The pet projects of tomorrow’s innovators

Iris Amuto, Eric Ma, Jennifer Kaban, Tahira Ebrahim, Azim Wazeer: TEDxTerry Talks speakers

On Oct 3, UBC hosted more than 250 students and alumni to the second annual TEDxTerry Talks 2009, a UBC student conference that provides a platform for its young leaders to share innovative ideas and discuss personal projects they are passionate about. This year, the speakers were seven undergraduate students, one graduate student and a young alumnus.

TEDx, where the x = independently organized TED event, is a program initiated by the group widely known for their Ideas Worth Spreading Series of annual conferences and inspirational videos of invited speakers. TEDx is designed to provide an opportunity for anyone to self-organise and host an event that will bring people together to share in a TED-like experience.

TEDxTerry Talks (tag: TEDxTt) emerged out of the Terry Project, a collaborative initiative between the UBC Faculties of Arts and Science. Its key purpose is to educate primary undergraduate students about current global issues such as malaria, H1N1, and poverty through organising events and fostering conversations using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and their blogs.

Jennifer Gardy, alumnus speaker: “Public Health in the 21st Century: the Open-Source Outbreak”

Dr. Jennifer Gardy, an alumnus speaker at the event, is co-leading the new genome research lab at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). She is also known as “Nerd Girl” from her Globe and Mail blog of the same name. In her talk, Gardy shared how advances in technology have provided increased collaboration on scientific research and scholarly publications — what she labelled as public health 2.0.

For example, she showed how one publication had 36 authors. After leading the audience through the origins of H1N1, she stated how it only took five days from the sequencing of the virus to the first open-source paper. Gardy ended her talk emphasizing how students should be willing to explore the benefits of Open Access publications, collaborative research, and emerging technologies.

Via email, Maclean’s OnCampus asked Gardy, along with other speakers, about her pet project:

Q: What is the value of open-access (OA) publications? Are these types of publications being supported by scientists?

Gardy: OA publications have value because they remove access barriers to knowledge. To access anything more than an abstract of a scientific paper in the pre-OA days, someone who was interested in the paper either had to a) be affiliated with an institution that had a subscription to that journal (and then be able to access that subscription either online or by traveling to the library to see the print copy) or b) willing to pay the per-article charge, generally $30-$50, to be able to download or access that article.

This excluded all sorts of groups from being able to access information: researchers whose institutes don’t have enough money to pay for a subscription (e.g pretty much all of the developing world) and people who are interested in a topic but don’t have an institutional affiliation (e.g. a patient trying to do research into a rare disorder they have) are two of the most obvious groups, but there are others you wouldn’t think of it….OA removes all these headaches and barriers and lets anybody see a paper, taking knowledge out of the domain of just the ivory tower and giving back to the people.

Q:What was the role of open-access publications in the discovery of H1N1?

Gardy: As far as H1N1 goes, virtually all of the big, early papers on the virus were published in non-OA journals but the authors chose to pay the extra costs and make the articles freely available. Many other important papers were published in weekly online OA journals like Eurosurveillance and MMWR. Thus ANYBODY could access the most up-to-date knowledge and contribute to the investigation into the virus.

Also, the outbreak catalyzed the creation of PLoS Currents, an online OA “pre-journal” where authors can submit works in progress that are vetted a by a small team of experts but nor formally peer-reviewed, and which can then be published later once they are more developed. The first PLoS Currents site (there will be one site each for a range of topics) is on influenza research, and launched a few months back at www.ploscurrents.org/influenza. It’s a neat new model for scientific publishing.