Limited Capacity seats available
All the Science That’s Fit to Blog: The Shaping and Evolution of Science Bloggers’ Content, Paige Brown Jarreau
Within the last decade, science blogs have had unprecedented influence in opening up science journalism to scientists and non-traditional communicators and exposing a wider audience to the scientific process, from research to publication. And yet our interpretations of how science blogs are enhancing traditional media discussions about science or public engagement with science lack a solid foundation in our understanding of science blog production. The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors including motivations, backgrounds, values, identity work, cultural moorings, learned practices, norms and social media interactions that might shape a science blogger’s content. More than 50 in-depth interviews with a diverse range of science bloggers, along with an international survey of science bloggers, shed light on science blogging practices and rules of content production. This research presentation will highlight my PhD dissertation and professional work in this area.
Open Peer Review, Stephanie Harriman
Peer review by independent experts is vital to ensure the integrity of the published literature and allow readers to make informed decisions. Traditional anonymous peer review is subject to limitations and can be biased. Open peer review goes some way to solving these issues. It involves two levels of openness. Firstly, authors know who peer reviewed their article. Secondly, if the article is published, the reviewers’ reports are posted online alongside the published article. As well as increasing transparency, this has additional benefits - reviewers are able to gain credit for their reviews, editors and reviewers are more accountable for their decisions, reviewers’ competing interests are clear and readers know there was a trustworthy review process. In addition to these direct benefits to readers, authors, reviewers and editors, open peer review also allows reviewers’ reports to be used in much needed training of peer reviewers and research into peer review.
PRE-val: Trust & Transparency in Peer Review, Adam Etkin
PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) was founded to support and strengthen the peer-review process – the cornerstone of scholarly communication – on behalf of researchers, publishers, and libraries. PRE’s flagship service, PRE-val, verifies for the end user that content has gone through the peer review process and provides information that is vital to assessing the quality of that process. While it seems the peer review process is constantly under criticism, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of researchers & authors value peer review. By increasing transparency around peer review and what goes into this act of curation each of the primary stakeholders in the scholarly communication chain benefit.
Looking Beyond the Journal, Caroline Herbert
In such a fast-paced world with many demands on our time, effective communication is key. Scientific journals are essential in disseminating the fundamentals of research, but they often prove too technical for anyone outside of the specific field. How can barriers to both access and understanding be reduced whilst retaining the essence of research principles? Design, media and publishing agency Research Media was set up in 2009 in response to a real need from researchers and research-focussed organisations for support in creating and disseminating research updates, outcomes and impacts to the broadest possible audience. In this session, we discuss how Research Media is able to communicate complex scientific concepts, skilfully using existing materials to capture the essence of a research project, transforming it into a concise, interesting and practical summary and delivering it to a global audience across a range of free-to-access media.
Using Learning Communities to Overcome Gender Barriers in Science and Technology, Anu A. Gokhale
Science and technology (S&T) fields have tremendous job opportunities and represent some of the highest-earning majors. Despite the fact that women comprise 46 percent of the nation’s workforce, their representation is only about 15 percent in S&T fields. Current research suggests that the perceptions of students play a large role in discouraging women from pursuing S&T majors. The learning communities were designed to demonstrate that the field is not dominated by “geeky” white guys but the fact that women can, and do contribute. The purpose was to humanize S&T fields in the eyes of the students. The study used a scale that measured attitudes toward S&T to evaluate the impact of learning communities. Comparing pretest to posttest factor scores for experimental and control groups, it was found that participating students increased interest in learning about S&T (p < .007), and their acceptance of female participation in S&T (p < .001).
Incentivizing Openness in the Humanities: Are Altmetrics the Key? Stacy Konkiel
You probably know that humanities scholars are less likely to be cited than their peers in the sciences, but did you know they are more likely to have their work shared and discussed online? This presentation will provide a brief introduction to the research done to date on humanities scholarship and altmetrics. We'll also discuss three ways that altmetrics can incentivize openness for humanities researchers.
Overleaf: Scientific Writing and Publishing in the Age of the Cloud, John Lees-Miller
The 'web was invented by scientists, but scientific writing and publishing somehow got stuck at Web 1.0. Even though science is by nature global and collaborative, we still write papers mainly using single-user tools that run on desktop computers (Word). We then send our files through a slow, frustrating and expensive publishing process that runs on email and clunky, fiddly web forms. Meanwhile, the rest of the world races ahead with modern, integrated, collaborative tools. We can do better.
Overleaf is an online collaborative editor for writing scientific documents, such as papers and theses. It simplifies and accelerates the scientific writing and publishing process by keeping the document in a single central place through its entire lifecycle. The document is stored securely in the cloud, so authors, editors, reviewers and readers can each read, edit or comment on the paper when it is their turn, using only a web browser. Overleaf supports tracked changes, comments, version control and several popular reference managers, and you can now submit directly from Overleaf to over a dozen publishing partners, including PeerJ, Nature Scientific Reports, and F1000Research. More than 200,000 authors from over 2,000 universities across the globe have created in excess of two million documents with Overleaf, and a new Stanford University-wide Overleaf trial has just been launched.
Storytelling and Science: Using Narrative to Connect Researchers with New Audiences, Alexander Brown
As humans we are hardwired for story. Since the beginning of civilization we have passed down meaning to each other through narrative. Yet scholarly communications often overlooks this powerful tool, instead staying confined to rigid formats that are inaccessible to the general public or even researchers in other disciplines. Find out how storytelling can highlight the work of scientists and empower researchers with the tools they need to communicate about their work.
