Summary
Agata Morka writes a few personal lines about this network and her experience with it.
By Agata Morka
This blog post was to be finished last week, but I am writing it on Monday as I was running behind with everything. And this delay has resulted in a peculiar circumstance, as an end and a beginning overlapped in one day. Today for me, is a day between the lines as I am transitioning from working on open access books to the realm of open access journals.
My OABN co-coordinators graciously agreed to give me some airtime, as I requested to write a few personal lines about this network and my experience with it. So please bear with me as I permitted myself to be somewhat emotional and informal. You have been warned.
I have worked on OA books for more than ten years, and it has been a fascinating journey. But never have I had the pleasure before to work on a project within this realm that was truly transformative. That was before my then-boss Rupert Gatti told me there was this idea about a network for people interested in OA books, and I was to work on it with Lucy Barnes, whom I hadn’t yet met. And then we did meet, and then Tom Mosterd from DOAB/OAPEN joined us, and something that you don’t get to be a part of very often happened: we turned out to be an exceptionally well-working team. Then Tom left, and Silke joined, and the vibe stayed the same: not only did we enjoy working together, but we had a strange way of motivating each other, and all that mixed with the best possible sauce: a somewhat sarcastic sense of humour.
So, I am taking this airtime opportunity to say how much I have enjoyed working on making OABN THE platform for discussing OA books, and exchanging ideas with what grew to be a community of amazingly passionate people whom I admire and look up to. I loved every minute of it: designing posters at midnight, birthday postcards the second my son went down for a nap, and taking notes of our weekly meetings to give us an illusion of being well-organized.
To my co-coordinators: it has been an honour, and I hope we meet soon and share some OA anecdotes over a whisky.
To the OABN: spread your wings, transform, and grow, but keep the initial spirit—that of camaraderie, of getting things done attitude and of very personal charisma.
Well, that came out somewhat awkwardly, but you can read between the lines as we are all avid readers here at the OABN…
I will miss you so very much.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.