Tag Archives: digital science

How to get a ticket for this year’s SpotOn London

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With a month to go, we’ve been busy behind the scenes planning for this year’s SpotOn London conference on 14th and 15th November. We are pleased to announce that we can now share some more details about how you can attend the event.

What is SpotOn London?

If you’ve not attended before, SpotOn London is an annual opportunity to meet other people interested in how science is carried out and communicated online. The two day event, which marks its sixth year, is hosted by Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Digital Science and the Wellcome Trust.  We’re also delighted to have Martin Fenner of PLOS joining us as a co-organiser again this year.

The conference is taking place on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th November  Find out more details about the event in our blog post announcing the dates.

This year’s theme will be on the challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age. Friday will see panels, workshops and keynotes on topics including: sharing sensitive data, measuring social impact, open peer review and the right to be forgotten. In an exciting change to our Saturday programme, SpotOn London will be hosting an unconference completely picked and run by the community within this year’s theme.

How can I get a ticket?

This year we’re releasing tickets to attend the main conference in one batch which will go on sale at noon (UK time) on Monday 13th October via our Eventbrite page.

This year there are two ticket types, a full two-day conference ticket (£60) and a Saturday only ticket (£35) – which includes breakfast, lunch and other refreshments.

As the conference has sold out every year, we recommend buying your ticket as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

What if I want to run a session

On Saturday, the programme will be crafted by the delegates. There will be a Google doc before the conference for session suggestions. Saturday’s schedule will be formulated on the Friday at the conference. If you are only attending on the Saturday and want to run a session, do let us know in advance.

If we’ve already been in touch with you and you’ve agreed to coordinate a session on the Friday, please don’t purchase a ticket. If you’ve got any questions about organising sessions and joining in the unconference, please do get in touch.

What about attending fringe events?

We’ve also been busy coordinating plans for fringe events on the evenings of Thursday 13th and Friday 14th November. Tickets to these events will be offered to conference attendees first. We’ll announce details of the fringe events soon – so stay tuned!

Follow @SpotonLondon and the hashtag #solo14 for updates and if you’re not already on our mailing list, or if you have any questions, drop us a line at blogs@nature.com and we’ll happily add you!

Impact Women: Tech Meet Social interview with Servane Mouazan

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Servane Mouazan

Servane Mouazan{credit}Amanda Clarke{/credit}

Nature Publishing Group’s sister company Digital Science, alongside Ogunte CIC, the organisation for Women Social Entrepreneurs, are hosting a new Impact Women event, to be held in London on October 13th.

The event will be a healthy, fast-paced mix of peer mentoring, coaching, keynote tips, and of course drinks and nibbles! It’s an opportunity to make women who navigate in this space more visible – but the invite is open to all interested in this arena.

To whet your appetite for this event, to be held in our London office, we thought we would host a Q&A with Ogunte CIC’s founder, Servane Mouazan.

1. Hi Servane, tell us about Ogunte and the type of community you are building.

I believe in impact made by women. I founded Ogunte CIC, [ www.ogunte.com] a pioneering organisation that contributes to “building a better world powered by women”. We have helped thousands of women social entrepreneurs, but also their ecosystem of support providers (incubators, finance providers, media) – to make a positive impact of people and planet, by enabling them to learn, lead, and connect.

Our aim is to make women changemakers genuine household brands in the world and create a ripple effect for good. We created Make a Wave, the first UK incubator for women social entrepreneurs, developed the International Women’s Social Leadership Awards, focusing on the achievements of women-led good businesses. We offer a gender lens on ways to change people’s world.

When I am not running Ogunte, I advise and coach people on Conscious Innovation, helping people to prototype love (yes, love!) through amazing learning experiences.

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SpotOn London: Public interest and privacy in the digital world – 14/15 November 2014

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Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 15.13.36The annual conference, SpotOn London, will be taking place at the Wellcome Trust on Friday, 14 November and Saturday, 15 November 2014. The two day event, which marks its sixth year, will be hosted by Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Digital Science and the Wellcome Trust.  We’re also delighted to have Martin Fenner of PLOS joining us as a co-organiser again this year. SpotOn London is a dynamic, lively melting pot of scientists, science communicators, technologists, and those interested in science policy.

This year’s theme will be on the challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age. Friday will see panels, workshops and keynotes on topics including: sharing sensitive data, measuring social impact, open peer review and the right to be forgotten. In an exciting change to our Saturday programme, SpotOn London will be hosting an unconference completely picked and run by the community within this year’s theme. Issues explored will include:

  • Is our understanding of where the lines blur between private and public keeping pace with technology?
  • How do we balance public interest with the right to privacy when it comes to personal data?
  • How much are we prepared to share for our own interests, and do we really know how much we are sharing about ourselves?
  • How do we balance personal opinion and professional image on social media?
  • Has the right to be forgotten managed to strike a balance between the right of information and the individual’s right to privacy?
  • Does scientific peer review need to be open? And would this work?

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All that glitters is not gold

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Guest blog by Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at Digital Science.

Do you know what good research looks like? One of the great successes of research management in leading research economies is that it is usually equitable and fair in judgements about who gets the jobs, who gets the grants and who gets the recognition. That is a powerful incentive to the people who deliver research outcomes of benefit to society and the economy. Lose their confidence and enthusiasm and you have lost everything.

But not all is quite as it should be.  Our recent report for Digital Science shows that when researchers put on their best show for the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise, they think journal articles are the best bet – even where surveys say that monographs or conference proceedings are key to their subject. And they think that articles from high impact journals provide a better signal than other highly-cited work. The evidence suggests that the ‘right’ signal has become more important than the real substance.

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I owe my business to my frustration as a Scientist – Figshare Founder Mark Hahnel

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“The main thing about Figshare is its community-based so all of our good ideas, all of these new innovations have come from the community, institutions and publishers.”

Ahead of ESOF 2014, we talk to three leading figures in science, technology and academia who through frustrations of not having the effective tools necessary to do their work, decided to build their own.

In this three-part series in the run-up to Europe’s largest, general science meeting held every two years, this year in Copenhagen (June 21-26), we look at the increasing number of start-up companies that are “spinning out” of academic institutions worldwide.

Here, the founder of Figshare, Mark Hahnel talks about making the leap from academia to business and why he thinks open science is revolutionising the research community.

Mark’s background:

Mark completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London three years ago, having previously studied genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community. Figshare is looking to become the place where all academics make their research openly available, as well as producing a secure cloud based storage space for their outputs. By encouraging users to manage their research in a more organised manner, so that it can be easily made open to comply with funder mandates. Openly available research outputs will mean that academia can truly reproduce and build on top of the research of others.

What were the biggest frustrations you faced in academia?

As a stem cell biologist, I created lots of videos and datasets that never really fit into the publication process. So as of right now, three years on from finishing my PHD, I have three papers from that time that have five static images in each and none are suited to the new ways we can disseminate research, videos, the datasets and the molecules, so I wanted to make academia more web native and to disseminate the content in the way it was formed.

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ESOF 2014: I owe my business to my frustration as a Scientist

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Ahead of ESOF 2014, we talk to three leading figures in science, technology and academia who through frustrations of not having the effective tools necessary to do their work, decided to build their own.

In this three-part series in the run-up to Europe’s largest, general science meeting held every two years, this year in Copenhagen (June 21-26), we look at the increasing number of start-up companies that are “spinning out” of academic institutions worldwide.

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Imagine not getting the PhD you’d been working towards… #datadramas

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What would happen if you lost all of your research data? The loss of scientific data can have a devastating impact on careers. Imagine if you lost all of the research data you’d been diligently collecting for four years. Now imagine the knock-on effect; you wouldn’t get the PhD you’d been working towards and your future career would be impacted. This nightmare situation actually happened to Billy Hinchen. Hear his story. Continue reading →

Data management

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As Euan Adie and Alex Hodgson discussed in this month’s Naturejobs podcast on scientific publishing and a digital future, the amount of data being created in science is phenomenal. It is being created faster than the technology to store it. But as the volumes are increasing, are scientists getting any better at managing it? As it turns out, there are still a few kinks in the system.

An article on Research Information called Better management reduces data loss risk, highlights some of the problems that scientists might have.

“After moving all of his data home to write up, biologist Billy Hinchen returned one afternoon to find that his laptop and all his backup hard drives had been stolen.” Continue reading →

Nine Worrying Stats on the Effect of Poor Scientific Data Management

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Guest Post from Nathan Westgarth of Digital Science, the younger sibling business of Nature Publishing Group.

We’ve been hearing a common theme from the academic community – researchers are having difficulty managing and accessing their data. It seems to be an ongoing problem for research scientists, at any stage of their careers.

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Digital Science Concepts Video Series

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Here at Digital Science, the younger sibling of Nature Publishing Group, we are always thinking of what we can do to make the lives of scientific researchers more efficient. In light of this mission, back in July 2012 we launched the first of our Digital Science Concepts videos, Touchless, showcasing our  thinking on the future of science. The video doesn’t actually include any projects we’re developing but, who knows… maybe one day we will! Continue reading →