Conference

This talk will review the public impact of developments in open access to research on education, professional practice, and public policy, with consideration given to legal, economic, and academic freedom issues, as well as to the very design of scholarly communication systems. The Public Knowledge Project has been conducting research on public interests in the new openness of research for a nearly a decade, and as a result, continues to explore how the creation of new reading environments for the online publication of journals and books can provide a wider range of readers with what might otherwise be the missing context for the work they are now able to discover online.

In the 1990s, the eprint arXivs fundamentally reshaped scientific communication in Math and Physics. In this decade, blogs, wikis and other, similar, tools are mediating an equally profound reshaping of scientific communication. I will talk about my own experience, as a blogger, software designer, and physicist, pointing to some of the successes and some of the challenges ahead.

At a time when the great challenges facing our civilization are scientific in nature (climate change, sustainable energy, pandemic disease), improving the voting public\'s understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever. I will argue that the Internet in general and weblogs specifically provide an opportunity to address this problem, both through bringing science outreach directly to the public, but also by humanizing scientists to the public. I will illustrate with examples from my own experience blogging about physics for a popular audience, including explaining quantum mechanics to my dog.