Participants will explore the question of whether Diamond Open Access scale can disrupt the broken paywall publishing model and save science with the help of open source software. 

A panel of experts will address this challenge and take questions from the audience:

• Lorena Barba (host): Dr. Lorena A. Barba is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and international affairs, and the Faculty Director of the GW Open Source Program Office. Her interests include computational fluid dynamics, open science, and computational reproducibility. She has a history of educational innovation and contributions to open education, which has been recognized with several awards. Additionally, she is well known for her leadership in open-source software and science reproducibility. She has been a member of the board of directors of NumFOCUS, founding editor of The Journal of Open Source Software, editor-in-chief of IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Open Source Education.
• Rowan Cockett: Rowan, CEO and cofounder of Curvenote, a publishing platform for researchers, societies, and institutes, aims to free science from static PDF documents. With a Ph.D. in computational geophysics from UBC, Rowan helped start SimPEG, a simulation and parameter estimation package for geophysical processes. Rowan has won awards for innovative dissemination of research and open-educational resources, including Visible Geology, used by over a million geoscience students. Rowan serves on the steering council for JupyterBook and MyST Markdown, providing open-source tools for scientific content creation and sharing.
• Karthik Ram: Karthik Ram, currently a program officer for Open Science at The Navigation Fund, previously worked as a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, for about 14 years. At Berkeley, he co-founded and directed the rOpenSci project, supporting open and reproducible research, and was the lead principal investigator for the URSSI (US Research Software Sustainability Institute). He also has a PhD in evolution and evolutionary biology from the University of California, Davis.
• Arfon Smith: Arfon Smith, currently the Director of Product/AI at GitHub, focuses on the Copilot Enterprise product. His professional roles involve helping organizations utilize data effectively and his dedication to open-source software. He founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute and founded The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a diamond open-access journal for research software packages. JOSS has surpassed 400 papers published annually and is nearing 2700 papers since its inception. Arfon also contributed to software citation principles and efforts to recognize and advance research software developers.

All sessions are free to GW students, faculty, staff, and alumni. GW has an institutional commitment to ensuring that all of our programs and events are accessible for all individuals. If you require any accommodations to participate in this event, please contact libraryevents@gwu.edu at least 72 business hours (3 business days) prior to the event.