Office hours

I'm experimenting with public office hours to talk with anyone about open access to research.

The idea is to pick some dates and times, open an online teleconferencing room, and invite any/all who are free at the time and interested in the topic to drop in to chat. I'll make the dates, times, and URLs public on Twitter.

I'll start with Zoom.

• To make it easy to drop in, I will not require passwords or advanced sign-ups.
• To reduce the risk of Zoombombing, I'll start with certain settings (such as the waiting room) and tweak them in light of my experience. If I can't sufficiently reduce the risk of Zoombombing, then either I'll drop the experiment, modify it (say, by requiring sign-ups), or move to a different platform where it might be safer.
• When I pick the next date and time, I'll post them to
• I'll probably use a different Zoom session URL for each meeting. But I'm still thinking about that.
  • If I use the same Zoom session URL every time, I'll post it on this page.
  • If I use a different URL each time, I'll post it to Twitter along with the date and time.

I'd like to make this convenient for people in different time zones. But there's no getting around the fact that I'm in the Boston area. Depending on the season of the year, that's EDT (UTC-4) or EST (UTC-5).

If you have ideas on how to make this experiment work, or if you'd like to set up a meeting, please let me know.

— Peter Suber