So I have posted a couple of times via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ about the new website that Carley designed for me.  What I tried to do with the site is make my work a little bit more accessible.

1 – Publications – An academic lives and dies by publications, but this side of science is largely kept from the general public.  I have been writing an angry post about the scientific publishing industry and their gatekeeper role in withholding knowledge (which will be up soon) and this is part of my response.  There are still copyright rules that prevent me from hosting the full, complete paper, but I will see how far I can go before breaking them.  Meanwhile, on the publications page there are now collapsible text boxes (you have no idea how complicated they were to work out!) with lay summaries for all of my papers as well as links to the content online.  Enjoy!

2 – Teaching – By the summer I will have finished teaching a third-year undergraduate course in Conservation Biology and hope to make those lectures (around 32 hours in total) available for free online through Screencast or Youtube.  You can see the course outline on the teaching page if you are interested.  There will also be a number of different resources that the students will be producing as part of their assignments and I hope to make those available through my website alongside the lectures.

3 – Data – This is the part with which I have made the least progress.  Data are sacred and are the key to publications and so to share data is like giving away part of your future.  That is if you haven’t managed to wring every publication out of them…  Because I am fairly early-on in my career, I have been hesitant about sharing data wholesale.  However, an easy and risk-free first step is to provide details of the datasets that I do have access to and invite collaborations from interested researchers.  I will hopefully be putting that information on the site at a later date.

So, now you know what I get up to and the Ontarians know where their tax dollars are going!  I’ll be sure to let everyone know when the lectures and data go up!