K.T. Vaughan, our 1000th PLoS Facebook Group member and the mystery of Beard 24
K.T. Vaughan, a Pharmacy Librarian from UNC and Harvard graduate, is the 1000th member of the PLoS Facebook group (we're up to 1007 members in about a year) and we are delighted to have her on board. I've been messaging her through the group to find out more about her daily life and why she supports PLoS.
I've learnt so much about grass roots PLoS supporters like K.T. by looking at the huge range of job roles, interests and yes I admit it, photos, of our members. What a good looking crowd we are! We have talented folks from every corner of the globe undertaking a huge range of activities from prolific science communicators and founders of aligned non profits to researchers and open access advocates not to mention many PLoS staff and board members plus a healthy smattering of Nature folks too.
As for K.T, her work schedule is publicly available for all to see. The only part of her week that was hard for me to understand was what she gets up to on Tuesdays from 4-5pm when "Beard 24" appears on her agenda. This caused me to wonder whether chin hair, like haircuts, now qualifies for a number and if so, what a number 24 would look like (perhaps like the ex-PLoS Poet in residence Jacob Evans) but less fancifully i expect she's probably offering up training and hands-on guidance in a room somewhere on campus.
Here's what K.T. said on finding out that she was our 1000th member."Hey, that's cool! Bora sent me an invite, and I've been a fan of the journals since their inception (we once hosted Hemai Parthasarathy for a series of talks at our library when she was still with PLoS)".
As for my role as group creator and what this means for the content of the site, I try to post multiple times each week and I cover pretty much anything and everything – jobs that we want to fill, photos of members wearing their t-shirts in far flung places, hot research articles, government open access mandates, general publishing trends towards freely available content, calls for action (this is always fun), copyright democracy, the list is endless.
You can post items for discussion, photos, or get hold of me and have a moan if something that we are doing is frustrating you (I'll do my best to fix it).
Getting involved is easy. Simply visit facebook.com, sign up for an account (which takes moments) and then visit the group, you can join if you like what you see.