The Call for Papers for the 2020 Researcher to Reader Conference has been announced. Full details are available on the ‘Call for Papers‘ page of the Conference website.

This annual international scholarly communications event will next take place in London on 24 & 25 February 2020. The R2R Conference is attended by around 150-200 senior delegates from all parts of the scholarly communications lifecycle including funders, researchers, research managers, publishers, distributors, technologists and librarians. 

The Advisory Board is inviting proposals for workshops, presentations, panels and debates. We are also seeking experienced facilitators to help lead our workshops. We are particularly seeking proposals from librarians, researchers, editors & funders, from people based outside the UK, and from under-represented demographics.

Proposers are invited to provide an abstract (50-100 words) and a fuller description (100-250 words) by Friday 23 August 2019, using the proposal form available on the ‘Call for Papers‘ page of the website.

Mark Carden
2 July 2019

The controversial debate on Sci-Hub that took place at the Researcher to Reader Conference in February has now been published as a full transcript on the Scholarly Kitchen blog. As well as giving people chance to read the debate, the comments section of the blog contains a well-informed and lively discussion of the issue, with 22 comments posted at the time of writing.

Several other aspects of the Researcher to Reader Conference have also been featured in Scholarly Kitchen blog posts.

The video-recording of the debate is available on the Conference YouTube Channel.

Mark Carden
17 April 2019

Analysis of the delegate feedback from the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference shows very high levels of satisfaction with the event, with delegates rating both the sessions and the event very positively.

Of the 70+ survey respondents, all but two ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the Conference was relevant to them professionally and was a valuable use of their time.

Just one respondent disagreed that the event was ‘valuable’, but they acknowledged that this was because they only attended one day. And just one respondent strongly disagreed on both ‘value’ and ‘relevance’, although since they also said that they “go every year”, we are confident that this response was an error! (Get in touch if you want to change your response.) If we exclude these two anomalies, 100% of the respondents agreed that event was “relevant to me professionally” and “a valuable use of my time”.

The speaker presentations at the event also received consistently positive results, with most getting an average rating at least 3 out of 4, and all presentations getting at least 2.8, which is outstanding for any conference. Five of the 10 presentations got over 80% favourable ratings.

The Workshops and Panels received more mixed feedback, with the comments showing quite polarised opinions on many of these sessions. But two Workshops managed to achieve 100% positive ratings (Supporting Early-Career Scholarship and Levelling the Playing Field), which was excellent, with the former receiving an outstanding 3.8 average rating.

The organisation and venue also rated highly, with the event administration getting 100% positive ratings.  The temperature of the rooms continued to be somewhat concerning , with 20% rating it Poor or Fair, despite careful monitoring and frequent checking of the audience comfort level – we will have to keep working on this.

Delegate comments were also very positive, with responses that included:

• Audience interaction was great.
• Altogether a well-run conference.
• Excellent, interesting to be so interactive.
• Good conference, I liked the mix of attendees.
• Brilliant for networking.
• A well-organised conference.
• Interesting conference
• Really enjoyed the programme, good variety and the workshops well facilitated.
• Great as always.
• Really good balance of subjects and speakers.
• Extremely well run.
• Passionate speakers; great topics.
• Excellent facilitators, fun and productive
• Great timing, layout and stage.
• Workshop format was good for energy levels.
• Very collaborative event.
• Brilliant hearing the perspective of librarians and researchers as well as publishing.
• Very nice venue.
• Great workshops. helped fuel the creative process and given me lots to take away.

Overall, the survey results showed very positive feedback for the event, and we also received many useful suggestions for improvements and innovations for 2020.

Mark Carden
14 April 2019

Unfortunately our email addresses @R2RConf.com have been down for a few days due to some strange WordPress/Google glitch. We hope that normal service will be resumed soon.

Mark Carden
10 April 2019

A presentation given at last month’s Researcher to Reader Conference, by Dr Haseeb Irfanullah, has been the basis of a guest post, ‘How has Bangladesh’s scholarly communication changed in recent decades?’ at the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

The slides for the R2R presentation (in PDF format) are available on our website, and a video-recording of the presentation is available on our YouTube channel.

Mark Carden
29 March 2019

A presentation given at last month’s Researcher to Reader Conference, by Dr Christine Tulley, forms the basis of a guest blog post, ‘Emerging Trends in the Academic Publishing Lifecycle’ at the Scholarly Kitchen today.

The slides for the R2R presentation (in PDF format) are available on our website, and a video-recording of the presentation will be available shortly on our YouTube channel.

Mark Carden
27 March 2019

The recent Researcher to Reader Conference has been written up by Dr Danny Kingsley (an Advisory Board member) on the University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication Blog: Unlocking Research.

In her comprehensive, and personal, take on the issues raised at the Conference, Dr Kingsley concludes that it is essential that to get researchers, librarians and publishers into the same room to understand one other better, through events like R2R.

The full blog post is available at Unlocking Research.

Mark Carden
7 March 2019

One of the workshops at the recent Researcher to Reader Conference has been written up by Andrea Powell of Research4Life on the Scholarly Kitchen blog. In the blog post, Powell described the question being addressed during the series of three workshop meetings that took place during the 2019 R2R:

• How can the global scholarly communications community address economic and infrastructure imbalances that prevent researchers from the Global South from achieving equality?”

and concludes that “The workshops generated a great deal of engagement and ideas, with some highly practical and achievable recommendations for further action. “

The highly interactive workshops that form an integral part of the two-day Researcher to Reader programme are very popular, and it is great to see practical actions following on from the inter-disciplinary conversations that take place.

Visit Scholarly Kitchen to read the full account.

Mark Carden
6 March 2019

We are excited to announce that Professor James Evans, who will be speaking at the Researcher to Reader Conference, 25-26 February, has been featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature (Vol 566 No 7744), in relation to his research (with Lingfei Wu and Dashun Wang) into the impact of team size on research outcomes.  The abstract is below.  We look forward to hearing Professor Evans speak about this and other aspects of his work on 26 February.

Although the Conference is only just over a week away, and we are already at 120% of last year’s total delegates, it is not too late to register. As of today we have about 10 spaces left.

Mark Carden
16 February 2019

Abstract

One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence. Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities, improvements in communication technology, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology produced by large teams differs from that of small teams. Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more-recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future—if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher-impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for a small part of the relationship between team size and disruption; most of the effect occurs at the level of the individual, as people move between smaller and larger teams. These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology, and suggest that, to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes.

We are delighted to announce that Karger Publishers has become a Bronze Sponsor of the Researcher to Reader Conference.

Karger Publishers is the largest medical and scientific publishing company in Switzerland. Karger has 250 employees in 15 countries, and is dedicated to serving the information needs of the scientific community with publications of high-quality content, covering all fields of medical science. The publishing program comprises 50 new books per year and over 100 peer-reviewed journals, with a growing number of open-access publications.

We are very grateful for Karger’s support, helping to keep the R2R Conference affordable for all members of the scholarly communications community.

Although current registrations now exceed the 2018 total, we have made some additional space available, so registration is still open for the 2019 Conference, which takes place on 25-26 February in London.

Mark Carden
31 January 2019