Cooper Smout (ORCID: 0000-0003-1144-3272) is on a mission to revolutionize scientific conduct and communication through the principles of Open Science. Unhappy with the costly, inefficient, and biased nature of scholarly publishing, Cooper founded Project Free Our Knowledge to harness the collective action of researchers worldwide. He then built on learnings in this space to found Open Heart + Mind, a citizen science project that is developing an evidence-based framework for directly rewarding public goods created by diverse communities, spanning Open Science and beyond.

With Open Heart + Mind, Cooper seeks to harness the collective power of commons-oriented communities around the world by creating a universal framework for recognizing and rewarding diverse contributions to the commons. His vision is to create a digitally-encoded language of gratitude for public goods, forming a meta-communication layer that can foster collaboration and connect aligned communities in the pursuit of their common goals.

Join Cooper and Jo on this podcast episode where they discuss the evolution of open science, personal experiences with academia and mental health, challenges in transitioning to open access publishing, and his two projects, Free Our Knowledge and Open Heart + Mind. They discuss the resistance within academia, the need for cultural shifts, and the slow progress towards Open Science under the current academic model. Cooper shares his journey with Free Our Knowledge and how his learnings from this space led him to leave academia temporarily to prototype a new model for global systemic change, in the form of Open Heart + Mind.