Simon Porter, Mark Hahnel & Ashlea Higgs Speaking at CASRAI ReConnect15

Digital Science will be at CASRAI ReConnect15! If you’re attending then please drop by our booth and say hello!

Mark Hahnel, founder of Figshare, is giving the keynote talk on the second day, at 8.45am, titled “The Digital Academia Power Struggle”.

“According to the Scholarly Kitchen Chefs, one of the things to have the biggest impact on scholarly publishing in 2015 is the publication of data and objects (like multimedia, application code). While we have seen the launch of ‘data journals’ from the like of Elsevier and Nature in the past 12 months, we have also seen the pressure from funders for institutions to be better managing the digital products of research carried within their walls. Funders are increasingly requiring grantees to deposit their raw research data in appropriate public archives or stores in order to facilitate the validation of results and further work by other researchers. According to the JISC and RLUK funded Sherpa Juliet site, globally there are now 34 funders who require data archiving and 16 who encourage it. So are we on course for a collision between publishers and institutions over who has control over the digital products of research?

Previous attempts by institutions to retake control of printed scholarly output through institutional repositories have been beneficial, but have not stemmed the profit margins or reach of the big publishers. This is mainly due to the culture of academia, where for 350 years papers have been the currency and for the last 50, impact factor has been the value. The recent influx of digital-based data and other outputs is, however, creating a culture shift. This session will explore how the web enabled world of multiple digital outputs is playing out and predict what could happen in the next 12-60 months. Either way, it’ll be an interesting journey!”

Simon Porter, VP Academic Relationships and Knowledge Architecture at Digital Science, is participating in a breakout session on the first day, giving a talk on “Research Metadata Mechanics”.

“Over the past 10 years, research systems have evolved from systems that focused on how to structure and record information on research, to systems capable of allowing significant insights to be derived based upon years of high quality information. In 2015, the maturity of the information now collected within many current Research Information Systems, and the insights that this can provide is of equal or greater value than the insights that could be gleaned from established externally provided research metrics platforms alone. The ability to intersect these external and internal worlds provides new levels of strategic insight not previously available. With the addition of platforms that track altmetrics, and their ability to connect university publications data with a constant flow of real time attention level metrics, an image of a dynamic network of systems emerges, connected together by ever turning ‘cogs’ pushing and translating information.

Add to this, the success of ORCID as pervasive researcher identifier infrastructure, and CASRAI as the emerging social contract for information exchange, and it becomes possible to extend this network back from the systems that track and record research information, through to the platforms through which research knowledge is created. The ‘Mechanics’ of this network of systems is more than just getting the ‘plumbing’ right. As research information moves through the network, its audience and purpose changes, the requirements for contextual metadata can also change.

This presentation will explore the lived experience of Research Data Mechanics at Digital Science though illustrating how connections between Figshare, Altmetric, Symplectic Elements, and Dimensions can both enhance research system capability and reduce the burden on researchers, and research administration.”

Ashlea Higgs from UberResearch will be talking about research classification in the breakout session titled “How Do I Know Thee? Let Me Count the Ways”, at 1pm on the second day.

“Organizations need and develop research classification schemas for many different reasons. Our presentation will help to illustrate why it is a lot easier to start with the agreement on the primary purpose for the classification. With this starting point in mind purpose drives the scope and usability of any schema, and promotes broader harmonization and sustainability. We will share from the collective experience the top things to keep in mind when defining purpose. An specifically we will look at how understanding the collective needs of the National Alliance of Provincial Health Research Organizations (NAPHRO) continue to help us reach consensus and help decision makers see investments in health research through consistent lens.”

Keep up-to-date with all the discussion on the #CASRAI15 hashtag, we’ll be following it closely!