Pat Furlong, Founding President and CEO of the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), will speak to Columbus audiences on two occasions during Open Access Week.  The first will be on Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at the Worthington Public Library in Old Worthington, 820 High Street, Worthington, OH from 7:00-8:30 p.m.  (Please park on the street or in one of the Worthington City lots).  The second opportunity to hear Ms. Furlong will be on Thursday, October 21 at OSU’s Science and Engineering Library, 175 W. 18th Ave. from 10:30 a.m.-noon in Room 070/090.

PPMD is a nonprofit organization that focuses on research, advocacy, and education for and about Duchenne muscular dystrophy.   As part of that advocacy, Ms. Furlong is an eloquent speaker on the importance of the public’s access to published medical research.

When Pat Furlong found that two of her children had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, she needed all the information she could find on how to treat and manage their disease.  Even though she is a nurse and her husband is a doctor, it was difficult to access research on how to treat their children’s condition.  It was then when Ms. Furlong became a proponent of open access publishing, a movement that encourages making scholarly journal articles more freely available over the internet.

Both programs are free and open to the public.

For more information about Open Access Week programming at The Ohio State University, contact Anne Gilliland, anne.gilliland@osumc.edu or visit http://go.osu.edu/openaccess.

Open Access Week at Ohio State University is sponsored by the Prior Health Sciences Library, University Libraries, the Knowlton School of Architecture, and the OSU Department of Mathematics.  It is supported with a Learning Technology grant from the Digital Union.  In addition, this project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. N01-LM6-3503 with the University of Illinois at Chicago.