Looking at the Future of Research Communication – Going Beyond the PDF Visual Cage
The Future of Research Communications and eScholarship (FORCE 11) held their Beyond the PDF conference in Amsterdam at the Pakhuis de Zwijger from March 19 to 20, 2013. The event was organized by the VU University Amsterdam’s Network Institute and the COMMIT programs Data2Semantics Project. The event was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Elsevier, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and PLoS.
The Beyond the PDF conference brought together over 200 scholars, technologist, entrepreneurs, librarians, publishers and research funders in a lively forum, not just to broaden awareness of current efforts across disciplines, but to define the future through discussions, challenge projects, demonstrations and seeding new partnerships and collaborations. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology.
The conference featured keynotes by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and Carol Tenopir (Chancellor’s Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville). Dr. Fitzpatrick discussed how scholarship in particular humanities is being changed by the digital domain. Prof. Tenopir discussed how scholars read in the digital age.
The event included a variety of sessions discussing everything from new business models to new modes of scholarly evaluation featuring presenters such as Christine L. Borgman
(Presidential Chair & Professor of Information Studies University of California Los Angeles), Philip E. Bourne (Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industrial Alliances at the University of California San Diego), Wim van der Stelt (Executive Vice President Corporate Strategy at Springer) and Jason Priem (co-founder of ImpactStory).
A video recording as well as summary notes will be available at http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2. A recap can be found at http://thinklinks.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/beyond-the-pdf-2-quick-recap/