Beyond the PDF 2 – A Quick Recap | Think Links

"Wow! The last three days have been crazy, hectic, awesome and inspiring. We just finished putting on The Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarhip (FORCE11)’s Beyond the PDF 2 conference  here in Amsterdam. (I was chair of the organizing committee and in charge of local arrangements) The idea behind Beyond the PDF was to bring together a diverse set of people (scholars, technologists, policy experts, librarians, start-ups, publishers, …) all interested in making scholarly and research communication better. In that case, I think we achieved are goal. We had 210 attendees from across the spectrum. Below are two charts: one of the types organizations of the attendees and domain they are from.  The program of the conference was varied. We covered new tools, business models, the context of the approach, research evaluation, visions for the futures and how to moved forward. Here, I won’t go over the entire conference here. We’ll have a complete video online soon (thanks Elsevier). I just wanted to call out some personal highlights.  We had two great keynotes from Kathleen Fitzpatrick of the Modern Language Association  and the other from Carol Tenopir (Chancellor’s Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville). Kathleen discussed how it is essential for humanities to embrace new forms of scholarly communication as it allows for faster dissemination of their work.  Carol discussed the practice of reading for academics. She’s done in-depth tracking of how scientists read. Some interesting tidbits: successful scientists read more and so far social media use has not decreased the amount of reading that scientists do. The keynotes were really a sign of how much more humanities were present at this conference than Beyond the PDF 1.  Just two years ago at the first Beyond the PDF, there were mainly initial ideas and drafts for next generation research communication tools. At this year’s conference, there were really a huge number of tools that are ready to be used. Figshare, PDFX,Authorea, Mendeley, IsaTools, StemBook, Commons in a Box, IPython,ImpactStory and on… Furthermore, there are different ways of publishing from PeerJ to Hypothes.is and even just posting to blog. Probably the interesting idea of the conference was the use of github to essential publish.  For me this made me think it’s time to think about my own scientific workflow and figure out how to update it to better use these tools in practice ..."