On Tuesday, October 5th, the Levy Library presented the latest event in its Research Insider series. Free or Fee: How Open Access Publishing Impacts Your Choices as an Author takes a look at the ways in which Open Access is changing how you publish your research, what requirements funding agencies impose on researchers, and who owns the copyright of published works.
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- Learn more about the featured speakers of this event
- Watch a recording of the seminar
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Chair, ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law
Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts
Columbia Law School
June M. Besek is the Executive Director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts and a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School in New York City. Her research and teaching focus on copyright and related rights, particularly concerning new technologies. She is the author of many articles and studies on copyright law.
She currently serves as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Law Section. She is also a member of the Section’s Copyright Reform Task Force, and is the Section’s liaison to the American Law Institute’s Copyright Restatement Project.
Ms. Besek is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and the board of advisors of the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts. She is also a member of the board of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, New York. She earned her law degree from New York University School of Law and her undergraduate degree, in economics, from Yale University
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Program Officer
Knowledge & Research Services, Gates Foundation
Over the past decade Ashley has worked in both academic and public libraries, focusing on digital inclusion and facilitating access to scholarly content.
She completed her Masters in Library and Information Sciences through the University of Washington’s Information School.
Ashley is a Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity she focuses on the foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This includes leading the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Other core activities involve supporting the strategic and operational aspects of the foundation’s library. This work has sparked a passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.
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Editor-in-Chief
Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ)
Tom Olijhoek has been living and working in Africa for many years. After obtaining his PhD in molecular microbiology from Amsterdam University (1982) he has been at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin for 7 years. He has spent seven years in Kenya and Algeria doing research on malaria, sleeping sickness and meningococcal epidemics. Since 2012, Tom has advocated open access and open science as Open Access working group coordinator for Open Knowledge International. In 2013 he became a member of the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) advisory board who were instrumental in redefining the criteria for being indexed in DOAJ. Since 2014 Tom has been Editor in Chief at the DOAJ.
From January 2018, his main task has been the managing of the global DOAJ ambassador program and global outreach activities including connecting to other open communities like the Creative Commons Global Network and OCSD Net. From 2019-2021 the program has a special focus on Africa. He is also a member of the programming committee of Force11 where he teaches at the yearly Force11 Summer School on the topic of how to evaluate scientific quality for journals, articles and individual scholars.
His current research interests are, copyright and licensing in open access publishing, development of new ways to assess the quality of scholars and scholarly works and follow research in the area of soil microbiology in relation to soil health and human health (microbiome research).
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Director, Strategic Partnerships
PLOS
Sara is responsible for supporting PLOS' growth strategy by identifying and developing new business and partner opportunities focusing on libraries, institutions, societies, other publisher and service providers, and other geographies and sectors currently unexplored by PLOS.
A member of the PLOS leadership team, Sara has led the effort to build out PLOS' partnerships with institutions globally, including launching PLOS first non-APC-based business models in 2020: Flat Fees and PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP). The doubling of PLOS international customer base in less than year was the result of extensive consultation with libraries and consortia to understand their needs and challenges during and post-COVID as well as their expectations for transparency and collaboration.
In addition to leading of the Partnerships team and collaborating cross functionally on the PLOS leadership team, she is active industry-wide as a member of the SSP Board of Directors and consults for the SPA-OPS work from Plan S and COUNTER and their work around native OA usage status.
At Digital Science Sara managed business development, sales strategy and thought leadership for Altmetric in the Americas while also taking on team lead responsibilities for these same areas with Digital Science’s new Dimensions platform. She is a member of ISMPP, the SSP Board of Directors, and mentors colleagues and early career professionals in #scholcomm.
You can watch a recording of the event with the video below or on our YouTube channel.
Want to go back and take a 2nd look at the material? Click here to view the presentation slides from our panelists.
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Each month Levy Library showcases the achievements of Mount Sinai faculty and researchers by highlighting an article and its altmetrics. Altmetrics are alternative measures of impact that capture non-traditional data like abstract views, article downloads, and social media activity. Our altmetrics data is provided by the PlumX platform.
This month we highlight SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce persistent human germinal centre responses. This article was written in part by Florian Krammer, PhD and Fatima Amanat.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-based vaccines are about 95% effective in preventing COVID-191,2,3,4,5. The dynamics of antibody-secreting plasmablasts and germinal centre B cells induced by these vaccines in humans remain unclear. Here we examined antigen-specific B cell responses in peripheral blood (n = 41) and draining lymph nodes in 14 individuals who had received 2 doses of BNT162b2, an mRNA-based vaccine that encodes the full-length SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) gene1. Circulating IgG- and IgA-secreting plasmablasts that target the S protein peaked one week after the second immunization and then declined, becoming undetectable three weeks later. These plasmablast responses preceded maximal levels of serum anti-S binding and neutralizing antibodies to an early circulating SARS-CoV-2 strain as well as emerging variants, especially in individuals who had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2 (who produced the most robust serological responses). By examining fine needle aspirates of draining axillary lymph nodes, we identified germinal centre B cells that bound S protein in all participants who were sampled after primary immunization. High frequencies of S-binding germinal centre B cells and plasmablasts were sustained in these draining lymph nodes for at least 12 weeks after the booster immunization. S-binding monoclonal antibodies derived from germinal centre B cells predominantly targeted the receptor-binding domain of the S protein, and fewer clones bound to the N-terminal domain or to epitopes shared with the S proteins of the human betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1. These latter cross-reactive B cell clones had higher levels of somatic hypermutation as compared to those that recognized only the SARS-CoV-2 S protein, which suggests a memory B cell origin. Our studies demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-based vaccination of humans induces a persistent germinal centre B cell response, which enables the generation of robust humoral immunity.
View this article profile here!