FAQ

For 14 years, the Alfred P. Sloan Work and Family Research Network served a global community as the premier online destination for information and resources about work and family. The Sloan Network housed a virtual library of research and reference information including the Work and Family Encyclopedia, the Glossary, a “Who’s Who” database of work and family leaders, and a Literature Database of citations and annotations. The Sloan Network’s virtual presence allowed individuals across various disciplines to connect to the work and family global community. The Sloan Network closed in February 2012.

Sloan Network funding concluded in October 2010, at which time transition funding was obtained to develop the new Work and Family Researchers Network. The Sloan Network website closed in February 2012.

The events calendar allows members and interested visitors to stay informed about the important activities taking place in the global work and family academic community. You can post information about your events, see when calls for papers are due, and learn about conferences, workshops, events or meetings.

Don’t miss the first interdisciplinary work and family conference! Connect with your colleagues and peers from the various disciplines that comprise the work and family field. In addition to the customary academic conference sessions, the conference will feature a number of professional development workshops and innovative sessions.

The conference will take place from Thursday morning, June 14th (10 am) through Saturday evening, June 16th (6 pm), 2012 at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square, New York City. The conference registration form is available here. 

Rooms are no longer available at the Millennium Broadway Hotel.  We have sold out all our room nights. 

Rooms are now available at the New York Marriott Marquis and the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel.  The Marriott Marquis is located at 1535 Broadway which is between 45th and 46th St.  The Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel is located at Two Times Square, 714 Seventh Avenue at W. 48th St.

Both hotels are walking distance to the conference venue, the Millennium Broadway Hotel.

To make your reservations for the New York Marriott Marquis, please click here.

If you want to reserve by phone, please use the following dedicated Group Reservations phone numbers in order to make sure that you are able to access the special block rate of $289 per night.
Reservations Toll Free: 1-877-513-6305
Reservations Local Phone: 1-506-474-2009

To make your reservations for the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel, please click here.

If you want to reserve by phone, please use the following dedicated Group Reservations phone number in order to make sure that you are able to access the special block rate of $289 per night.
Reservations Toll Free: 1-800-772-5897. Please reference the Work & Family Researchers Network Biennial Meeting Room Block.

For more hotel and travel information, go here.

Conference only Registration Fees (US dollars) below:

General registration $175
Member registration $125
Student registration  $  50

If you are presenting at the conference you must be a member. You can pay your registration fee and membership dues at the same time by selecting one of the combination payment options at the end of the registration form. Please pay both your membership dues and the registration fee by December 15, 2011.

You do not have to be a member to attend the conference. However, WFRN members will receive a discounted conference rate. If you would like to register for the conference and join as a new member at the same time, you may choose one of the combination payment options at the end of the registration form.

Information about conference only fees or combination conference registration/membership dues rates are available here.

Yes, if you are presenting at the conference you must be a WFRN member. You can pay your registration fee and membership dues at the same time by selecting one of the combination payment options on the registration form. Please pay both your membership dues and registration fee by December 15, 2011.

Information about conference only fees or combination conference registration/membership dues rates is available here.

Childcare for conference attendees and their families will be provided by Bright Horizons at a discounted rate. Childcare will be available for children up to 12 years old. Childcare hours are from 8 am - 6 pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Please indicate on your conference registration form that you would like childcare.  In order to secure a spot for your child(ren), we need to know by February 1, 2012

More details will be provided as the conference date approaches. Visit the Millennium Hotel website for information about hotel amenities including family and children’s services.

Applications for the 2011-2012 cohort are no longer being accepted; the deadline was July 31, 2011. An additional cohort will be recruited in early 2013.

Your login is your email address. If you forget your password, click on the tab on the login page for resetting your password.  Change your password is the 3rd tab under User account.

If your email changes, contact us.

Your request for a login must be approved by our site administrator.  We take this step to ensure that we are not giving logins to spammers.  Usually, we approve requests within 24 hours, but it can take longer if your request is sent during the weekend or a holiday.  Also, you might want to check your trash/junk/spam folder.  In some cases, the email with your one time password will go there instead of to your inbox.

You are probably getting this error message,  "Your password must contain at least 6 characters. It should include numbers, punctuation, and both upper and lowercase letters."   

It is likely that your computer is configured to block a pop-up window.  You may notice a warning about blocked pop-up windows near the top of your computer screen.  You might want to disable this feature for this transaction or try again using a different browser.

First, you will need to be logged in.  After you are logged in, click on the login button (top right) again.  This will take you to "My Account." Click on the edit tab (next to view), then click on the Personal Profile tab (underneath view) and you should see (scroll down) the fields to add the bio and picture.  One tip, if you are copying the bio text from a website (not a word doc), strip it first using Notepad to get rid of any word garbage.

There are many benefits for members of the Work and Family Researchers Network.

Members enjoy:

• An interdisciplinary work and family home base
• Access to the WFRN online resources and community
• The opportunity to present at our biennial conference
• Discounted conference registration
• Member Directory
• The chance to assume leadership roles as elected officers
• The option to serve as committee members
• Voting privileges 
• Other benefits

More information available here.

For information about WFRN’s membership categories and dues, click here.

Founding and Sponsoring members are work and family scholars, academics, practitioners, policy makers, and other interested individuals who make a 3-year commitment to join WFRN in the first year of operation (dues year 2012). Founding and Sponsoring memberships are available for this first year (2012) only.

Membership is based on the calendar year. Dues will be collected in the fall of 2011 for the calendar year 2012 (January 1 – December 31, 2012). Each year, dues for new or renewing memberships will be collected in the fall for the following calendar year.

Your membership will be valid only for the calendar year in which you join (starting with 2012). Please remember that you are joining for the calendar year regardless of the month that you join.  All memberships will renew at the same time.

Memberships are not transferable.

Information about elections will be available at a later date.

1. You can visit our homepage to see the latest news.

2. To receive a daily email of news items added to the WFRN website sign up here.  

3. A subscription to our News Feed (delivered to your web-based reader such as Google Reader) is available here.

Please note that your news item will be auto shared with our Linkedin group, Facebook page and Twitter account. Follow us on Twitter @wfrn.

We know that many of you are interested in continued access to the resources previously provided by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. The Sloan Network is currently closed. We have preserved our most popular legacy information in the Archive of the new WFRN. However, information has not been updated since 2011. In some cases, information is older than 2011. Click here for a list of items available in the Archive.

The former Sloan Work and Family Research Network, WFRN’s predecessor, had been generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for 14 years. When that funding concluded, the WFRN was created to sustain the impact on the work and family community and continue the legacy established by the Foundation.

Open access technology has enabled the WFRN to transform to an innovative website with similar benefits at significantly lower cost—a natural evolution of the former Sloan Network model with staff-produced content to a decentralized, user-based model of resource generation and dissemination.

Open Access (OA) is a term commonly used to describe a worldwide movement that promotes free, immediate, permanent online access to and unrestricted use of full-text research articles. Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge to the reader, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, so there are no price barriers and no permission barriers. More information can be found here.

Open access repositories may be institutionally-based (e.g., universities or laboratories) enhancing the visibility and impact of the institution and its faculty (e.g., Penn Scholarly Commons at the University of Pennsylvania), or they may be centralized, subject-based collections like the economics repository (e.g., RePEc Research Papers in Economics), the physics repository (arXiv), or the Aquatic and Marine Science repository (Aquatic Commons), a thematic digital repository covering natural marine environments. More information can be found here.

Open access content reaches the broadest possible audience by eliminating the price and permission barriers of subscription-based journals. Scholars and researchers at institutions without journal subscriptions and interested individuals outside the academy have immediate access to your work. With a broader audience and no access delays, your research has the potential for the greatest impact. Although the new WFRN is geared toward academics, we hope to reach a broader audience of students, researchers, journalists, policy analysts, workplace practitioners and others with an interest in work and family issues who may not have ready access to a well-funded university library or may not be able to afford journal subscriptions.

No, anyone with an interest in work and family research is welcome to access and browse the materials gathered in WFC free of charge. To contribute materials to the repository, you will have to create a login. Materials are submitted directly by authors. There is no fee to register.

Publisher policies are an important aspect of submissions to open access repositories (WFC copyright guidelines). If you want to submit journal articles, you will find that publisher policies vary by journal.

Virtually all peer-reviewed journals allow authors to publish working papers (prior to peer review) in an open access format, even if an author intends to publish the final version in that journal. These are called pre-prints.

For previously published articles to be deposited in an open access repository, publishers often require a specific version to be submitted; typically this is the version that has been edited based on comments from the peer-review process but not yet copy edited by the journal. These are called post-prints.

To look up a specific journal’s current policy on open access submissions and to find additional information on Publisher and Copyright archiving policies, view the comprehensive SHERPA/RoMEO website.

We also encourage you to consult your agreement with the publisher for more specific information. Many publishers can be approached on a case-by-case basis for individual permission to post a specific article.

You need to know the copyright status of your work before submitting it. If the copyright belongs to you, you keep it. If you share the copyright with other authors, check with them to make sure they also approve of the work being archived and made available at WFC. WFRN asks for your permission to display your work on the Internet. If another party (such as an academic publisher or organization) owns the copyright, you need to secure their permission for the inclusion of the full-text version in WFC. Go here for WFC Copyright Guidelines. You may have transferred your copyright to your publisher as part of the publication process. You should check your publisher's copyright policy to determine allowable submissions to a non-profit, subject matter repository. The SHERPA website provides publisher copyright policies.

All authors must sign a submission agreement as part of the submission process to confirm that posting their work to the WFC does not infringe on any copyright laws. Go here for WFC Copyright Guidelines.

No, materials are submitted directly by authors (or their designee) with a WFRN login. If you have questions, email: workandfamily@sas.upenn.edu

One of the unique features of the WFRN is the archive of legacy information from the former Sloan Work and Family Research Network. The more than 11,000 citations from the former Sloan Network Literature Database have been retained and deposited into the WFC. You will find more full-text documents as new material is deposited.

Go to the link below on this page here, for a Tutorial PowerPoint explaining how to use the Work and Family Commons. 

Navigating the WFRN website and the Work and Family Commons  | 2-20-12

You will also find links to information about open access on this page.