Not long now until this year’s SpotOn London conference (formerly Science Online London). Held at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre on Sunday 11th and Monday 12th November, the theme of this year’s event will be “Connections.” Celebrating the conference’s fifth anniversary, we’re looking forward to two days of discussions, learning new skills and networking. Whether you’re a technologist, librarian, science communicator, or academic researcher, we aim to have something of interest for you.
This year, there are a few amendments to the format of SpotOn London, including structuring the activities around three topic strands:
i) science communication and outreach
ii) online tools and digital publishing
iii) science policy
The three topic strands will have 6 discussion sessions and 3 workshops. Attendees are by no means restricted to just one strand, so if you’d like to jump between different tracks, you are welcome to.
In the meantime, here is a taster of the sessions and workshops we plan to feature in the Tools strand. Sessions in this track will focus on the use and development of online tools for scientists. Tools that can be used to visualize data, improve data sharing and measure research impact are among those to be discussed and demonstrated, providing a showcase for tools for different stages of the research cycle – from reference managers to data sharing to communication tools and eBooks. For developers, there will be opportunity to find out about tools, APIs and data provided for the creation of apps and services for a scientific audience. There is still time for these to evolve, so please do share your thoughts, all suggestions welcome.
The provisional programme for the Science Communication and Outreach Sessions can be found here. More information on the policy strand, plus the keynotes and fringe events to follow!
Tickets for this year’s conference have now sold out, however you can be added to the waiting list by signing up here. We are hopeful there will be a few spare tickets. If you have any questions, do feel free to email us: spoton@nature.com
Discussion sessions (1 hour)
Session A: Altmetrics beyond the Numbers
Coordinators: Euan Adie, Martin Fenner
Panel members: Sarah Venis
Hashtag: #solo12alt
Altmetrics look at the impact that research is having in the social web. They go beyond citations of scholarly papers, and also include usage statistics, sharing in social bookmarking sites, discussions on Twitter and Facebook, and mentions in science blogs and Wikipedia. Much of the discussion about altmetrics has focussed on the numbers collected by these tools, but their real value is in helping explore what happens after a paper (or other piece of research) is published, and how it is absorbed into the body of knowledge. In this session we will take a few examples as a starting point to highlight how altmetrics tools can help in this process. In the discussion we hopefully hear more interesting examples, but will also find time to talk about how the existing tools can be improved to go beyond collecting numbers and help tell great stories.
Session B: Data reuse
Coordinator: Mark Hahnel
Panel members: Ross Mounce, Sarah Callaghan
Hashtag: #solo12reuse
For some people reuse in academia is seen as a dirty word. But this is illogical. Reuse is impact. Every time a traditional academic paper is cited, someone is re-using their research to back up a statement which they are making. But this is only one of infinite ways in which academic outputs can be re-used, and the impact factor is only one (slightly dodgy) way of measuring this reuse. In this session we will explore the novel ways in which new technology allows us to build on the corpus of knowledge that academics around the globe are adding to on a daily basis. This includes pulling data out of traditional publications as well as linking new forms of research outputs. Of course the interesting part of this discussion will reflect how useful all of this data is for both the efficiency of academic progress, and the impact of an academic’s research.
Session C: The journal is dead, long live the journal
Coordinators: Bob O’Hara, Ian Mulvany, Anna Sharman
Panel members: Matias Piiperi, Ethan Perlstein, Davina Quarterman, Damian Pattinson
Hashtag: #solo12journals
Today’s online articles and journals remain mostly an online mirror of print products. Reduced time to publication and the potential for low-cost widespread dissemination are the two main benefits that journals gain from being on the web, yet many online innovations have not had much of an effect on our core concept of what a journal is. Innovations in business models, technology and social behaviours could all lead to changes in what a journal could be. This session will touch on the following questions. Are there any innovations that are having an effect on the mainstay of scientific communication – the journal? If you are a publisher, should you be looking to do anything different from what you are doing today? What can you practically do in 2012, and what are the challenges? If you are a reader or an author, what should you be demanding? Are there any enhancements to the journal that could offer a significant improvement to your ability to do science and to advance your career?
Session D: Publishing Research Data: What’s in it for me?
Coordinators: Brian Hole, Jonathan Tedds
Panel members: Simon Hodson, Neil Chue Hong
Hashtag: : #solo12data
In an ideal world, open and efficient science would involve the widespread sharing not only of research papers, but also of research data and software. This session will explore what needs to be done to increase publication of these outputs. What’s in it for researchers and for publishers? How are we increasing the incentives and rewards and how can we do more? And what could the ideal future of open data publication actually look like?
Session E: eBooks and apps
Coordinator: Manjit Kumar
Panel members: Marcus Chown, Will Francis, Henry Volans, Eric Cobbe
Ebooks no longer are a niche product for the geek, but have become mainstream tools to read long-form digital content. eBooks are not only a different distribution format, they offer unique opportunities to enrich the reading experience. This is particularly true for scientific content, from fiction, over textbooks to scholarly books. We are still in the middle of the transformation from traditional books to eBooks, and in this session we want to highlight and discuss some of the most exciting developments. The panelists of this session bring in unique expertise in this evolving area, and they will share their thoughts and ideas.
Hashtag: #solo12ebook
Session F: Motivation and rewards in community curation projects
Coordinators: Bastian Greshake, Jeffrey Lancaster
Panel members: Chris Evelo, Daniel Lombraña González
Hashtag: #solo12cc
Science has entered the age of Big Data. Biologists now have technologies at hand to sequence the genomes of complete organisms within a couple of days, generating terabytes of raw data doing so, and in physics the LHC alone generates some petabytes of data each year. While storing these amounts of data is already a huge problem the real challenge is making sense of this data deluge. To enable a thorough analysis of those quantities of data, much of it will end up in public databases. But reuse of data is hindered by the lack of knowledge about the data: How has it been produced? What is the quality of it? And: What does the data tell us? Annotating genetic sequences and biological pathways, cataloging specimens, providing digital meta data on archaeological artifacts: In the age of ubiquitous data curation becomes more and more important and harder as more and more data gets collected. We want to discuss how data curation in the age of Big Data can be made more efficient, utilizing modern technology and the power of crowdsourcing.
Workshops (1 hour)
Workshop A: Collaborating and building your online presence: educating scientists and science students
Organisers: Ruth Harrison, Jenny Evans
Members: Tom Phillips, Anna Zecharia, Stephen Curry, Mark Hahnel
Hashtag: #solo12edu
At Imperial College London Library, we have developed a programme (Blogs, Twitter, wikis and other web-based tools: collaborating and building your online presence) to educate postgraduate research students about not only the web 2.0 tools and technologies available to them to help with their research, but also the impact their use has on building their online presence and any legal and ethical implications. The programme is based online but includes a face to face workshop and the Library has worked with researchers and PhD students to integrate as many ‘real-life’ Imperial based examples as possible. Whilst many attendees at SpotOn London are already aware of what’s available, what about those who are not, or are interested but just not sure where to get started? And leading on from this – what about undergraduate science students? What should we be doing to introduce them to the these tools and technologies (as an additional form of scholarly communication in addition to more traditional means such as journal articles), in order to educate them from an early stage in their career? How can librarians and scientists work together to make this happen?
Workshop B: Tools for digital researchers – an app slam hosted by Digital Science
Organisesr: Digital Science
Hashtag: #solo12DS
Multiple participants to give 5-minute demos structured around the research cycle.
Workshop C: BrainSpace, a global interest graph for scientists. Utilizing social curation and semantics to spark a new age of discovery
Organiser: Dave Copps
Hashtag: #solo12PD
An interactive workshop introducing BrainSpace, a global interest graph for scientists. The speakers have deep experience in the area of semantic search and discovery. In the workshop, they will demonstrate the dynamic learning system that combines machine learning and social curation to form a BrainSpace for the science community. Scientists can utilize BrainSpace to semantically connect with other people and knowledge critical to their interests. Attendees of the workshop will be given beta codes to become the first users of BrainSpace.
Make sure you join in the conversation online using the #solo12 hashtag and by following the official Twitter account @SpotOnLondon.