PLOS leader lined up for R2R event

Alison Mudditt, the chief executive of PLOS, will be the opening keynote speaker at the 2018 Researcher to Reader Conference in London, organisers have announced. Mudditt will follow a tradition of first-class opening speakers including Mark Allin, Derk Haank, YS Chi and Vitek Tracz.

The Researcher to Reader Conference is the successor event to the annual conferences formerly hosted by the Association of Subscription Agents & Intermediaries (ASA), and aims to be the premier forum for discussion of the international scholarly content supply chain – bringing knowledge from the researcher to the reader.

The conference takes place in London in February each year at BMA House in London’s West End. The 2018 conference dates are 26 and 27 February.

The conference programme covers key topics in the area of scholarly content supply, with a scope that ranges from the creation of content by researchers, to the point when the readers access the content and beyond, into archiving and preservation. This supply chain involves many ‘intermediaries’, not just subscription agents and distributors, but publishers, librarians and technology providers.

Presentations will include:

•    Opening Keynote Presentation – Alison Mudditt, CEO at PLOS;
•     Aligning Library Services with Researcher Needs – Susan Gibbons, librarian and deputy provost at Yale University;
•     Academic Publishing within Universities – Lucy Lambe, scholarly communications officer at London School of Economics;
•     Understanding User Behaviour and Research Impact – John Sack, founding director at HighWire Press;
•     The Needs of Scholars in a Contemporary Publishing Environment – Maria Bonn, senior lecturer at the University of Illinois;
•     Defining the Role of Libraries in the Open Science Landscape – Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost at University College London and Tiberius Ignat, manager at Scientific Knowledge Services;
•     Adoption of Open-access Mega-journals – Jenny Fry, senior lecturer at Loughborough University;
•     Sales and Usage of Scholarly Books – Ros Pyne, head of policy at Springer Nature; and
•     The Burden of OA Policy on Libraries and Researchers – Elizabeth Gadd, research policy manager at Loughborough University and Yvonne Budden, head of scholarly communications at the University of Warwick.

A series of interactive panels will include ‘Can Learned Societies Survive and Thrive in an Open Future?’ and ‘Who Should Manage Scholarly Communications within Institutions?’, while a range of immersive workshops will include ‘Gaps in Metadata Lifecycles’, ‘Open Science Roles in Scholarly Communications’, ‘International Access to Research’, and ‘Improving Open Access Communications’.

Organiser Mark Carden told Research Information: ‘We aim to be multidisciplinary, covering the whole scholarly communication supply chain; this multidisciplinary agenda means that we attract senior generalists, not junior people with a narrow focus. We typically have 150 to 200 delegates, so it is not a huge ‘corporate event’ but a smaller focussed gathering with highly interactive workshops, Q&A sessions and long networking breaks.

‘Our roots are in the commercial supply chain, so while we discuss a wide range of communication models, we are commercially-minded and realistic. The highest accolade from our delegates is that the event is extremely well organised, which makes life easier for our speakers, delegates and sponsors alike!’

BMA House’s Great Hall will be the venue for the main presentations. Since the 2016 Conference, BMA House has improved the sound system in the Great Hall, which enhanced the audibility of presenters and questioners, and following the 2017 event a new larger screen has been installed.
Sponsors include Copyright Clearance Center, Ingenta, Atypon, Highwire Press, Elsevier, Ringgold, Page Majik, Redlink, Springer Nature, Digital Science, Research Information and Mosaic Search.