TertulIA Saber — Read the Science

Every story that says "a study found…" points at a paper you were never expected to open. This course walks you through six doors into the scholarly record itself — what’s settled, what’s brand new, what’s most cited, and how much of it you can actually read. No university login.

Open all six doors

CrossRef counts the settled record. arXiv shows the frontier — where nine of the ten newest papers on misinformation are about AI. OpenAlex draws the citation map that used to be sold. DOAJ shelves only what's 100% open. PubMed speaks medicine's protocol. CORE hands you the full text.

Keep score against the paywall

Every lesson adds a row to a running scoreboard: walled, free, or half-free. The most famous paper in the field stays walled the whole course — not every wall falls — and the finale opens a 6,000-word paper whole and saves it to your Drive.

Ask in plain words

You describe what you want; Gemini writes the Python; you run it in a free Colab notebook. Results land in a spreadsheet — titles, journals, years, links, DOIs. Five of the six doors need no key at all; the sixth key is free.

About this course

Six lessons, one per door, all chasing the same topic — misinformation — so you watch one question travel the whole scholarly system: counted in CrossRef, preprinted on arXiv, ranked by citations in OpenAlex, fully open in DOAJ, medically indexed in PubMed, and finally read whole through CORE. Everything runs on Google’s free tier, in a Colab notebook you keep, with code Gemini writes from your plain-English ask. By the last lesson the scoreboard gives you an honest answer to the question the course opens with: how much of science can you actually read? Enough — if you know the doors.

Meet the Creator

Dr. Diego Bonilla is a Full Professor of Communication Studies at Sacramento State and teaches graduate courses at UNAM in Mexico City. His work on digital literacy precedes the current AI moment by two decades: in 2007 he served on the ETS panel that set the passing standards for iSkills, the national assessment of information and technology literacy, and on the California leadership roundtable whose policy framework preceded the state’s 2009 executive order on digital literacy. In 2026 the CSU Chancellor’s Office invited him to speak with media as a faculty expert for the release of its systemwide AI survey. TertulIA grew out of the faculty learning community on AI literacy he directed at Sacramento State, where these lessons were first taught to professors. Every lesson is his own — designed from his teaching and his research, and offered in both English and Spanish.

Curriculum

1 Chapter · 7 Lessons

1
1. (Included in full purchase)
  Before you start
2. (Included in full purchase)
  The CrossRef API
3. (Included in full purchase)
  The arXiv API
4. (Included in full purchase)
  The OpenAlex API
5. (Included in full purchase)
  The DOAJ API
6. (Included in full purchase)
  The PubMed API
7. (Included in full purchase)
  The CORE API

Ready to open the record?

Part of the TertulIA membership — five tracks, one subscription, and the scholarly record is the fifth door.

$10.00 / month

Enroll now