2018 STM Week:
Processes, Products and People in Publishing

8:00 

Light continental breakfast & networking

9:00

Opening Keynote: 

Getting it together: Advancing technology through collaboration

Bill Kasdorf, Kasdorf & Associates

A running theme in Bill Kasdorf's technology update this year is the extent to which so many important advances in the publishing ecosystem are the result of collaborations between organizations, publishers, libraries, technologists, researchers, and funders--even competitors. We're also benefiting from developments in sectors we rarely intersect with, like news and media. While this is not new--Crossref being the most obvious example--it's striking how much of this is going on, and producing results. Blockchain for peer review? No longer just a cool idea, thanks to collaboration. Rights metadata in Google Images? Good layout and typography on the Web? EPUBs opening in a browser or a journal site natively?  Really? Yes, really! All this and more is happening in this very fertile time for the evolution of publishing technology.

9:45

Morning Plenary 1: 

January 2020: A Call for Unity?

Moderated by:
Jamie Carmichael, Senior Director, Publisher Solutions, Copyright Clearance Center

Will Schweitzer, Director, Product & Custom Publishing, AAAS
Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Director of Publishing, Microbiology Society
Ian Potter, Solutions Specialist, Publishing & Associations, Clarivate Analytics
Rob Johnson, Director, Research Consulting Limited

The dynamic Open Access environment presents many challenges to longstanding practices in scholarly research publishing, particularly from funders, whether public or private. In the EU, government agencies are pushing the so-called Plan S principles, even while in the UK, Wellcome Trust considers further revisions to its funding and publishing guidelines. 

What lies ahead for OA and how should publishers respond? What kinds of partnerships for publishers with other industry stakeholders are likely to yield a "win-win-win" scenario for researchers, funders, institutions and the public? This expert panel will explore the state of publisher commitment and investment in OA infrastructure and workflow, as well as consider how adoption of partnerships, tools, and standards could address any impasses, perceived or real.

10:15

Ignite Session 1 

Enriched content strategies support open science engagement through storytelling

Donald Samulack, President of the U.S. Operations for Editage / Cactus Communications

With new content formats comes new possibilities. Journal article and page design are being adjusted to accommodate the inclusion of enriched content. Beyond the traditional journal article, enriched content such as video summaries, infographics (static and dynamic), embedded graphics and video, and other forms of communication such as plain-language summaries, podcasts, research news stories, and press releases are all current-day strategies to communicate research through storytelling. Such strategies bring focus to the main messages of the article, make specific content stand out above the rest of the narrative, and further enhance the discoverability of the research article.

The coordination with the author toward the development of enriched content along with the development of the manuscript is changing the face of science communication, not only at the article level, but at the author level as well. In the current Open Science movement, researchers are increasingly being called upon to self- advocate and to be more involved in the communication of their research beyond their traditional academic peer audiences. Researchers are being encouraged to talk about their research with peers (both inside and outside of their disciplines), as well as with the public at large, and with local, municipal, state, and federal policy-makers (the 3 Ps; peers, public, and policy-makers). This does not mean that all researchers are comfortable with expanding their communication habits beyond academic conversations at conference venues and in the form of journal publications or opinion pieces. Having the enriched content tools at hand greatly facilitates the ability of the researcher to be empowered to have these conversations.

This presentation will show how the two movements of enriched content integration at the journal level, and the evolution of open science communication engagement at the researcher level, are intertwined and self- reinforcing.

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Semantic Enrichment

Jay Ven Eman, CEO, Access Innovations

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to automatic indexing and other aspects of content enrichment have tremendous potential, but there are significant barriers to successful implementations.  The economics of these systems can be prohibitively expensive, which will indefinitely delay widespread adoption.  Significant costs are involved in the training and maintaining of systems that chronically under perform and fail to scale.  ML and AI projects are not for the faint of heart, nor for those with small budgets.  Key cost elements are identified along with approaches to estimating costs based on actual and reported cases.

The IP address is dead! Long live the IP address!

Andrew Pitts, CEO, PSI Ltd 

While there are moves afoot to change the ways that academic content is accessed, the fact is that IP recognition is currently the easiest, most secure and most seamless method of providing access to customers. Even if a “better” method can be created it could take years to develop and implement, followed by many further years to filter out into the various institutions around the world.

We believe that publishers owe it to themselves and their customers to ensure that the IP addresses they use are accurate and up-to-date. Why is this necessary? To ensure the right access is provided to customers, to ensure accurate usage statistics and to eliminate fraudulent usage.

While it appears that a number of IP Registries exist, and continue to appear, theIPregistry.org is the only registry that checks and verifies IP addresses to eliminate the errors that commonly occur. We currently find that approximately 20% of the IP addresses submitted to us contain errors, so we know that a one-time audit of the data does not suffice to ensure that the right content is provide to the right customers.

67 Bricks case study: streamlining the open access process for RSC and its authors

Jennifer Schivas, Head of Strategy and Industry Engagement, 67 Bricks
James Stevens, Product Manager, Royal Society of Chemistry

In response to common industry challenges around facilitating open access, RSC needed to improve and speed up the way they managed their OA processes and customer experience. In our talk we will present a case study of a recent project to address this need. RSC engaged 67 Bricks as a technology partner and we worked together in an agile manner to build a new, automated Open Access system, removing the reliance on manual processes and disconnected systems and reducing the burden on authors by providing a more user friendly and efficient experience. The new system is flexible and robust enough to grow alongside RSC's open access programme, evolve with the changing OA landscape and support staff and external users simultaneously. The system has been live for several months and we will share information on the positive impact it has had.

11:15

Refreshment break & networking

11:45

Morning Plenary 3: 

Metadata Map for Research

Jim Swainston, Senior Product Manager for Data Services, Emerald

The goal of improving the quality, reusability, and interoperability of metadata for research has long been a goal of all working in academic publishing. The Metadata 2020 initiative, through various project leads, has quickly determined that a ‘metadata map’ was required to navigate the research landscape and anchor many of the conversations around this subject. A visual overview, charting the flow of research information between its various creators, curators, and custodians is the result. We share the methodology and processes behind generating the map, and give an early glimpse at how all of these data strands interact.

12:15

Morning Plenary 4: 

I grant you this: how I learned to stop worrying and embrace funder workflows

Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member and Community Outreach, Crossref

Publishers are sitting up and taking notice of funder involvement in how research is produced, published, disseminated and counted. The relative might of some of the big funders represents a potential game-changer for the sector, or does it? Academic publishing is familiar with change, but also collaboration as that change has come about, hence the creation of Crossref in 2000 as the transition to online publication accelerated.

At Crossref, we’ve already seen changes among our members in response to recognition of different types of research outputs. Crossref DOIs for preprints, peer reviews, assignment of DOIs upon acceptance, and the push for standardized data citation all point to this. It is coupled with the increased impetus on reporting on who funded that research.

If you were at STM week back in 2013, you might remember Crossref talking about what’s now called the Open Funder Registry. Using that registry to collect funding information has been successful, and the registry has quadrupled in size, but there are flaws - limited granularity, incomplete/incorrect data entered by researchers and deposited by publishers, and lack of engagement from funders. So we need to push ourselves to do better - hence the need for persistent identifiers for grants and associated Crossref membership for funders. We’ve built good infrastructure, why not share it with the broader community to improve research workflows?

We’d welcome the opportunity to talk about the work we’re doing with funders, on grant IDs and more, where we are now, and where we hope to get to with continued community collaboration.

12:45

Lunch

1:45

Afternoon Panel: Finding the right tool for the job. How partnering with the right vendor benefits everybody.

Ben Johnson, Head of Communities & Engagement, Springer Nature

Jon Beer, CTO & Co-Founder Zapnito

Louise Russell, Consultant, Tutton-Russell Consulting

Back in 2015, having learned much from early community experiments, Springer Nature identified that the best way to build exciting new community services for researchers would be to work with a best-in-class partner. A company who understand the publishing landscape and could offer strategic insight, as well as provide a service.

Springer Nature and Zapnito have partnered for the past 3.5 years to offer new value to scientists through online research communities, hosted on Zapnito’s ‘expert community’ platform. The communities were launched to drive submissions to new Nature journals, provide an additional author service, strengthen editorial board relationships, and bring in new sources of revenue.

The communities are run by Springer Nature with Zapnito providing both the platform and strategic support. The partnership has worked to benefit both companies; giving Springer Nature more agility to innovate and try new ideas, while also allowing Zapnito to continually develop the platform features and capabilities to meet new needs.

Now, in 2018, the Springer Nature has a great deal of insight and advice to share into what it takes for publisher-vendor partnerships such as these to succeed, as well as the many benefits of their communities programme.

We will cover:

How the partnership works
How it benefits both parties
How the communities benefit researchers
How they benefit Springer Nature’s business

2:30

Ignite Session 2 

The Linguistic Challenges of Scholarly Publishing in a Multi-Lingual World

Open access tools

Daniel Pollock, Publishing Consultant, Delta Think

How to increase engagement with your online content

Vee Rogacheva, UX designer, OpenAthens

Publisher websites present a varying and often confusing range of options for user access to their subscribed scholarly content, resulting in researchers finding alternatives such as free or piracy sites.

Make your service stand out by giving researchers the ‘Google’ experience by following our top tips for a simpler, more standardised UX-designed interface. In so doing, expect to see an increase in access to and engagement with your online content.

Join us to benefit from our experience of implementing federated single sign-on and recent research into students’ online behaviour. We encourage you to share your own experiences and innovative ideas for standardising the user experience.

Read our recent blog ‘How piracy is forcing industry transformation’ to find out more.

Manuscript exchange common Approach (MECA) – Bringing convenience for authors, efficiency for publishers

Tony Alves, Director of Product Management, Aries Systems Corporation

A group of manuscript-management suppliers has taken up this challenge and has developed a common approach that can be adopted across the industry. This initiative will produce a set of guidelines and best practices that publishers, manuscript systems and other players in the scholarly publishing ecosystem, such as preprint servers, authoring tools and production services, can all utilize so that communication between varied and diverse organizations can be more easily achieved. One thing that is particularly unique about this approach is the inclusion of peer review data in the transfer package. The article metadata file is in JATS XML format, since that is a well understood industry standard. However, JATS does not currently handle peer review data, and so the MECA team has outlined a new XML format that uses the principles of JATS, but extends it for peer review. While the article XML file contains information about the most recent revision of the article being transferred, the review XML contains multiple reviews from all revisions of the submission.

This initiative will continue to evolve these guidelines to address new technologies and changes in data types and file formats that will likely emerge in the scholarly publishing infrastructure over the next few years. This initiative is currently working with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), to be sure the guidelines and recommended practices will be well thought out and universally accepted.

The current participants include: Aries Systems Corporation, Clarivate Analytics, eJournal Press, and Highwire Press. This session is intended to report on the group’s work to the larger community, and to gather comments, questions, and suggestions. More about MECA can be found here: https://www.manuscriptexchange.org

3:30

Refreshment break & networking

4:00

Afternoon Panel Session 1:

Transparency in Peer Review: Is it the silver bullet for some of the biggest problems in scientific publishing today?

Moderated by: Michelle Norell, Business Development Manager, Sheridan

Niamh O'Connor, Journals Publishing Director, PLOS

Andrew Preston, Managing Director, Publons

Yakov Chandy, Managing Director, TNQ Technologies  

Editorial assessment of researcher manuscripts is fraught with issues. Each of the three speakers on this panel is working towards transparency in peer review as a means to an end in improving the process and output of peer reviews. Increasing the reproducibility of scientific findings is a goal that all of us in the research enterprise share.

As one of the largest Open Access publishers, PLOS is committed to making reviewer materials freely available alongside published articles. Niamh O’Connor, Journals Publishing Director, will share the expected outcomes of bringing greater openness to peer review.

Publons’ technology applications are in the midst of a pilot initiative to support publishers in bringing peer review materials into full view. Andrew Preston, Managing Director for Publons, will provide a view into this transparency initiative leveraging Publons’ technologies.

And TNQ technologies is changing the reviewer experience by introducing a fully HTML workflow that focuses on author and researcher experience. Yakov Chandy, Managing Director of TNQ, has established a testbed to evaluate impact of the new reviewer workflow to be shared during this session.

4:45 – 5:30

Afternoon Panel Session 2: Can Agility in Tools be Pretty?

In the rapidly changing world of Academic and STM publishing, tools and production platforms are adapting to become smarter. Can smarter and more agile result in an enhanced experience? The panelists will present how they have been able to enhance user experience through their tool and production platform upgrades. Efficiency and faster times to market is table stakes and the discussion will focus more on user experience. They will reflect on lessons they learnt, share best practices, and discuss how user experience isn’t a consequence but rather a means to a successful upgrade and transition.

Moderated by: Yamini Arora, Chief Marketing Officer, MPS

Pretty Agile
Chris Brennan, ECMS Systems Manager, Emerald Publishing

Building elegant tools to enhance the user experience and help to deliver tangible results in a smarter and more engaging way by thinking pretty from the outset. The practical pitfalls of user research when deciding how to optimise look, feel and process on a live system.

Is agility enough?
Jo Burges, Project Manager and Implementation Consultant, knkPublishing

An overview of the approaches one publishing software company takes to product development and enhancing the user experience. Is agility enough in the bid to be pretty or does this need to be combined with other ways of thinking?

Agility in tools can be pretty and deliver significant impact – ScienceDirect Topics
Bryan Davies, Vice President, Product Solutions, Elsevier

ScienceDirect Topics is an example of how Elsevier has developed a product that combines content, technology, analytics and deep customer insight in an agile way that is not just pretty but delivers real value to users, buyers and the business. ScienceDirect Topics was launched a year ago, is still a Minimal Viable Product  (MVP) but is already contributing 15% of all traffic to ScienceDirect (the largest STM content platform in the world) and has increased usage of book content on the platform by 30%.

Picking the right tool for the job
Ian Mulvany, Head of Transformation, Product Innovation, SAGE Publishing

Products and platforms follow natural lifecycles, from incubation, growth, sustainability, through to retirement. Different tools and approaches to user research are appropriate for products at different points in their lifecycle. We will take a quick look at some different approaches that we have taken for SAGE products that are in different phases of their development.

5.30

Close of seminar

8:30

9:30

Opening Keynote: Professor Dr Paul Wouters, Leiden University

Moderated by: IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg (Elsevier), chair STM’s Future Lab and STEC

New Research Indicators and their meaning for Open Science

Paul Wouters, professor of scientometrics and director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, is currently the chair of the EU Expert Group on Research Indicators. This Expert Group is exploring indicators that can measure and report researcher's engagement with Open Science and its impacts. The group will synthesize existing research on open science and scholarship and translate this into policy recommendations. The group will deliver its report on these problems at the end of 2018, and will base its recommendations on the consultation of relevant stakeholders. The keynote by Paul Wouters will shed light on what we can expect in the final conclusions on new metrics soon to be delivered to the EU.

10:30

Refreshment break & networking

11:00

Morning plenary and discussion panel

The future of access 1: a supercontinent for content ?
Moderated by Roger Schonfeld, (Ithaka S+R)

Gaby Appleton, MD of Mendeley/ Elsevier

Rob McGrath, CEO ReadCube/ Access Anywhere

Jan Reichelt, CEO, Kopernio/ Clarivate

The process for discovering and accessing scholarly content has broken. Today, there are fundamentally two different approaches being taken to address this issue legally. The first is RA21, which seeks to make the processes easier for authenticating to content on publisher sites, which is being sponsored by STM and covered in another session today. The second is to leapfrog past a model containing sites for individual publishers and creating instead one or several “supercontinents” that have all scientific content discoverable and accessible from a single site.

These “supercontinent” services that are beginning to develop look very much like Spotify for the music business. The three major workflow providers are all looking at how to serve this model. Digital Science’s Dimensions is probably furthest along in offering a full offering. Clarivate’s acquisition of Kopernio suggests it is moving in this direction as well. And, through Scopus and Mendeley, Elsevier may  be looking to offer a somewhat similar service, although with a different model for its development. How will  these services develop? And how will they monetized?

12:15

Peek preview into solutions ready for launch

Chaired by Chris Shillum, Elsevier, Ralph Youngen, American Chemical Society

The Future of Access 2: Project-RA21 ready to deliver

RA21, Resource Access in the 21st Century, is a joint project by NISO and STM to develop easier access protocols to scholarly resources. The project started in 2016/2017, and has over 60 organisations worldwide actively participating. The project is now ready to publish its solutions. Today’s session will offer you a peek preview of the solutions and recommendations project-RA21 will deliver.

12:45

Lunch

13:40 

Industry Update, dedicated to Karen Hunter (1945-2018) 
Moderated by: Gerry Grenier, Senior Director of Content Management, IEEE

STM Industry Report: Innovations in the Publishing Universe

Michael Mabe, CEO, International Association of STM Publishers

Rob Johnson, Director, Research Consulting

Johnson and Mabe, lead-authors of the new STM Industry Report, its special edition launched at STM’s 50^th anniversary celebration in Frankfurt, will provide an overview of the current state of the STM Publishing universe, including the importance and impact of the latest developments in technology and innovation.

14:00

Digital humanities: Setting the stage to go digital in the humanities/social sciences

Moderated by Jasper Simons, Chief Publishing Officer, American Psychological Association

Digital Humanities and Open Science - A Librarian’s Perspective

Overview and introduction by Liam O’Dwyer, Special Collections and Digital Humanities Librarian, Dublin City University

A brief overview of Digital Humanities (DH) and its relationship with ‘traditional’ humanities. A snapshot at the DH landscape, method and praxis, the role of libraries, and implications for open science and publishing in the field. What are the current challenges and tensions? What roles and approaches are emerging?

Followed by 3 exciting examples of Digital humanities projects:

Oceanic Exchanges, research across large-scale digital newspaper collections
Julianne Nyhan, Associate Professor of Digital Information Studies; Programme Director of the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities UCL; Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH)

The Oceanic Exchanges project* is at work on creating new opportunities for researchers to work across the large, and possibly multilingual, nineteenth-century newspaper collections that are held in otherwise disparate national archives. Our aim is not to create new digital resources but to facilitate approaches that can overarch individual server environments and institutional contexts. To facilitate this, we are engaging in essential technical work, like the elaboration of an ontology that can describe nineteenth-century newspapers. We are also seeking to better understand the decisions that public and private providers of digital newspaper archives made then planning, digitising and disseminating their collections. In this way we are interested as much in the socio-cultural, economic and political contexts of such collections as we are their technical affordances.

Oceanic Exchanges is an international project that brings together a consortium of scholars in the Finland, Germany, Mexico, The Netherlands, Finland, USA, and UK. It is funded through a Transatlantic Partnership for Social Sciences and Humanities 2016 Digging Into Data Challenge. The UK team is funded by the ESRC.

*Oceanic Exchanges Project Team, 2017. Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks In Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/WA94S.

Working from scraps: Digital interpretations of the Edwin Morgan scrapbooks 
Bridget Moynihan, University of Edinburgh

Scrapbooks comprise a significant portion of the world's archival holdings; however, due in part to the difficulties they present for cataloging and contextualization and their complex status within copyright laws, twentieth-century scrapbooks are often obscured in our digital environments. Our project digitally interprets the scrapbooks of Scottish Poet Makar Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) to create a prototypical interface that will give the scrapbooks and their wealth of materials (over 52,000 individual items) an increased online presence. 

Pelagios Commons: Linking the Places of our Past
Dr Valeria Vitale, Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study in London

The emergence of Digital Science creates unique challenges and opportunities and offers very fertile ground to new Open Science approaches. This session will offer insight into the developing trends in the digital humanities space, A general overview of what is happening at this new and exciting forefront will be followed by two examples of particularly exciting projects and innovations seizing on these challenges and opportunities in Europe and North America.

15:15

Refreshment break and networking

15:45 

Rubber-meets-the-road session
Moderated by Renny Guida, IEEE

AI and Open Science, new tools and service

Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President Access Innovations Inc.
High level AI overview

Jon White, VP Global Sales & Marketing, PageMajik
AI in the publishing production process

Michael Upshall, Head of Business Development at UNSILO
AI in peer review and the article workflow

Babis Marmanis, CTO, Copyright Clearance Center
Searching for images in the era of deep learning

AI and machine learning have the potential to radically speed up operations and increase the efficiency of the STM publishing sector. Existing AI-based technologies have already been developed or acquired by publishers to assist with the identification of peer reviewers, identify and combat plagiarism, recognise fabricated data, bolster the decision-making process behind the acceptance and rejection of papers. Likewise, AI has the potential to offer brand new services to researchers and the research community to empower Open Science and open knowledge creation. Come and listen what is available now and what vendors have on offer and are developing for smarter information applications.

17:00 

Closing keynote: Ammy Vogtlander, founding CEO of BlueInsights

Complexity Rules; the limits of predictability in AI and Big Data

Moderated by: Liz Marchant, Editorial Director,Taylor & Francis

The use of AI and Big Data is often depicted as the availability of one big prediction machine; if you put in enough data, anything will be clear. But complex systems set limits to predictability. The function with disruptions. So the question is now; to what extent are disruptions predictable. Is there a deeper pattern for disruptions. Ammy Vogtlander, founding CEO of BlueInsights is exploring this for you in an inspiring rollercoaster ride along disruptions in many sectors, including scholarly communication.

17:30

Close of Conference IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, chair of STM’s Future Lab and STEC

8:45

Light continental breakfast & networking

9:30

Opening Keynote: Femi Otitoju, Managing Director, Challenge Consultancy Ltd

Developing a culture of dignity in the workplace

Building a strategy around dignity in the workplace. The session will include a discussion of the results of a pre-circulated survey on unconscious bias.

10:30 

Why do you need a Women in a Publishing group anyway?

Fiona Counsell, Taylor and Francis, Head of Open Access Operations & Policy, Taylor & Francis / Routledge Journals

In 2018 Gender Pay Gap data was released by every UK business employing more than 250 staff. The results were not happy reading for the academic publishing industry with the Median Gender Pay Gap as high as 40% in some companies. The industry has also experienced a grassroots interest in diversity and inclusivity including, but not limited to, gender, implying the need for publishers to engage more with these issues. The writing and advocacy of people such as Sian Harris, Charlie Rapple, Alison Mudditt, Melanie Dolecheck, Alice Meadows, Phill Jones and Nancy Roberts has shone light on this issue and prompted vigorous debate. In this context, this session will cover the experience of running Women in Publishing at Taylor & Francis (T&F), a network launched and led by a committee of employees. Our mission is to celebrate the success of women at T&F and the wider industry, provide networking opportunities, and promote professional and career development. We maintain a lively online forum, and organise events in a range of formats to meet our goals. Our success is such that these events are often standing room only, and we have gained a notable amount of traction, such that we now liaise with T&F’s HR and Learning and Development teams and have spawned sister chapters in our global offices. During this talk I will give a flavour of our activities and the engagement and feedback we’ve had from our colleagues. I will also share the challenges we’ve faced and lessons learned, including the debates over our necessity, remit and representation. This insight will be of particular value for others hoping to organise similar grassroots initiatives.

10:50

Refreshment break & networking

11:20

Case studies in inclusion:

The STRIDE committee at Emerald Publishing

Helen Beddow, Publisher, Gender and Diversity, Emerald Publishing

Challenges and opportunities in hiring and HR policy in small organisations

Laura Cox, Chief Financial and Operating Officer, Ringgold, Inc.

Ringgold is a small virtual company with staff across the UK and US. This brings challenges and opportunities in making the organisation more diverse and inclusive. This talk will lay out some of the changes that we made at Ringgold in our recruitment practices and more unified HR policies within two rather different employment landscapes. Inclusion remains challenging, which is complicated without a physical building and everyone working together, or even at the same time.

11:50 

Dignity, Diversity and inclusion in the modern workplace. A question and answer session

Moderated by:  Nikul Patel, Publisher (Open Access), OUP 

Femi Otitoju, Managing Director, Challenge Consultancy Ltd

Fiona Counsell, Taylor and Francis, Taylor and Francis, Head of Open Access Operations & Policy, Taylor & Francis / Routledge Journals

Laura Cox, Chief Financial and Operating Officer, Ringgold, Inc.

12:30 

Lunch

Afternoon talk 1:

Science benefits from diversity

Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief Nature Communications, Springer Nature (effective January 2019)

For publishers, action on diversity and inclusion can’t begin and end with our own internal processes.  There is an imperative for us to find ways to address any problem that is standing in the way of great research. Find out about how Springer Nature is working with the academic community to increase representations of diversity in the scholarly work they publish, and how internal diversity programmes also play their part. What actions can the scholarly publishing industry take, together, to help drive change more quickly?

14:00 

Afternoon talk 2:

Diversity of Editorial Boards, a call for industry collaboration

Shelley Allen, Publisher, Taylor and Francis

While 2018 has been largely about diversity and inclusion within the STM publishing industry, we also have a key role to play in diversity and inclusion in the research communities that we serve. It is widely acknowledged that diversity, particularly that of gender, is an issue within the Engineering sector, both within industry and the academy. The Engineering and Computer Science teams have engaged in small scale experimentation to increase the diversity of applicants for the Editor-in-Chief role, within Taylor & Francis journals. This talk will share the experiences of the teams in these endeavours, considering what needs to change, ways in which changes can be effected, and possible timeframes for change.

14:30 

Refreshment break and networking

15:00 

Closing Panel:

Promoting Experience in Peer Review: Use of Preprints, Blogs, and Training for Early Career Researchers

Moderated by: Heather Ruland Staines, Director of Partnerships, Hypothes.is

Teresa Rayon,  Post-Doctoral Fellow, Francis Crick Institute

Sam Hindle, bioRxiv, Content Lead | Co-founder, PREreview

Emma Schumeyko, Managing Editor, American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics

Amye Kenall, Global Head of Life Sciences, SpringerNature

Researchers provide a valuable service to their peers when they serve as peer reviewers for scholarly publications, yet they may find themselves ill prepared for the experience. Scholarly publishers, associations, and initiatives are trying to remedy this. The Company of Biologists launched preLights in early 2018 to provide an outlet for early career researchers to hone their critical assessment of papers by selecting important preprints, writing useful digests and crucially explaining why they found the research important. PREreview launched mid-2017 to provide resources to encourage early-career researchers (ECRs) to review preprints during journal clubs, and share their feedback with the community. It was developed by ECRs for ECRs to help increase diversity and inclusivity in the peer review process by providing training and acknowledgment for ECRs. Other initiatives, such as the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, offer training programs and certifications in peer review. Learn about possibilities for early career researchers and find out how you might get involved in this important new movement.

16:00 

Close of Seminar Phill Jones, Seminar Director