Openness and The Two Cultures - The Scholarly Kitchen

"I recently attended an excellent conference — the third Researcher to Reader Conference, which was held in London in February, and was, in my view, a resounding success. Why a success? Because I found myself engaged, annoyed, irritated, and at times in full agreement with all being said. The opening keynote was from Alison Mudditt, recently installed as CEO of PLOS, who set the tone and theme for the conference – openness. Her talk was entitled Changing the Culture of Research: It’s Everyone’s Problem, and focused on openness through the need to improve transparency, reproducibility and efficiency of scientific research, and how publishers may play a trusted role in this ecosystem. It is a participatory conference, with a range of workshops that you can join. I joined a diversity workshop and it was fascinating, productive, and well-facilitated by Nancy Roberts of Business Inclusivity and Phill Jones of Digital Science. There were other excellent workshops, which addressed open science responsibilities, open access communications and standards, the metadata lifecycle, and open data sharing. The latter workshop focused on the Belmont Forum e-Infrastructures Data Management Project, and sustainable open access to research data...."