New Work and Family Researchers Network

Let us tell you a little bit about what we have been doing to create the new Work and Family Researchers Network, now located at the University of Pennsylvania.  First, we are in the process of building a new web platform to create the next generation of opportunities for information sharing and networking.  The new website will feature a work and family subject matter Open Access Repository (OAR), a news tagging component and other interactive features. An OAR is a searchable database of academic papers, similar to anelectronic library database, with the difference being that content in the repository is visible to search engines and freely available to anyone.  Once we launch the new website (target date in August), we will provide you with anintroduction to OA for those of you who are interested in submitting your work and using the OAR.

Second, we are creating a new membership organization for academic work and family researchers from a broad range of fields as well as offering opportunities to engage the next generation of work and family scholars. The WFRN will also welcome the participation of policy makers and workplace practitioners as it seeks to promote knowledge and understanding of work and family issues. To acknowledge the community-driven nature of our new website and the importance of members to the success of the organization, we have changed the word “Research” to “Researchers.” So our new name is theWork and Family Researchers Network – we hope to become an international membership organization that seeks to advance, promote and disseminate interdisciplinary research on work and family.

The new WFRN will offer both the traditional benefits of a membership organization and an online peer community for multidisciplinary scholars to share their work, meet online and offline, and advance the field of work and family research. You will be able to get involved by contributing your research articles, providing news items, posting events and by taking a leadership role in advancing the organization as an elected officer or committee member. Wewant to foster both face-to-face and virtual connections among the work andfamily community of global stakeholders.  We hope that sounds as exciting to you as it does to us.

We invite you to join the WFRN and become a member.  Membership levels and payment options will be communicated shortly.  We will keep you posted and hope that you get involved.

To learn more and stay updated, please visit our interim website at: http://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/index.html

Best,

Jerry A. Jacobs, Executive Officer

Judi Casey, Director

P.S. Don’t forget to Save the Date for our Inaugural Conference: June 14-16, 2012.