In memoriam, Jon Tennant

Do you remember Jon Tennant?

Check his profile on my website https://access2perspectives.org/team/jon-tennant/, where I will increasingly showcase his legacy to inform my work and stay true to my professional compass.

Jon was a close friend and colleague of mine and many others. Huge amount of inspiration and motivation I received from him.

Thanks to Jon, I founded and managed AfricArXiv for more than 5 years and counting.

Thanks to Jon, I finetuned and designed Access 2 Perspectives with my personal values and principles deeply ingrained into my business approach.

Thanks to Jon, I am outspoken about opportunities and challenges within Academia and beyond. Mind you, I have always spoken up for Justice, but to do that within the scholarly ecosystem, I learned mostly with and from Jon.

I created a YouTube playlist with (currently 11) videos in which he is featured. Here are some recommendations for you to re/watch:

? Have we started a fire? ?? (Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Open Science Fellows Program 2019)

? #OpenScience is just #goodscience ? (DARIAH ERIC Annual Event 2018)

? Fighting for #PRINCIPLES to FIX #science ?? - BEYOND CARROTS - Jon Tennant Tribute Video (2019)

? Jon Tennant, Michael Aufreiter, Oliver Buchtala in SciELO 20 years (2018)

In the video recoded at the SciELO 20 conference, Jon said:

"Hi, we're here at the SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online 20th anniversary conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My name is John Tennant and founder of the Open Science MOOC (https://opensciencemooc.eu/)."

[…]

"If you go anywhere around the world, you hear about open science just all the time but in Europe, we often talk about it in terms of political motivation as something for economic growth or innovation whereas if you come to Latin America it's a very different feeling, everyone seems to believe that open science is more of a social imperative so we need to work together more as a global community to develop a common understanding of what open sciences […]"

"I'm working on the open science MOOC and for that you know we're traditionally working in English but we have a Spanish language working group as well to help engage the Spanish-speaking global research community on these things.

A message for you is if we can help you or you can help us please come join us in this global scene for open science you know we have so much more to learn. We learn better as a global community from different people's issues and there are many ways to contribute with ideas with passion with so many ways money we need to work together to define what it is we're doing, who we're doing it for, why we're doing it, the greater context of science and society and we need to work together to do that there's no single one of us no single demographic should be defining what open science is.

It's up to all of us to come up with a common understanding. This is a bigger change that has to be done and you cannot make this change as an individual or as a smaller group cannot even do it as a nation maybe not even a single continent; so we have to do it all together, all around the world."