The Society of Physics Students at UC Santa Cruz

So grab your bongos and come on over to party with your favorite physicists at SPS.

Here are some links as promised by our speaker Brandon Allgood cofounder of Numerate Inc.

Association of Research Libraries
http://www.arl.org/

SPARC
http://www.arl.org/sparc/

Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of
Scientific Publishing
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml

The ArXiv
http://arxiv.org/

Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org/

Eprints
http://www.eprints.org/

Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Open Access at UCSC
http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=1970

PRISM
http://www.prismcoalition.org/index.htm

NIH open access policy
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

Current threat against NIH open policy
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.801:

Open Access Directory
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page

Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org/

freeculture.org
http://freeculture.org

PLoS
http://www.plos.org/

MIT portal for staff publications
http://dspace.mit.edu/

wikipedia article with great links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)

Last week’s Undergraduate Symposium was definitely a success, full of tensors, Tesla Coil’s and Exosolar Planets. There really is no way we could possibly do better.

Except for maybe this week.

This week the Society of Physics Students is proud to present the second half of our Undergraduate Symposium! The SPS meeting will be held on Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 6 P.M. in ISB 231. This will be a conference style event. In that fashion the speakers will have 12 minutes to present and 3 minutes for questions. It will  be moderated by Professor Peter Young of the Physics Dept.

This week’s speakers are:

• Assia Tolpygo: “Understanding Brain Function Through Large-Scale Retinal Output Activity”

• Kyle Kaplan: “Dust Absorption in Metal Strong Damped Lyman Alpha Systems”

• Megan Shabram: “Transiting Extrasolar Planet Transmission Spectra”

Your attendendace, as always, is kindly requested.

This week SPS is proud to present an Undergraduate Symposium on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 6:00 PM in Isb 231! This week we have three speakers:

Josh Vinson: Tesla Coil Science
Nick Ernst: An Introduction to Tensors
Ben Nelson: Exosolar Planets and finding Terrestrial Planets

Moderated by Professor Haber.

Each speaker will present for 10-12 minutes, and afterward answer a few questions.

‘Open Science’

Open Science was the original goal of the world wide web (WWW), when Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN created a system for high energy particle physicists to share data and information.  It was such a promising beginning.  What happened?  As the world marches on with open source software, open media, open publishing, and all of the other openness that the WWW has inspired, science is being left behind in publishing and data sharing.  Science journals are online, but publishing in a journal few have access to, in an archaic format that has far less to do with the digital age that it does 1980s is not innovative.  The current Open Science movement is trying to change this.  Actions such as the recent vote by MIT faculty to make all scholarly publications openly available and efforts such as those by the Science Commons (a Creative Commons project) are signs that things are changing, but the movement is still in its infancy.  A lot of thought and action must still happen at all levels: government policy, university policy, publishing industry, and individual scientific attitude.  I will discuss the current movement, it’s history, and what still needs to be done to bring science into the open century.

&

‘Science outside of Academia’

I would also like to talk about my experience doing science outside of academia and what I would do if I were at UCSC preparing for the job market.