Mathematics

A recent update on my work to eliminate all financial and technical restrictions on access to medical research (and all peer-reviewed journals): I was lead author on a piece published in a blog for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) analyzing four years of invoices which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has paid to 710 different journals in order to be sure that all of the research that they help fund is published with full open access and no embargos.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/11/07/guest-post-transparency-what-can-one-learn-from-a-trove-of-invoices/.

I'm now working on a model for some society publishers of flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences that provides immediate access to the submitted work of every author without imposing an article processing charge (APC). I'd love to interview Oberlin grads who are actively publishing or reading the scholarly journals in their discipline--you'd be a big help to me in validating this new model. I'm at johngdove@gmail.com.

My 4th through 8th careers have all been related to increasing the accessibilty of computers to the public. 7th [2003-2015] was leadership in a team that created the online Encyclopedia, Credo Reference, which has been profitable since 2008. The 8th career is focused on creating unfettered access to all scholarly literature worldwide, aka "Open Access".

A special time in our family life was the 13 months that we spent teaching in an MBA program in Shanghai in 1986-7 when our boys were 4 and 9.

Gloria and I have raised two young men who:
**respect women
**speak a second language fluently without an accent: Matthew--Chinese; Michael--Slovak
**play a musical instrument: Matthew Banjo, Michael Electric Bass
**athletic: Matthew--biking; Michael--running
**and they can cook

Like Bill Gates, I dropped out of school and got right into computuers. Oberlin did not teach a single course in computer programming or software engineering when I dropped on in 1968. [He's done better than me, financially; but I'd be surprised if he was a happier man than me.] I joined a small team of programmers in a Wall Street brokerage which had just invested in a super computer up in Waltham, Mass. Our team was developing a new computer language that ordinary people could use to do analysis of their stock market investments. It was like a mainframe spreadsheet. So I've been online from home since 1969.
Years later (1988) I contacted Oberlin to see if they'd give me credit for the courses I taught in graduate school--I probably knew the subject. They gave me all but 8 of the hours I needed to graduate. So the remaining 8 hours I took as a special student, 2 philosophy courses, and an English Comp course. At that time I was VP, Product Development for an enterprise software company (Computer Corporation of America) and my travel schedule was taking me to customers all over the world. I arranged with the English Comp prof to send in my weekly assignments by fax machine. This only fax machine at that point was in the Campus Security office--so they'd receive my papers and bring them to the Prof.
Finally I had two hours yet to complete, and a phys.ed requirement. So I found a course in the catalog called "Special Problems". [That sounded like me!] So I worked out a course with Pat Milkovich in the Phys Ed department. I wrote a paper on integrating sports into a professional life (like doing a scheduled 10-miler while in transit to Korea for work by getting up at the hotel in O'Hare airport and running 20 laps of Terminal C). The final exam was training for and running the Boston Marathon. It was covered that year (1991) as the NPR human-interest story that they do every year in their coverage of the Boston Marathon.
The reporter, told me when he interviewed me at the finish, "Do you realize that you've just run one mile for every year since you entered Oberlin College?" It's the only course at Oberlin in which I receive an A+.

Undetermined

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