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SCHOLARLY OUTREACH, IMPACT AND OUTCOMES 6TH UCL BLOOMSBURY CONFERENCE 28 AND 29 JUNE 2012
Scholarly communication, both formal and informal, is primarily communication between scholars, and specifically between scholars and their peers. SCHOLARLY OUTREACH, IMPACT AND OUTCOMES is concerned more with moves to make scholarship more accessible to those outside the ivory tower. These moves include both internal and external pressures including from government. The conference will examine how scholars, working directly and through publishers and librarians, are taking advantage of digital opportunities to make scholarship easily available to scholars in other fields, professionals outside the academy and the general public. It is also concerned with the related question of how research impacts the world outside the academy as knowledge which leads directly and indirectly to economic advantage - a topic of special interest in the UK. There are also presentations on equipping people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in public discussion. Another theme is public engagement, specifically as represented by a sub-discipline within the social sciences which is concerned to foster a "culture of two-way conversations between university staff and students, and people outside the university".
DAY ONE (28th June 2012)
09-00 to 10-00 Registration and Refreshments
10-00 to 10-15 welcome to UCL and Introduction to the Conference from the conference director Anthony Watkinson, who is senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies UCL.
10-15 to 12-45 Framing the Discussion (1)
This is the first of two sessions comprised of overviews representing the broad remit of the conference.
Dr. Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network. Expanding access to research publications
The presentation will discuss the Finch report published last week, its analysis and its recommendations on how to expand access to research publications in the UK.
Dr. Grant Lewison, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Research Oncology, Guy's Hospital, King's College London From biomedical research to health improvement
Biomedical research has twin goals - better patient care, and the prevention of illness. There are many pathways between the conduct of research and these goals, and much can be learned about the effectiveness of research by the tracing of these links through citations of research papers by various types of document - patents, clinical guidelines, policy documents, textbooks and the mass media. These are of increasing importance, not least to the general public whose views about research are often influential in setting the bounds on what can be researched.
Dr. Lee-Ann Coleman, Head of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information, British Library Why science is opening up?
The evolution of technology has led to dramatic advances in the way that science is conducted. Some of these changes have enabled science to be practiced more 'openly' but equally moral, philosophical and pragmatic approaches have inspired this movement. Libraries- as places which provide access to information for everyone who wants to do research - have a vital role to play in this new participatory science. This talk will explore how this role might be realised.
Professor David De Roure, Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre and National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research Social Machines
Digital scholarship is changing - on the one hand we have the increasing scale of data and computation, on the other the increasing scale of engagement of society. This is creating a new space of citizen scholarship, where projects are challenging perceptions ulof the boundaries between experts and public but also the boundaries between human and machine. This suggests a reconceptualisation of knowledge infrastructure, and an empowerment of communities to design and assemble "social machines. 12-40 to 13-45 Lunch 13-45 to 15-10 Panel on Impact - as we have to understand it The title of the session refers to the inclusion of academic impact in the ongoing Research Excellence Framework, the new system for assessing the quality of research set up by the British government. Three speakers with special knowledge of what impact means in this context will give shorter presentations and then be open to a wider discussion. They are Professor David Price, Vice-Provost for Research, University College London, Dr. Ian Carter, Director of Research and Enterprise, University of Sussex, and Professor Claire Warwick, Head of the Department of Information Studies and Vice-Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. 15-10 to 15-35 Refreshments 15-35 to 17-00 What does impact really mean?
This session is intended to counterpoint the previous panel and brings together two different comments on impact.
Professor Jack Meadows, Emeritus professor in the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University Communicating Research Impact and subject differences
First, the implications of defining 'impact' will be looked at briefly. The remainder of the talk will be primarily devoted to looking at how the question of impact affects different subject areas. Two examples will be considered - research collaboration and communication channels. Finally, the question will be raised of what part, if any, librarians and publishers might play in assessing impact.
Michael Taylor, Research Specialist, Elsevier Labs "How do I know thee? Let me count the cites..."
As scholarly communication explodes and fragments, who will be the arbiter of good science? Will our hitherto internal metrics find a new life in the brave new world? Will there be a new currency of tweetation, linkage and nanoclaims? Or will indecision result in a defacto and proprietary ranking agency determining the common view of the scholarly universe?
17-00 to 17-50 Making Sense of Science and Evidence This final session for the day consists of one presentation concerned with equipping people to make sense of science and evidence on issues of importance to society. It points forward to more extended discussions with a rather different slant on the second day.
Emily Jesper, Deputy Director, Sense about Science Is it important to communicate good science and evidence to the public?
What happens when research announcements go wrong; statistics are manipulated; risk factors are distorted; or discussions become polarised? Sense About Science is a small charity that equips people to make sense of science and evidence. We work with a network of over 4,000 scientists ranging from Nobel Prize winners to postdocs, and with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media to challenge pseudoscience and to promote public understanding of evidence by sharing the tools of scientific reasoning.
18-00 Reception for all registrants and speakers
DAY TWO 29th June
08-45 to 09-30 Registration and Refreshments
9-30 to 11-25 Framing the Discussion (2)
This first session continues with another three presentations giving overviews of rather different areas.
Professor Brian Collins, Director, Centre of Engineering Policy, University College London
Science as an Open Enterprise; open data for open science. The Science as an open enterprise report published by the Royal Society on June 21st 2012 (http://royalsociety.org/news/science-open-enterprise/) highlights the need to grapple with the huge deluge of data created by modern technologies in order to preserve the principle of openness and to exploit data in ways that have the potential to create a second open science revolution. Exploring massive amounts of data using modern digital technologies has enormous potential for science and its application in public policy and business. The report maps out the changes that are required by scientists, their institutions and those that fund and support science if this potential is to be realised. Intelligent openness about the data that underpins scientific ideas must be the default position is one of the major principles discussed in the report. Scientific progress can only be maximised, and scientific understanding most effectively exploited in the economy and public policy and communicated to citizens as a basis for their judgements if intelligent openness is the norm. The main issues raised in the report and this principle in particular will be discussed in this presentation.
Drs Astrid Wissenberg , Director of Partnerships and Communications at the ESRC and Chair of the Impact Group of the Research Councils UK.Impact on the research dance floor: line dance, tango or ceilidh?
Where and when in the sequences of steps leading to impact, do we engage with the different publics? The presentation will explore the patterns and configurations of stakeholders. What are the expectations on researchers and how can research councils assist and support?
Anne Welsh, Lecturer in Library and Information Studies, University College London .I=EC2: towards a formulary for the 21st century information provision
In the last decade, libraries have moved from models of liaison with academic staff and outreach to students towards greater dialogue and interactivity with the communities they serve. Engagement, cooperation and collaboration have become the watchwords of the day, driven by the desire to prove impact within the wider Higher Education framework of value and excellence. Looking beyond the jargon, this presentation highlights effective strategies and projects that exemplify student engagement, collaboration with academic colleagues and cooperation between library teams to provide impact inside and, in some cases, outside the academy.
11-25 to 12-50 Reaching a wider audience (1) Working Across Disciplines
Two speakers give personal accounts of reaching out across communities
Professor Jonathan Bowen, London South Bank University and Museophile Ltd .Making scholarly publications accessible online: Erdos and beyond
Developing and monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of interactive facilities and amount of data available about communities increases. It is possible to view connections on social and professional networks in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of academic papers. For example, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Academia.edu, now have large corpuses of freely available information on publications, together with author and citation details, that can be accessed and presented in a number of ways. In mathematical circles, the concept of the Erdos number has been introduced in honour of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos, measuring the "collaborative distance" of a person away from Erdos through links by co-author. Similar metrics have been proposed in other fields. The possibility of exploring and improving the presentation of such links online in the sciences and humanities will be presented as a means of improving the outreach and impact of publications by academics across
Professor Jeremy Frey, Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton."Great Expectations" - Supporting Inter-disciplinary, Multi- disciplinary and Open Collaborations
My role in coordinating some projects for which multi- and inter-disciplinary collaboration were key, highlighted some of the difficulties that can arise from different research practices in even closely related disciplines. I will discuss this with examples from projects that have involved Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science. For me the meeting point for all these areas was work under the banner of e-Science (now perhaps better called e-Research) and I will give some examples from our e-Science projects. I will show how some of the techniques developed as part of this research area have influenced the way we conduct some more traditional laboratory research as it reaches across the Physics-Chemistry-Biology boundaries. I will discuss the support of Open Notebook Science as a way to engage an even wider audience in collaboration
12-50 to 13-50 Lunch
13-50 to 15-35 Reaching a wider audience (2) Public Engagement
Three presentations concerned in different ways with reaching the general public and interacting with them
Dr. Heather King and Dr. Elaine Regan, the Department of Education and Professional Studies, Kings College London Relating Research to Practice website resource: a translational research tool (www.research2practice.info)
The Relating Research to Practice website aims to build and reinforce the field of Informal Science Education's awareness of, access to, value for and use of current peer-reviewed research. Currently, a gap persists between the work of research and that of practice. This gap results from barriers that are logistical; for example, research is published across a number of expensive academic journals to which most practitioners do not have access. Barriers are also cultural; for example, education research is written using language and theory that can be impenetrable for readers not trained in particular methods or disciplinary practices. Our website seeks to address these barriers by creating a tool for Informal Science Education professionals that provides quick, searchable, sortable access to scores of recent and/or seminal peer-reviewed studies. Each of these studies is synopsized in a stand-alone 500-word Research Brief, written with the needs, trends, and practices of the field in mind. Each Brief is meta-tagged by key words and by theme ("Hot Topic"), and contains a link to the relevant journal website where the original abstract can be viewed and the original paper downloaded In this presentation I will describe the development of this NSF-funded resource and discuss its potential as a translational research tool.
Ann Grand, Science Communication Unit, University of the West of England .Can open science be a shared space for members of the public and scientists to work together?
Demands for openness and access to data are transforming the way science is conducted. Conducting research in the open makes possible the involvement of new, possibly public, participants and creates potential spaces for dialogue and engagement. Members of the public can scrutinise, co-create or contribute to research, or possibly conduct their own research using publicly-available information. How can professional researchers take the needs of such new participants into account? Indeed, can they or should they respond such demands? Will public participants need to develop new skills if their contributions are to be valued?
Amara Thornton, Institute of Archaeology, University College London Engaging the public - past, present, future? : An archaeological case study.
This paper will discuss the ways in which archaeologists have participated in or initiated public engagement with the past. Using research on the history of archaeology, it will present historical precedents for engagement while highlighting current initiatives to reignite engagement with archaeology through its history. It will also explore the potential for new forms of communication, bringing us full circle - a new method for an old philosophy.
15-35 to 16-00 Refreshments
16-00 to 17-50 Reaching a wider audience (3) Medicine - a special case
All three speakers are concerned with making medical research more available but in very different contexts
Richard Gedye, Director of Publishing Outreach Programmes, International Association of STM Publishers PatientINFORM and Research4Life: an overview of two collaborative content delivery programmes
patientINFORM represents a collaboration between medical publishers and medical research charities to provide patients and carers with intelligible summaries of the most significant and important latest research, but also to allow them to access and print out the research articles on which the summaries are based and share them with their physician, as part of their physician-patient dialogue on matters of disease progression and treatment.
Research4Life is collaboration between scientific publishers, UN agencies, library and technology partners to reduce the knowledge gap between industrialized countries and developing countries by providing affordable access to critical scientific research. The initiative has just celebrated its 10th anniversary and this presentation will consider the current anecdotal evidence we have gathered on its impact and the bibliometric analysis we are about to embark on to derive a more statistical assessment of impact.
David Payne, Editor, BMJ.Com Scholarly articles and the Clapham Omnibus
David Payne will draw upon the experience of the British Medical Journal for long in the lead where transparency and outreach are concerned and will discuss the impact of features many of which he has been responsible for.
Monica Duke, Patients Participate! Project Manager, UKOLN The Crowd-Sourced Lay Summary for Medical Research
The Patients Participate! project has investigated the lay summary as a means of communicating research to a wider audience, proposing a crowd-sourced model of delivery. The project sought the views of several stakeholders, including medical research charities and patients. The findings of the project are presented against a background of other projects engaging the public in doing research.
End of conference
