Officially launched just over a year ago, the Open Access Network (OAN) offers a transformative, sustainable, and scalable model of open access (OA) publishing and preservation that encourages partnerships among scholarly societies, research libraries, and other partners (e.g., academic publishers, university presses, collaborative e-archives) who share a common mission to support the creation and distribution of open research and scholarship and to encourage more affordable education, which can be a direct outcome of OA publishing. Our ultimate goal is to develop a collective funding approach that is fair and open and that fully sustains the infrastructure needed to support the full life-cycle for communication of the scholarly record, including new and evolving forms of research output. Simply put, we intend to Make Knowledge Public.

Rebecca Kennison is the Principal of K|N Consultants and the co-founder of the Open Access Network. Prior to working full time at K|N, she was the founding director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, where she was responsible for developing programs to facilitate scholarly research and the communication of that research through technology solutions. Rebecca has worked primarily in the scholarly publishing industry, including production leadership roles at Cell Press, Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley-Blackwell), and the open-access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS), where she was the very first employee.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consists of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.  We will provide lunch, please bring your own drink and your questions.