Erin McKiernan is a professor in the Department of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a researcher in experimental and computational biophysics and neurophysiology, and an advocate for open access, open data, and open science. She is also the founder of Why Open Research? (whyopenresearch.org), an educational site for researchers. She blogs at emckiernan.wordpress.com. You can follow her on twitter at @emckiernan13.