Free Culture @ NYU

Freeculture.org will be holding an organization-wide Open Access event in NYC on Jan. 13, 2007 from 12-5pm at NYU’s Courant Institute in Room 101.

Click here for the Google Maps link

All chapters are invited and encouraged to attend.

The event will be free and is open to anyone interested in advocating for Open Access and Free Culture on university campuses. There will be food and refreshments and we’re hoping to record the entire session to post online.

As opposed to last year’s Freeculture.org NYC regional summit, this event will be more specific and focused. We’ll be tackling the issue of how to advocate for Open Access on university campuses. We want to take action and start targeting faculty and professors whose work is publicly (or university funded) but is published in closed journals that charge exorbitant prices to libraries and students. There is an alternative out there and we want to make sure everyone knows about it. Access to Knowledge isn’t just important, it is your right as a student and member of a larger academic community.

The event will be interactive, with presentations from influential professionals working in the Open Access world followed by smaller working groups.

Interested in coming? Just RSVP to oa [at] freeculturenyu.org or via our facebook event post.

Agenda

Here is the agenda for the day:

12:00pm Registration / Lunch

12:30pm Introductions

1:00pm Jennifer Mclennan from SPARC

2:00pm Gavin Yamey Public Library of Science (Download Gavin’s Powerpoint Presentation Here.)
2:50pm Break

3:00pm John Wilbanks of Science Commons

3:45pm Open Access Training

Attendees

Heather Joseph of SPARC

Gavin Yamey of Public Library of Science
Gavin Yamey is a product of three continents - he was born in Cape Town, raised in London, and now lives in San Francisco. He studied medicine at the University of Oxford and University College London, graduating in 1994. After five years of working as a physician in a variety of settings - including an AIDS hospice, a dialysis ward, and a brain injuries unit - he joined the British Medical Journal (BMJ)in 1999 as a trainee in medical journalism and editing. In 2001, he moved to San Francisco to be the deputy editor of the Western Journal of Medicine, published by the BMJ and the University of California. Gavin has written extensively on global health, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, and has helped to train medical editors at workshops in Barcelona and Addis Ababa.

John Wilbanks of Science Commons
John Wilbanks comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His first technology work was at fonix, where he researched human-computer interface and pattern recognition. He also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and can be found in the project MAC groupspace. He serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities awards.

Fred Benenson of FreeCulture.org and NYU ITP
While studying Philosophy and Computer Science, Fred co-founded the Free Culture @ NYU chapter of FreeCulture.org, an international student movement and is currently serves on the board. After graduating from NYU in 2005, he interned at Creative Commons in San Francisco and then moved back to NYC to stage the first-of-their-kind DRM protests, and organize several other related public events, all receiving national media attention. During the summer of 2006 Fred was the Creative Commons Cultural Fellow and worked with organizations, schools, and major art institutions in New York to help shape their copyright policies through the use of Creative Commons licenses. He regularly travels the country to speak on these topics and is currently working on his masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He spends his spare time with the Rubik’s cube, bicycles, and cameras.

Elizabeth Stark of FreeCulture.org and Harvard Law School
Elizabeth Stark is a board member of the international student organization Freeculture.org and the founder of Harvard Free Culture. A third year student at Harvard Law School, Elizabeth works for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on such projects as Open Access and Digital Media. She is an Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law Technology, a Teaching Fellow in Cyberlaw and Electronic Music, and a researcher on the Future of the Internet. She has worked with organizations such as Creative Commons, iCommons, EFF and Audionautes, on issues surrounding technology, law, and culture. Elizabeth speaks French, German, and Portuguese.

Audio

The audio from Heather, Gavin and John’s talk has been posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license on the Internet Archive. Download it in MP3 or OGG here.

Photos

Photos from the event are posted on Free Culture NYU’s Flickr Photo stream here.

Share This