Quick check-in from NYC

Mrs.Coturnix and I arrived nicely in NYC last night and had a nice dinner at Heartland Brewery. This morning, we had breakfast at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I ordered my pastry using a Serbian name for the cake, and the Albanian woman working in the Hungarian shop understood what I wanted! I forgot to bring my camera with me today, and Mrs.Coturnix did not bring her cable, so the pictures of the pastries will have to wait our return home.

Then, Mrs.Coturnix went for a long walk (it was nice in the morning, got cold in the afternoon), ending up in the Met. I joined my co-panelists Jean-Claude Bradley and Barry Canton and our hosts Kathryn Pope, Rebecca Kennison and Rajendra Bose for lunch at Bistro Ten 18.

Then we walked over to the Columbia campus and got all set up for the Open Science panel. I talked first, giving a brief history of openness in scientific communication, defining Open Access publishing and how it fits in the evolving ecosystem of online science communication, ending with some speculation about the future. Jean-Claude and Barry then followed, describing their own projects, showing how some of that future that sounds so speculative when described in general terms, is already here, done by pioneers and visionaries right here and now.

The panel was followed by a number of excellent questions from the audience - you could follow the discussion blow-by-blow on twitter (several pages of it!), and the video of the entire thing will be posted online in a few days (I will make sure to link to it once it is available).

There were some familar faces in the crowd - including Caryn Shechtman (who already wrote a nice blog post about it), my Overlords Erin and Arikia, Michael Tobis, Talia Page (and her Mom who is writing an interesting book right now), Noah Gray, Hilary Spencer and Miriam Gordon (whose husband does interesting stuff with science education in high schools).

We went for a beer nearby afterwards, where we were re-joined by Mrs.Coturnix. It got really cold, so we went back to the hotel, had some (too) authentic Chinese cuisine for dinner and are trying to rest as tomorrow is another busy day - meeting various famous people for various meals, including the Big Bash at Old Town Bar at 8pm to which you are all invited.