2021 Conference Programme
The Programme for the 2021 Researcher to Reader Conference is shown below, with links to the video recordings and slides.
The Full Programme, a 1-page GMT Timetable or a 1-page Time Zones Timetable (showing a range of time zones), in PFD format, can be downloaded using the buttons below, and the timetable is also shown on this webpage.
Programme
Programme
The programme and running order is set out below. The content and timing of the Programme is subject to change.
Day 1
TUESDAY
23 February 2021
Morning
Welcome & Introduction
Mark Carden
● Conference Chairman
● Managing Consultant at Mosaic Search & Selection
Video Recording
Participant Perceptions
What the R2R Community thinks about the scholarly communications landscape
Rob Johnson
● Founder and Director at Research Consulting
Dr Danny Kingsley
● Scholarly Communication Consultant
● Visiting Fellow, Australian National University
Conference participants are asked to give their opinions on key scholarly communications issues in a live interactive survey. The anonymised results will be shared on the fly, to give a picture of the views of the R2R community, and to provide qualitative and quantitative information on a range of hot topics. The consolidated survey results will be available at the end of the Conference.
Panel: Inclusivity
Becoming Part of the Solution
How publishers can help to improve inclusivity within academia
Kim Eggleton (moderator)
● Research Integrity & Inclusion Manager at IOP Publishing
Simone Ragavooloo
● Research Integrity Co-ordinator at British Medical Journal
Professor Jon Wilson
● Editor of the Journal of Islamic Marketing
Dr Katherine Brown
● Executive Editor, Development at the Company of Biologists
Dr Nicola Nugent
● Publishing Manager, Quality & Ethics at the RSC
It is widely acknowledged that there are considerable diversity problems within the research ecosystem. As privileged and powerful players within that ecosystem, this panel session will explore the ways publishers are trying to make their products and practices more inclusive. This session will encourage delegates to consider the complex equality, diversity and inclusion challenges we all face, and aims to stimulate a supportive and collegial discussion to address some of those challenges to improve equity of opportunity for all.
Interview: China (part 1)
China Research and Publishing
What to expect in 2021 and beyond
Judy Bai
● Director of Business Development, China at Digital Science
Nicko Goncharoff (moderator)
● China Strategy Advisor to Hindawi
● Former MD, Business Development, China at Clarivate
A China expert interviews thought leaders from the country’s scholarly research and communications sector to get their views on key trends and developments to watch out for in 2021 and beyond, and then invites questions from the Conference participants.
Workshops:
First Meeting
Laura Cox (moderator)
● Chief Financial and Operating Officer at Ringgold
Delegates are invited at registration to select one workshop in which to participate during the Conference. Each workshop group convenes three times during the two-day Conference, typically scoping the topic in the first session, exploring options in the second session, and formulating solutions in the third session.
Workshop A:
New Models for Open Access
How should we shape the future of and ensure long-term sustainability for transformative agreements?
Tasha Mellins-Cohen
● Founder and Director at Mellins-Cohen Consulting
Stuart Taylor
● Publishing Director at the Royal Society
Transformative agreements – Read-and-Publish, Subscribe-to-Open, and the like – are currently everywhere in the scholarly communication landscape. They purport to be a way to transition journals from the subscription model into a new, Open Access world. In this workshop participants will consider issues like the sustainability of such deals, the pros and cons of different models and, crucially, what comes next.
Workshop B:
Who Decides What’s “Good” Academic Writing?
How can we reduce barriers and increase diversity by improving the effectiveness of researcher authoring?
Dr Christine Tulley
● Professor of English at the University of Findlay
● Research Adviser at Prolifiko
Sara Rouhi
● Director of Strategic Partnerships at PLOS
Dr Anna Sharman
● Founder and Director of Cofactor
Publishers play an important role as gate-keepers and arbiters of “good, well-articulated” research. As questions of equity and inclusion become more pressing in scholarly publishing, it’s valuable to examine the origins of these gatekeeping standards and where they might have consequences that disadvantage emerging fields, communication styles, research outputs, methods, communities on the margins, and readers. Changing the emphasis away from enforcing a strict style and towards encouraging authors to present their research clearly will encourage a wider range of submissions. In this workshop the participants will develop strategies to support researcher authoring in order to increase author diversity.
Workshop C:
An Antiracist Framework for Scholarly Communications
How do we confront racism, transform workplace culture, and accelerate progress towards inclusion?
Jocelyn Dawson
● Journals Marketing Manager at Duke University Press
Sabby Kaur
● Digital Product Manager at Emerald Publishing
Efforts to advance inclusivity in scholarly communications have gained momentum, yet there is still a lack of effective programs and solutions in place to address how systemic racism impacts our workplaces. How do we disrupt racism (and other -isms) and create work communities where everyone thrives? Workshop participants will identify the structures particular to our industry that maintain systems of white advantage and will explore specific actions to break down barriers and accelerate progress at both the interpersonal and organizational levels.
Workshop D:
Usage Metrics for Open Outputs
How can we craft community standards to track the use of open outputs?
Lorraine Estelle
● Executive Director at COUNTER
Catriona MacCallum
● Director of Open Science at Hindawi
Participants will explore the principles, technology, governance, and business models needed to create a compelling and level playing field for understanding the use of open articles, books, data, and other scholarly resources. We will explore the value that usage metrics hold for different stakeholders, and explore ways to automate services for gathering usage data and using it to compare and contrast service providers. Outputs will be shared openly and with a COUNTER working group looking at open access resources.
Workshop E:
The Many Shapes of Peer Review
How can we maximise value and visibility of peer review beyond the journal?
Iratxe Puebla
● Associate Director at ASAPbio
Chris Graf
● Director, Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics at Wiley
The growth in preprint adoption is bringing with it review activities that happen outside the traditional peer review process at a journal. This opens opportunities for broader representation in peer review and for innovation in review formats, but in the absence of the structure and coordination that a journal provides, where do those activities fit in the research communication space? In this workshop we will explore review activities in the context of preprints, and aim to collaboratively find practical steps that can maximize their value, increase their visibility, and facilitate complementarity with journal review.
Afternoon
Keynote: Research Integrity
Current trends in research integrity, taking into account the lessons from the current pandemic
Dr Ivan Oransky
● Co-founder of Retraction Watch
● Editor In Chief at Spectrum
Panel: Research Realities in Pictures
Researchers tell all (about their workflow, process, and priorities)
Dr Heather Staines (moderator)
● Member of the 2021 Researcher to Reader Advisory Board
How much do we really know about the life of researchers in the wild? Particularly early-career researchers who have grown up and entered the lab/classroom in the midst of information overload, rapid-fire new tools, ever-changing requirements, and more. Researchers from different disciplines will share their stories in response to a fun array of images that they’ve selected to represent their daily workflow, research processes, and career priorities. We will be hearing some eye-opening insights to trouble the preconceptions of publishers, librarians, funders and all.
Debate (Part 1)
Resolved: Journal publishers should pay academics for providing peer review
Rick Anderson (moderator)
● University Librarian at Brigham Young University
Two teams will argue for and against the proposition in a formal debate, with the result decided by the impact of the arguments on all the Conference participants. There will be an initial ‘benchmarking’ vote, and then the first two debaters will begin each side of the argument. The remaining two team-members will conclude the debate on day 2 of the Conference.
Workshops:
Second Meeting
The workshop groups reconvene to continue their discussions.
Day 2
WEDNESDAY
24 February 2021
Morning
Interview: China (part 2)
China Research and Publishing
What to expect in 2021 and beyond
Dr Jinshan Wu
● Professor at the School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University
Nicko Goncharoff (moderator)
● China Strategy Advisor to Hindawi
● Former MD, Business Development, China at Clarivate
Presentations: Open Access Books
Diversifying Readership Through Open Access
A usage analysis for OA books
Mithu Lucraft
● Marketing Director, Outreach and Open Research at Springer Nature
One of the attractions of publishing OA is the potential for greater reach, but is OA living up to its promise of expanding and diversifying the readership of books? In this session we present findings from the largest ever usage and citation study comparing OA and non-OA books, and show that OA books are read more, across more countries, than non-OA books, and reach more readers in low- and lower-middle-income countries.
New Funding Model For Open-Access Monographs
A novel business model and approach to publishing OA books through library membership funding
Professor Martin Eve
● Project Lead at COPIM
● Professor at Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Frances Pinter
● Executive Chair at Central European University Press
A partnership between Central European University Press (CEUP) and the COPIM Project (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) explores an innovative revenue model to fund open access monographs at CEUP. Building on library journal subscription models (eg: OLH) and Knowledge Unlatched’s approach to monograph funding, we present a sustainable OA publishing model that gives members exclusive access to a backlist, with the revenue then used to make the frontlist openly accessible. The model can be emulated by other scholarly presses who wish to take advantage of the opportunities that open access publishing affords.
Interview: China (Part 3)
China Research and Publishing
What to expect in 2021 and beyond
Dr Xin Bi
● University Librarian at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Nicko Goncharoff (moderator)
● China Strategy Advisor to Hindawi
● Former MD, Business Development, China at Clarivate
Workshops
Third Meeting
The workshop groups reconvene to conclude their discussions.
Afternoon
Debate (Part 2)
Rick Anderson (moderator)
● University Librarian at Brigham Young University
The debaters will conclude their arguments for and against the proposition and respond to participant questions. The result will be decided by comparing a vote amongst all the Conference participants with the ‘benchmark’ vote before the start of the debate.
Keynote: cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy
Helping researchers retain their rights and increase immediate open access
Professor Johan Rooryck
● Executive Director at cOAlition S
● Professor of French Linguistics at Leiden University
A Rights Retention Strategy has been developed by cOAlition S, to enable researchers to publish in a wide array of journals, including subscription journals, whilst adhering to the Plan S principles of immediate OA under an open licence. It does this by requiring funded researchers to assign a licence to their accepted manuscripts. Such a bold move provokes change: possibly disruption. This presentation describes modifications in scholarly publishing that have ensued as observed by cOAlition S funders, reactions they have noted by researchers, publishers, and librarians, and describes future developments for cOAlition S in this space.
Workshop Feedback
Laura Cox (moderator)
● Chief Financial and Operating Officer at Ringgold
Dr Phill Jones (moderator)
● Owner at Double L Digital
Each workshop will provide a very brief overview of their discussions, and any resolutions achieved and action points to be taken forward.
Panel: COVID-19 Rapid Review & Preprints
The long-term impact of the C19 cross publisher rapid review group and interaction with preprints
Dr Sarah Greaves (moderator)
● STM Publishing Consultant
Professor Ludo Waltman
● Deputy Director at the Centre for Science and Technology, Leiden University
Daniela Saderi
● Co-Founder and Director at PREreview
Dr Phil Hurst
● Publisher at The Royal Society
COVID-19 motivated a group of publishers and other industry stakeholders to collaborate on a cross-publisher rapid reviewer pool alongside manuscript transfers. The panel will focus on the C19RR initiative itself (including the rapid review database, manuscript transfers, links with preprints and mandating data sharing) and the conclusions on the project a year after its launch. Key questions around the impact of the initiative on open science including closing the loop with preprints, creating collaboration, challenging the peer review model, and lessons learned will all be discussed.
Welcome & Introduction
Mark Allin
● Principal at ContentAll
Slides (not yet available)
Researcher to Reader Conference — London — 20-21 February 2024 
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