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Jessica Polka

@jessicapolka.bsky.social
2.2K followers 193 following 25 posts

Open Science Advocate | Senior Program Lead, MIT Open Learning Somerville, MA

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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Via @mchris4duke.bsky.social - last month, the MIT grad student council called “for the adoption of preprints and other innovative scholar communication methods to reshape the current publication system” libraries.mit.edu/news/graduat...
libraries.mit.edu
Graduate Student Council Approves Resolution on Scientific Publishing and MIT Libraries | News
On March 4, 2026, the General Council of the MIT Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved a Resolution on Scientific Publishing and MIT Libraries. In it, the GSC affirms its support for the MIT Framewo...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Love this framing for open science from @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social: to discover the truth, you must be open to scrutiny from all quarters. Celebrating 25 years of @mitocw.bsky.social
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
I’m excited to share that I’m embarking on a new chapter: after 9 years working in open science nonprofits, including most recently at @asterainstitute.bsky.social , I’m transitioning to a new effort in the open education space - more on that soon!
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Getting more science into the world means publishing beyond papers. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but there are options to help researchers transcend the structure of traditional papers. See my analysis on Human Readable: asterainstitute.substack.com/p/science-tr...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
One of our @asterainstitute.bsky.social open science fellows is running a competition to identify interesting uses of the @metapages.bsky.social platform! open.substack.com/pub/dionwhit...
open.substack.com
Scientific Visualization Competition Series: 2
We're excited to announce our second weekly science challenge, focusing on biological data visualization!
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
⏰ Deadline today!
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Nokome Bentley @nokome.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Come and find out about 🪄Alchemy, ✨Cosmik, 🕸Fylo, 📑MetaPages, 🔬SciSci, and 📊Stencila, and help us make them more useful tools for science 🧪 !
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Calling all Bay Area researchers for a paid opportunity: the @asterainstitute.bsky.social Open Science Program’s User Testing Day in Emeryville on Feb 11! 📍 Try cutting-edge research tools 💡 Share feedback 🍷 Network Apply by Feb 5: forms.gle/1qk4PHjbee35... #UXTesting #Biotech #OpenScience
forms.gle
Application to the Astera Open Science program's user testing day
Are you a Bay Area researcher in academia or industry? Do you want to make an impact on innovative tools designed to transform the way we work and think? Apply below to be a part of the Astera Open Sc...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Curious about new tools to manage scientific information? Join us at the Whitehead on Tuesday 1/28 2-4pm...💡 @ronent.bsky.social @iaincheeseman.bsky.social @nadjaohnadja.bsky.social #openscience
“New tools for managing scientific information”
Organized by Iain Cheeseman, PhD (Professor, Whitehead Institute) & Jessica Polka, PhD (Open Science Program Director, Astera Institute)

Tuesday, January 28, 2-4 pm, Whitehead Auditorium

New developments in AI, knowledge graphs, and open science enable researchers to organize, visualize, and synthesize information in new ways. In this session, we’ll hear from creators of innovative tools for openly sharing scientific information about how they can improve your scientific workflows. This is a great opportunity to get hands-on exposure to new tools to benefit your research, as well as to learn about additional career opportunities and directions in the computational tool development space.

Speakers
Saif Haobsh (Astera): Fylo - AI-powered knowledge graphs
Ronen Tamari (Astera): Cosmik - Transforming social media into a collective sensemaking layer for science
Roy Kishony (Technion): Autonomous LLM-driven research from data to human-verifiable research papers
Nadja Oertelt (Center for Open Science): Open Science Framework - a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration
SJ Klein (Public AI, Underlay, and Wikipedia)
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 19/02/2024
Excellent post-mortem of peer-review.io - why is it so hard to disrupt peer review? 👥 social pressure to review ⚖️ need for moderation 🔑 reputational lock-in Would love to see more scholcomm experiments report learnings like this! theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-… ht Subbiah Arunachalam
theroadgoeson.com
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Iain Cheeseman @iaincheeseman.bsky.social · 03/02/2024
An amazing opportunity to shape the future (and present) of scientific communication. Advance discovery. Do right by science and scientists. Make a positive and tangible difference. ASAPbio is an incredibly effective and robust organization that is looking for a new leader. Apply today!
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 02/02/2024
After 8+ incredible years at ASAPbio, I am beginning a new chapter as Open Science Program Director at Astera Institute later this month. So, we're looking for new leadership: please share the posting with people passionate about open science!
asapbio.org
Job posting: Executive Director of ASAPbio (deadline Feb 19)
Join us to make scholarly communication in the life sciences more open and efficient by catalyzing cultural change in scholarly communication, for instance around the use of preprints and other interi...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 31/01/2024
+ Flatland! Thanks for a fun conversation!
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 31/01/2024
A browser extension that blocks journal names (on pubmed or the whole web) so researchers can focus on evaluating research itself without quality proxies Does it exist? Is anyone working on this?
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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 22/01/2024
You do not need private emails when leaders of the movement are publicly tweeting about the motivation behind their actions.
Rufo tweet about abolishing "the DEI bureaucracy"Rufo tweet about "abolishing DEI ideology"
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 22/01/2024
Just as not all preprint servers are suffixed w/ "Rxiv" not everything ending in "Rxiv" is a preprint server. Case in point - searchRxiv is a database for search strings! Interesting concept www.cabidigitallibrary.org/journal/sear...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 27/11/2023
We're trying a new experiment at #cellbio2023 this year. Join us!
asapbio.org
Meet your colleagues and discuss a new preprint over lunch during Cell Bio 2023
We’re pleased to announce preprint launch parties during Cell Bio 2023 (Boston, MA, USA)! These lunch events are not formally affiliated with ASCB/EMBO, but will be held Monday and Tuesday, Dec 4 an...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 29/09/2023
Abel Packer closes #scielo25, saying the future is publish first, assess later with open peer review 🤩
Abel Packer speaking at a podium
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 29/09/2023
Wonderful discussion at #scielo25 today! TLDR for my slides: Preprints… 🟰Promote equity by lowering barriers to dissemination 💬Enable new forms of dialog ⚖️Support reinventing assessment 🔓With reviews, are dynamic OA tinyurl.com/scielo25polka
tinyurl.com
v2 SciELO 25 2023 Jessica Polka
Jessica Polka Executive Director, ASAPbio mas.to/@ASAPbio @asapbio.bsky.social mastodon.social/@polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social Preprinting to broaden scholarly dialog These slides: tinyurl.com/scielo...
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 28/09/2023
Congress is trying to stop the Biden administration’s directive to make federally funded research articles free to read, and Mayank Chugh and I have ~opinions~
statnews.com
Congress could stop free public access to government-funded research
Every year, Americans invest hundreds of billions in federal research that they can’t access.
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 18/09/2023
eLife's new model accelerates access to peer-reviewed research! Refereed preprints are made public in 79 days vs 170 days to publication w/old model. Via Fiona Hutton at the @asapbio.bsky.social community call @elife.bsky.social
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 12/09/2023
Publishing industry reps have argued that the EU Council's proposed "no pay" publishing model is unrealistic. But there are already 4 functioning roads to making this vision a reality: 💎 Diamond OA journals 🪙 Publishing platforms 👁️ Preprints + peer review 🔓 Subscribe to open
asapbio.org
EU council ‘no pay’ publishing model is realistic
This post originally appeared on Olivier Pourret's blog and in Indonesian on Dasapta Erwin Irawan's blog. Authors Olivier Pourret - UniLaSalle, Beauvais, France - olivier.pourret@unilasalle.fr - ORC...
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Marc Somssich @somssich.bsky.social · 19/08/2023
Do you support #Preprints? If you want to show your support, you can get these stickers from @jessicapolka.bsky.social and ASAPbio.org here: asapbio.org/stickers #Publishing #OpenScience #AcademicPublishing #ResearchPublishing #AccelerateScience
The ASAPbio sticker collection to support preprints. The individual stickers say "I post preprints", "I read preprints", "I cite preprints" and "I review preprints". There's also a note from Jessica Polka saying "Marc, I hope you enjoy these! Thanks! Jess"
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 09/08/2023
Research should never be behind a paywall. But now there's a bill in the House that will restrict access to scientific work we pay for with our taxes.  Take action for #taxpayeraccess: sparcopen.org/our-work/oppose-secti…
Photo of me making a stank face at "Sec 552" written on a post it note, wearing a tshirt that says "Unlock tomorrow" with the open access logo, an open padlock
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