OSTI’s involvement in public access is accelerating! The week of June 24^th, 2013, The White House recognized Champions of Change: Open Science at an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. OSTI’s Director Walt Warnick was invited to nominate individuals who had been instrumental in championing public access to open science. As a result of Walt’s involvement in Public Access to scientific information, he was invited to attend this important event. Two notable Champions of Change who were honored were Jack Andraka, a Maryland high school student who at age 15 created a novel paper sensor that detects pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer in 5 minutes for as little as 3 cents; Jack has a huge Twitter following and is a passionate speaker about open access, STEM education and universal Internet availability. The other is Paul Ginsparg who created arXiv.org, an open access e-print network that serves as the primary daily information feed for global communities of researchers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and related fields and is the most popular e-print server in the world.

Dr. Warnick was very pleased to have the opportunity to attend and network with this distinguished group of science information pioneers. He was able to meet and talk with Jack Andraka about how open access positively impacted his discoveries. Jack was very appreciative of OSTI’s resources and the OSTI Blog, Where Do New Scientists Come From?, highlighting Jack’s research approach to publicly accessible scientific information. Dr. Warnick mentioned that the distinguished Paul Ginsparg gave OSTI a “shout out” in his acceptance speech noting our pioneering role in several scientific and technical information (STI) endeavors. The event was emceed by Mike Stebbins from The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.