Thing 10: Twitter Part 3

This is a bonus blog post to enthuse about Twitter.

Even if I don't ever use anything else I've learnt during the 23 Things journey it has definitely changed my view on Twitter.

If you are at all interested in the UK Open Access (OA) movement you will know that there is a lot of high level discussion going on at the moment, including the announcement from HEFCE regarding OA for REF post 2014, the Lords Select Committee review of the Research Council UK (RCUK) OA policy, the Royal Society workshop on UK OA held earlier this week, and the White House announcement on US open access policy.

The joy of Twitter is that people who understand these things tweet about them, provide links to the official documents and best of all provide helpful summaries of them.

For example, the Royal Society workshop (which I did not attend) had its own hashtag: #oaintheuk. By using this hashtag to search on Twitter I was able to get a flavour of the workshop. I also discovered a service called Storify that I hadn't heard of before; it allows users to collate tweets of their choosing like this:
http://storify.com/GarretMcMahon/open-access-in-the-uk-and-what-it-means-for-scient

Also from Twitter I came across 2 interesting Times Higher Education pieces (here and here) and a great blog post called 'Open Access for the Deeply Confused'.

But, my friends, that is not all: I also discovered via this blog post the Lolcats inspired #Icanhazpdf; if an article you need is not open access you tweet the article title, add that hashtag and hope that someone will send you a copy. Obviously I am not promoting it but it is interesting to see that such things are out there.

I could go on but I think that's enough to give you a general idea of how Twitter is working for me. Now I just need to resist posting snide tweets about the Eastleigh by-election...

#sharingthetwitterlove