#open-access

#open-access

A tweet can travel far, but it cannot spark a spontaneous conversation in the hallway. Conferences offer in-person engagement, but they are infrequent and often exclusive or too busy. Hanging a paper on your office door? That's immediate, local and quietly powerful. It is a symbolic gesture that brings your research into the physical space of the university, something rarely done in today's digital culture.

In 2019, Jenna Keindel came across a research paper that would change her life. The Canadian, then aged 37, found it through a Facebook group of people affected by limb-girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD), a condition that causes progressive muscle weakness. Keindel was diagnosed with it when she was 16. The paper suggested that another condition, called anti-HMGCR myopathy, a rare autoimmune disease that causes severe muscle weakness, shared some symptoms with specific subtypes of LGMD and was sometimes misdiagnosed as LGMD.