling on them to take these issues seriously, along with concrete implementation recommendations.
We also wrote an article directed to researchers themselves explaining why we think this is a critical issue and encouraging them to sign the letter.