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#FuturePub 4
Last night Overleaf hosted #FuturePub 4 at the British Library, along with LDN Open Drinks and Scholarly Social. The evening was a great success, full of inspiring innovations and new directions in the world of scholarly communication and technology.
Ian Mulvany, from eLife, gave a talk updating us all on the development of eLife Lens and what the future holds for this platform. He has also written a great summary of his talk plus his thoughts on the other talks in this blog post. Eva Amsen aka @easternblot has also written a really nice post here.
First speaker at #futurepub is @IanMulvany of @elife talking about Lens. 2-pane view so can see text and figs in parallel. No more flipping.
— Anna Sharman (@sharmanedit) January 27, 2015
Christopher Rabotin, back end developer at Sparrho, gave a interesting talk discussing their recent progress with a new API as well as upcoming challenges for Sparrho’s content recommendation engine. Kaveh Bazargan, founder of River Valley Technologies, gave an impressively titled talk on “How publishing can be better, faster, and cheaper”, in which he stressed the importance of treating XML as the primary format for editing. There was also a live demo of a completely automated XML-based publishing system, offering cloud-based one-click PDF generation from XML.
An ideal system is a cloud-based XML version of an article that can be openly edited by anyone – cool! @kaveh1000 #futurepub — Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) January 27, 2015
Keren Limor-Waisberg’s talk was titled “Lowering the barriers to scientific knowledge”. Keren discussed and introduced the first public version of The Scientific Literacy Tool. The tool functions as an educational web-platform which supports scientific literacy. The aim with the tool is to help people interested in science to discover, understand, and explore scientific texts.
Fascinated by @TheLiteracyTool, great concept to help anyone understand #science #FuturePub
— Roberta Cucuzza (@larobby) January 27, 2015
I can see people installing @TheLiteracyTool right now 🙂 cooooooool! #FuturePub — Ross Mounce (@rmounce) January 27, 2015
Finishing things off was Winston Li, a current computing student at Imperial College London. Winston discussed the work that he and a team of his fellow students put in to developing a link between Overleaf and GitHub, which has introduced offline editing to Overleaf. Winston gave us a short demo of the link in action, which it has to be said is a highly impressive piece of work. The future of publishing technology will be in capable hands if talented students like Winston and his team continue to be involved! For more details check out Overleaf’s blog post here.
You can also watch a recording of the live-stream, but we must first warn you and apologise for the dodgy camera angles! Unfortunately we couldn’t find an ideal position and we were limited by the relativiely low quality technology we had available. The link for the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioL0zNOGRwI.
There’s also a Storify of the tweets on the #FuturPub hashtag which is embedded below.