Saturday, September 29, 2007

Open Access Fun Guerrilla Activism, or How to Hijack an STM Conference

If you want to know how to get your open access message across at that STM conference, read up on the techniques of master OA guerilla Graham Steel as reported on McBlawg blog.

Graham attended the Neuroprion 2007 conference recently in Edinburgh, on an impressively low budget, with a personal mission to raise awareness about open access and OA archiving to the delegates present.

With over 800 delegates, one-on-one promotion was out of the question, so Graham employed a combination of techniques including wearing OA t-shirts: Research Made Public, I'm Open and PLoS One, flyers, postcards, and brochures, distributed through a rapid dissemination-and-vanishing act.

As for one-on-one discussions, Graham reports: Of those that I was able to discuss OA/IR’s with, almost all of the feedback was positive in nature. I was easily able to respond to any less positive feedback.

I'm taking notes, and keeping on eye on our innovative OA activist Graham Steel, Co-Founder, CJD Alliance.