Jonathan Tennant (6 May 1988 â 9 April 2020) was an English open science activist, science communicator and vertebrate paleontologist.
Tennant was born in 1988 in Kirby Muxloe, Leicestershire. His first 18 years were in Leicester with his parents and two sisters, Rebecca and Sarah. Jon attended Granby Primary School, Bushloe High School and then Beauchamp College. He obtained a PhD from Imperial College London in 2017, on a potential extinction event at the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary. He also published research on atoposaurids, an extinct group of small early crocodilian relatives.
As a science communicator, Jon was a regular contributor to Discover on paleontology.
A key advocate, speaker and activist in the Open Science movement, he was a supporter of open access to knowledge and cultural change within the scientific community. He was an Editor for the PLOS Paleo Community, executive editor for Geoscience Communication, part of the Mozilla Open Leadership Cohort, and worked as Communications Director for ScienceOpen. With Jennifer Beamer, Jeroen Bosman, , Neo Christopher Chung, Gail Clement, and others, he wrote an influential guide and strategy on open access and open research.
He was a panelist and keynote speaker at various academic and scholarly publishing conferences worldwide. Among his talks are
In 2014, Tennant and open access advocates drafted an open letter to American Association for the Advancement of Science expressing concerns about the journal Science Advances. They cited issues with reuse restrictions, failure to meet Budapest Open Access Initiative standards, and high publication fees.
He was a founder of the Open Science MOOC and the preprint service PaleorXiv.
In 2018, Tennant was banned from open science conference OpenCon after violating the conference's anti-harassment policy. This ban was publicly announced by OpenCon in 2019. Tennant accepted that he had behaved inappropriately at a 2016 conference (which he claimed had involved an "isolated incident of dancing with a friend/colleague while at a party, and running my hands down their side") and apologised. Tennant was subsequently accused of rape and sexual assault, which Tennant denied. The ban and allegations had a serious negative impact on Tennant's standing within the open science movement and academia more broadly, causing him to lose positions in academic journals (among others) and speaking engagements.
He later lived in Berlin, Paris, and Bali. Tennant died from a motorbike accident in Bali on 9 April 2020 at the age of 31.