Based on popularity from views on our YouTube Page, the most popular talk in 2017 was the one provided by Becky Douglas from University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy.
Over the years, we’ve had a number of speakers either from Digital Science or from one of their portfolio companies. The most recent speaker we’ve had from Digital Science was Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation.
Seems like a lot to take in? If you want to explore further, you can check out all of ReCon’s video coverage from a broad range of speakers on their blog. Inspired by ReCon, the UofG Library Team will also be holding an event for researchers on 27 October with tours, talks and tools to help you with research communication!
ReCon has become my favourite small conference about publishing and research. It’s held each June in Edinburgh. I attended it in 2015 and really enjoyed it. There were stimulating presentations on non-trivial topics, and plenty of interesting conversations over coffee and lunch. So I went again this year with high expectations that were not disappointed.
Thus far, our most prolific speaker by far has been Cory Doctorow. It was an honour to have Cory come and talk in 2014 (the conference was then called EdinPubConf).
At the time, Timo Hannay was Managing Director at Digital Science (prior to that, Timo was the publishing director of Web Publishing at Nature Publishing Group). He spoke for us in 2014 and delivered an excellent Keynote talk.
We were extremely pleased that Linda Gillard was available to give a talk for us at EdinPubConf in our first year (2013). This was our most popular talk that year.
*In 2013 and 2014, the event was branded with the name EdinPubConf (EPC) and our excellent team consisted of Joanna Young, Graham Steel, Rachel Willmer & Jan Wessnitzer.
SESSION ONE: Publishing’s future: Disruption and Evolution within the Industry
Moderated by Graham Steel
Pablo De Castro: Open Access Advocacy Librarian at the University of Strathclyde
100% Open Access by 2020 or disrupting the present scholarly comms landscape: you can’t have both? A mid-way update
With the momentum provided by research funders’ Open Access policies like HEFCE’s, Wellcome’s and RCUK’s, Open Access implementation has reached its maturity in the UK. The broad political agreement at the Amsterdam Conference last year to aim for full OA by 2020 at an EU level has added extra leverage to the attempt to progress with large-scale OA implementation across a fairly fragmented policy landscape. Even with the intrinsic contradiction between quickly reaching 100% OA and disrupting the present scholarly communications landscape, there’s a growing consensus that we’re heading towards a ‘new’ situation where Academia may regain some control over its own research output. The presentation looks into the current status of this process, examining the impact of disruptive initiatives like the Open Library of Humanities, the no-hybrid OA policies or Sci-Hub.
Phill Jones: Director of Publishing Innovation, Digital Science
Inputs, Outputs and emergent properties: The new Scientometrics
The analyses of citation counts and the Impact Factor have long formed the basis of research evaluation at the individual, institutional, and national levels. While an important indicator of scholarly interest and reuse, citations do not entirely capture the impact that a given piece of research makes, nor does it provide insight into every facet of research activity. This concept is known as the ‘Evaluation Gap’. Over the past decade or so, new forms of research evaluation have begun to gain traction among policymakers, including those who hire and promote academics. Starting with the altmetric revolution, scientometricians are looking at awarded grants, patents, policy documents and a range of other indicators to give a more complete picture of research activity and outputs.
Stuart Lawson: Doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London
Against Capital
The ways in which scholars exchange and share their work have evolved through pragmatic responses to the political and economic contexts in which they are embedded. So rather than being designed to fulfill their function in an optimal way, our methods of scholarly communication have been distorted by the interests of capital and by neoliberal logic. If these two interlinked political forces – that suffuse all aspects of our lives – are the reason for the mess we are currently in, then surely any alternative scholarly communication system we create should be working against them, not with them. The influence of capital in scholarly publishing, and the overwhelming force of neoliberalism in our working practices, is the problem. So when the new ‘innovative disrupters’ are fully aligned with the political forces that need to be dismantled, it is questionable that the new way of doing things is a significant improvement.
Uber disrupted taxis; Airbnb disrupted hotels; Amazon disrupted retailers…all because they didn’t look at the existing solutions and look to improve upon them – but instead, by totally redesigning what those industries had built in a time before the internet. The idea of disruption is not new – ‘Silicon Valley’ has been flourishing for 30 years – but, ironically, despite being invented as a result of science, the internet has left researchers decades behind. So – what does peer review and publishing and wet lab work look like in a world of Tinder, CTRL+C and Skype? How do you begin to think about innovating in a world of long processes, fierce bureaucracy and prolonged stagnation? How can you truly ‘disrupt’ science?
How well are your online tracks and traces representing you? In this short talk Nicola Osborne will offer some advice on managing your digital footprint by making a positive impact with social media, amplifying your scholarly work, and building a great professional profile to help you communicate your work.
Nicola will also touch on the importance of making sure your work is also fit for the future, with a brief introduction to an exciting new project, Reference Rot in Theses: A Hiberlink Pilot, which is building tools and approaches to support researchers like you to ensure the URLs you cite remains valid and provide access to relevant snapshots of the web long after you’ve submitted that thesis or publication.
The ways in which early career researchers are currently evaluated typically ignores much of the valuable activity they undertake, for which they do not receive credit. At F1000, we are working to change this by partnering with major research funders and institutions (e.g. Wellcome, Gates Foundation) to provide platforms to capture a much broader range of activities and delineate more clearly the contributions of each individual. This includes enabling publication of all types of research outputs, from posters, to small pieces of data & code, to negative/null results, all the way to full narrative research articles. We are also developing new approaches to enable the quality, reach and impact of that work to be captured at the level of the output, independent from the venue of publication, using CRediT to recognise individual researcher contributions.
Open Peer Review enables the contribution of referees to scientific review and discussion to be captured, with referee names published alongside the review, identified as principal or co-referee together with information on their specific area of expertise. By getting the funders on board, we hope to break the hegemony of the traditional STM publishers, change the way science is communicated, and ultimately enable researchers to receive recognition for all their work.
Anna Ritchie: Product Manager for researcher profiles and stats on Mendeley
Make an impact, know your impact, show your impact
Advancing science is more important than ever, yet researchers face increasing pressure and new challenges in the changing research landscape. Elsevier is evolving its products and services to support researchers with changing needs, not only in publishing their work, but throughout the research lifecycle. I’ll talk about a few ways in which Elsevier helps researchers to try to increase the impact of their work, including Mendeley as a platform for monitoring and showing your impact.
Becky Douglas: University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy
How to share science with hard to reach groups and why you should bother
Increasingly, institutions and researchers are recognising the benefits of science communication and public outreach. Many are now finding it necessary to report on outreach activities in order to complete annual reviews and promotion and grant applications. Certainly, with so much research being publicly funded it is clearly only fair that the public get to hear about where their money goes. However, it is important that this does not become a simple box-ticking exercise. In this talk I will discuss why we need to reach out to those groups who might not be your typical audience at a science festival, and I will make some suggestions about how to go about this.
Lewis MacKenzie: Biomedical Physicist, University of Leeds
What helps or hinders science communication by early career researchers?
Early career researchers are often excellent science communicators. However, they also face substantial and numerous pressures around their career and life, resulting in science communication falling by the wayside. This talk will explore the factors that make it hard for early career researchers to pursue science communication, and ask what can be done to help science communication continue through the turbulent career transition phases that face early career researchers.
As an entity, whilst preprints have been around for some time, there have been a number of significant developments over the last few years. In this short talk, Graham will take you through a journey in time, touching upon the history, developments and what the future may hold in terms of preprints.
SESSION THREE: Raising your research profile: online engagement & metrics
Moderated by Joanna Young & Graham Steel
Laura Henderson: Editorial Program Manager, Humanities & Social Sciences and Physical Sciences & Engineering Frontiers Media.
Green, Gold, and Getting out there: How your choice of publisher services can affect your research profile and engagement
In today’s academic world, it is important for every researcher to raise their profile and get maximum engagement with their publications. The rapid rise of Open Access in publishing reflects that need. But what are the differences between the Open Access formats – Green, Gold, and more? When choosing a publishing route (and particular publisher), you know that peer review and indexing are major quality indicators, but what extraordinary services should researchers be selectively seeking, and how can these help ensure better visibility and recognition?
At Frontiers, we were born digital and fully open access, with the ongoing aim of constantly innovating to meet the needs of our academic authors. Let’s talk about what discoverability tools a top-level academic publisher should offer (and how Frontiers provides these): from article-level to author impact metrics and networking tools, to community engagement and targeted research promotion.
Rachel Lammey: CrossRef Member & Community Outreach team
What are all these dots and what can linking them tell me?
Your research doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We’re familiar with linking articles (dots) to other articles, data, versions, and authors. So far, so traditional. However, interest is growing in tracking other platforms, tools and sources that might cite and use research (other dots). Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, blogs, and more—they all support the discussion, sharing, and promotion of research—so why not add them into the mix?
That’s what Event Data will help you do; it provides a unique record of the web activity related to individual research outputs. Not just articles, but also books, datasets, preprints, and anything with a Crossref DOI. We make that data openly available through a public API. What can this data tell us? That’s where you come in: what’s your interpretation of these dots? How would you evaluate this data in the context of your work? Give us some food for thought (and action)!
Jean Liu: Product Development Manager for Altmetric
The wonderful world of altmetrics: why researchers’ voices matter
Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data about the online attention received by research outputs. With over 49 million mentions about research collected by data provider Altmetric.com (14 million mentions from 2016 alone), there is a wealth of fascinating information to analyse. Over the past 5 years, the awareness and usage of altmetrics experienced a meteoric rise amongst the scholarly community, with publishers being some of the earliest adopters. Now, universities, funders, and even pharmaceutical companies are taking an interest. But the core of altmetrics are the researchers, who act as both recipients and producers of online attention that gets captured. So how can researchers manage the narratives surrounding their work, watch out for media spin, and ensure that they get credit where it’s due? Altmetrics present an opportunity for researchers to really understand the audiences they are reaching, and find new ways for making their voices heard.
How to help more people find and understand your work
With so many tools and networks for sharing your research, how do you know which ones will be most effective? The bad news is there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. The good news is that Kudos will tailor an answer just for you. This talk will look at some of the different ways you might communicate around your work, and show how you can use the free Kudos system to help you track those communications, and map them directly against your publication metrics (readership, citations, altmetrics) so you can see which efforts have the highest impact.
Academic publishing in the 21st Century, data & information visualisation and online tools for researchers were all discussed at ReCon this year and the Conference was a huge success.
Projects included Our hackday overall winner was Gary Martin (centre). Our two equal runners up were Bianca Kramer (left) and Yujie Hu and Xiehua Ji from Durham Uni. (right)
The hackday also included a short introductory Workshop to the data visualisation software Tableau. The workshop was delivered by Edinburgh based data visualisation company NumberTelling and is designed for beginners to the Tableau software. Anyone can sign up for a free 15 day trial for Tableau and students are able to use the software for free.
Here is Rebecca Kaye (Data visualisation specialist) presenting the Workshop.
In addition to the main conference, we will be holding an additional research communication & data visualisation hackday the following day (25 June) which is free to attend. There will be prizes available including cash!! A total of £400 (2 x £200 prizes) will be up for grabs! Details of our 2015 hackday can be found here.
The hackday is open to anyone who is interested in coming along and we will provide a forum for discussion in advance. You are welcome to come with an idea or your own or join another group. To help us with the planning, it is helpful for the participants to share ideas in advance so please take two minutes to add yours on this shared Google spreadsheet.
What will we be doing?
The ideas for the hackday do not have to be software based, they can include paperhacking, any type of information/data visualisation (a poster, a detailed scientific figure or dynamic online presentation) and more… Maybe you want to come along and learn how to use a new data visualisation software to build figures for research papers? Perhaps you would like to learn more data visualisation techniques from others? Or improve the data visualisations you use in presentations? Then the hackday is for you!
The hackday will also include a short introductory workshop to the data visualisation software Tableau. The workshop will be delivered by Edinburgh based data visualisation company NumberTelling and is designed for beginners to the Tableau software. Anyone can sign up for a free 15 day trial for Tableau and students are able to use the software for free.
Overview of the day
1000 – 1015 Arrive
1015 – 1045 Idea presentations
1045 – 1100 Discussion and team formations
1100 – 1215 Tableau workshop – optional (the team from NumberTelling will give an introductory workshop)
1215 – 1245 Lunch
1245 – 1700 Free to build/ hack/ create/ learn
1700 – 1730 3 minute team presentations
1745 – 1800 Prizes
1800 Finish
What will I need to bring with me?
We recommend that all participants bring a laptop and charger with them. You may wish to bring the following:
Andrew Tattersall, Information Specialist at The School of Health and Related Research (Now joining us remotely)
More than Numbers: Alternative Indicators of Scholarly Communications and Reach
Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives, CrossRef
The Citation Fetish
Citation has become a much practiced and little-understood ritual in scholarly communication. It is simultaneously aggrandised with quasi-magical career promotion properties and (paradoxically) trivialised when it is conflated with “linking.” Citation, like so much of scholarly communication, has become distorted. As we rush to make data and software “first class” research outputs in scholarly communication, we are in danger of building a citation cargo cult – where we emulate the surface features and rituals of traditional citation without providing a sound infrastructure for the future evolution of scholarly communication.
Mike Jones, Senior Product Manager, Mendeley
Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities
Preservation and accessibility of research data is one of the biggest issues currently facing science. Recent studies suggest that up 80% of original research data obtained through publicly-funded research is lost within two decades after publication. In response, funding agencies have introduced data-sharing mandates, requiring researchers to publish their data. In scientific publishing, concerns about the reproducibility of science and scientific fraud are increasing; sharing data leads to more transparency and trust. Furthermore for researchers themselves, sharing data adds to the possibilities for generating new findings. He’ll look at a range of solutions (Mendeley and others) that allow researchers to manage their data throughout their research lifecycle, and make their data available to and citable by others.
Joanna Young, Director, Scientific Editing Company
Data & information visualisation: the good, the bad & the ugly
Designing good visualisations can be challenging and it is important to consider a number of factors before touching a computer. Data visualisation is a large field and different research projects will require different types of visualisations and software tools. This talk will cover a range of different data and information visualisation examples that are relevant to researchers.
The principles underpinning good design can be a powerful tool when applied to information. In our talk, seven principles of design, we look at how you can apply these principles of design theory to your data so that you can see the story behind the numbers.
.
Ian Calvert, Senior Data Scientist, Digital Science
Data visualisation: early and often, the path to clean data.
Visualisations are often an afterthought, or a nice-to-have added on at the end if you’ve got time. I’ll try and convince you to make visualisations an integral part of your workflow, and show how it can make not only your own life easier but improve things for the community as a whole.
Isaac Roseboom, Head of Insight at deltaDNA
What does it mean to be `data-driven’?
Modern companies love to claim that their decision making is `data-driven’ but very few have visibility of data beyond a few performance metrics. In this talk I will show how deltaDNA is helping games companies use data to understand how players interact with their products and drive design and marketing decisions from this.
Of shapes and style: visualising innovations in scholarly communication
Changing research practices are reflected in the patterns of creation and usage of research tools. Analyzing and presenting these complex patterns greatly benefits from visualisation. In their “101 Innovations” project, Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman have used a variety of visualisations from the very start. They will tell the story of changing scholarly communication using these visualizations.
Cuna Ekmekcioglu, Senior Research Data Officer, Library & University Collections, The University of Edinburgh
Understanding and overcoming challenges to sharing personal and sensitive data
Researchers today are pressured to share their research data and make it accessible to other researchers as part of the scholarly/scientific record. But what if you have collected data about human subjects? Does the need for disclosure control about human subjects necessarily mean that your research data cannot be shared and re-used? For many researchers, the sensitivity of research data is one of the main barriers to data sharing. Fear of violating ethical or legal obligations, lack of knowledge about disclosure control and the time required to anonymise data to a suitable standard often prevent valuable datasets from seeing the light of day.
This presentation will touch on topics such as informed consent, anonymisation and pseudonomisation techniques, and what it means to be ethical with regard to data sharing about human subjects, including rich, qualitative data and research into social media content.
Andrew Tattersall, Information Specialist at The School of Health and Related Research (Now joining us remotely)
More than Numbers: Alternative Indicators of Scholarly Communications and Reach
Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives, CrossRef
The Citation Fetish
Citation has become a much practiced and little-understood ritual in scholarly communication. It is simultaneously aggrandised with quasi-magical career promotion properties and (paradoxically) trivialised when it is conflated with “linking.” Citation, like so much of scholarly communication, has become distorted. As we rush to make data and software “first class” research outputs in scholarly communication, we are in danger of building a citation cargo cult – where we emulate the surface features and rituals of traditional citation without providing a sound infrastructure for the future evolution of scholarly communication.
Mike Jones, Senior Product Manager, Mendeley
Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities
Preservation and accessibility of research data is one of the biggest issues currently facing science. Recent studies suggest that up 80% of original research data obtained through publicly-funded research is lost within two decades after publication. In response, funding agencies have introduced data-sharing mandates, requiring researchers to publish their data. In scientific publishing, concerns about the reproducibility of science and scientific fraud are increasing; sharing data leads to more transparency and trust. Furthermore for researchers themselves, sharing data adds to the possibilities for generating new findings. He’ll look at a range of solutions (Mendeley and others) that allow researchers to manage their data throughout their research lifecycle, and make their data available to and citable by others.
Joanna Young, Director, Scientific Editing Company
Data & information visualisation: the good, the bad & the ugly
Designing good visualisations can be challenging and it is important to consider a number of factors before touching a computer. Data visualisation is a large field and different research projects will require different types of visualisations and software tools. This talk will cover a range of different data and information visualisation examples that are relevant to researchers.
The principles underpinning good design can be a powerful tool when applied to information. In our talk, seven principles of design, we look at how you can apply these principles of design theory to your data so that you can see the story behind the numbers.
.
Ian Calvert, Senior Data Scientist, Digital Science
Data visualisation: early and often, the path to clean data.
Visualisations are often an afterthought, or a nice-to-have added on at the end if you’ve got time. I’ll try and convince you to make visualisations an integral part of your workflow, and show how it can make not only your own life easier but improve things for the community as a whole.
Isaac Roseboom, Head of Insight at deltaDNA
What does it mean to be `data-driven’?
Modern companies love to claim that their decision making is `data-driven’ but very few have visibility of data beyond a few performance metrics. In this talk I will show how deltaDNA is helping games companies use data to understand how players interact with their products and drive design and marketing decisions from this.
Of shapes and style: visualising innovations in scholarly communication
Changing research practices are reflected in the patterns of creation and usage of research tools. Analyzing and presenting these complex patterns greatly benefits from visualisation. In their “101 Innovations” project, Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman have used a variety of visualisations from the very start. They will tell the story of changing scholarly communication using these visualizations.
Cuna Ekmekcioglu, Senior Research Data Officer, Library & University Collections, The University of Edinburgh
Understanding and overcoming challenges to sharing personal and sensitive data
Researchers today are pressured to share their research data and make it accessible to other researchers as part of the scholarly/scientific record. But what if you have collected data about human subjects? Does the need for disclosure control about human subjects necessarily mean that your research data cannot be shared and re-used? For many researchers, the sensitivity of research data is one of the main barriers to data sharing. Fear of violating ethical or legal obligations, lack of knowledge about disclosure control and the time required to anonymise data to a suitable standard often prevent valuable datasets from seeing the light of day.
This presentation will touch on topics such as informed consent, anonymisation and pseudonomisation techniques, and what it means to be ethical with regard to data sharing about human subjects, including rich, qualitative data and research into social media content.
