R2R 2027 Programme

23–24 February 2027 | BMA House, London; the programme is subject to change.

R2R 2027 has already begun. Registration is open, conversations with contributors are under way, and the programme is taking shape. The two days at BMA House in February will be the culmination of several months of preparation, discussion and engagement with the R2R community.

Our Golden Thread for 2027 takes its cue from Harold Pinter’s wonderfully provocative question:

“Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”

It feels particularly apt for a research system experiencing rapid advances in artificial intelligence, changing geopolitics, new questions about trust and integrity, and growing expectations for research to reach further and progress faster.

The programme will explore some of these topics through presentations, panels, a formal debate, Plenary Lightning Talks and our Collaborative Workshops.

Collaborative Workshops: five groups, three meetings, one piece of work each

Our five Collaborative Workshops will each meet three times during the conference. They are designed as working spaces where participants can examine a problem together, test ideas, and leave London with something useful to carry forward.

The workshops will move through three one-hour stages during the conference, with their findings, questions and possible next steps returning to the plenary programme. That gives R2R participants a chance to see ideas develop during the two days, and gives promising work a route to continue afterwards.

Plenary Sessions

Managing Scholarly Communication in a Polycrisis

Rafael Ball, Director of the Library at ETH Zurich (in research leave), will explore Managing Scholarly Communication in a Polycrisis, drawing on the experience of the ETH Library to ask how institutions make strategic choices across open access, artificial intelligence, research data, resources and governance. The interesting territory lies in the trade-offs: where to concentrate attention, how to allocate responsibility and what lessons travel beyond a single institution.

Shared Research Infrastructure. What to Centralise, What to Distribute, and Why

Lars Kaczmirek, Head of AUSSDA – The Austrian Social Science Data Archive at the University of Vienna Library, will ask what research infrastructure should be centralised, what should be distributed, and why, drawing on a decade of experience building the Austrian Social Science Data Archive.

Shuffling the deck with ORE

Agata Morka, Operational Manager of Open Research Europe, based at CERN, will take us into the next phase of Open Research Europe, with its new model of shared stewardship and collectively funded infrastructure. Their contributions open a wider conversation about who should build, govern and fund the infrastructure on which research increasingly depends, and what researchers and institutions gain from different models.

Can peer review survive the debate?

Our formal R2R Debate also returns.

Rick Anderson, University Librarian at Brigham Young University, joined by Elaine Stott, CEO of Canadian Science Publishing, and Jennifer Regala, Senior Director, Publishing and Product Development at the American College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, will put an uncomfortable proposition before the room: Resolved: The Peer-review System Is Fundamentally Broken.

R2R debates thrive on argument, evidence and an audience willing to participate. This one will give the room a chance to examine what peer review still does well, where its weaknesses have become structural, and how far repair or reinvention should go. The audience will play the main role in deciding who wins the debate.

Building trust infrastructure for scholarly communication

As AI becomes a participant in finding, transforming and evaluating published works, scholarly communication faces another fundamental question: what do humans and machines need to know about a piece of content  before deciding how much confidence to place in it?

A panel bringing together Leonard Rosenthol, Chief Architect, Adobe Intelligence Platform and Chair of Technical Working Group, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity; Toby Green, Co-Founder of Coherent Digital and Co-Founder and Executive of the TrustMarc Initiative; Monica Westin, Policy Director at Cambridge University Press and board director at NISO; Kaveh Bazargan, Director, Focal Image (Moderator), who will examine provenance, attribution, standards, machine-readable trust signals and who issues them. Their work brings together emerging approaches including provenance standards, and the design and governance of signals that can travel with scholarly content.

The ambition is to understand how these approaches intersect, where the gaps lie, what the scholarly communication community can learn from developments elsewhere, and what coordinated action could usefully follow. Audience engagement will form a substantial part of the session, because a trust layer for research will need to work for the community at large: publishers, librarians, researchers, institutions, infrastructure providers, and standards organisations.

When AI enters peer review, who decides?

A second conversation will move from trust in content to human judgement and AI in peer review.

Caitlin Meadows, Head of Commercial at PA Editorial; Nisha Doshi, Director of Digital Publishing Product and AI Strategy for the Academic product group at Cambridge University Press & Assessment; Janice Read, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Silverchair; and Milos Cuculovic, Head of Technology Innovation at MDPI, are developing a session examining how AI governance translates into practice as automated checks, reviewer-assistance tools and AI-generated assessments enter editorial workflows.

The questions quickly become human ones. Where should decision rights sit? Which safeguards deserve priority? How should responsibility travel when humans and machines contribute to the same evaluation? Which forms of AI assistance actually improve peer review?

The session will bring together governance, technology, publishing and research-integrity perspectives and invite the R2R audience into the discussion. The underlying proposals span AI governance across the scholarly ecosystem, practical models of AI-supported peer review and research-integrity signals.

Editorial Transparency Beyond Peer Review

This roundtable will discuss to what extent can and should editorial workflows be made transparent to the researchers?

Calls for transparency in scholarly publishing have largely focused on peer review, promoting open reports, reviewer identities, and greater accountability. Yet the editorial processes that shape manuscripts before, during, and after peer review remain comparatively opaque. Authors rarely know what happens once they click “submit”, including how editorial decisions are made, which tasks are outsourced, or who in which part of the world performs them. While open science agendas promote transparency, in practice there may be difficult trade-offs. Drawing on research and practical experience, they will ask what meaningful editorial transparency could look like: what should be disclosed, to whom, and under what conditions? The audience will help examine the trade-offs, question assumptions and consider which changes could make editorial processes more understandable, accountable and worthy of trust.

Amna Pottarath, a PhD candidate and an early-career researcher in the DISAPEER project at Radboud University’s Institute for Science in Society, will moderate a roundtable bringing together Dr Sabina Alam, Vice President of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis Group; Dr Haseeb Irfanullah, independent consultant; and Chris Leonard, Director of Product Solutions at Cactus Communications.

Ten minutes. One idea. The main stage.

R2R 2027 will also inaugurate a new format: the Plenary Lightning Talk.

These are ten-minute main-stage contributions, including discussion, designed to give the programme more voices, perspectives and intellectual territory. Ten minutes is enough to introduce evidence, challenge an assumption or place a new question in front of the room. It also gives PowerPoint considerably less time to become comfortable.

Among the first contributions selected for this format are Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications, on The Future of Digital Publishing; Victoria Merriman, Researcher Engagement Manager at IOP Publishing, on Creating research communities for a more equitable future; Tilen Mandelj, Director of the Central Technical Library of the University of Ljubljana, on Small Country, Global Impact; and Thomas Kaarsted, Director of the SDU Citizen Science Knowledge Center, on Research outside the box.

And there is more to come

These are some of the anchors around which R2R 2027 is being built. We are currently developing further plenary contributions, speakers, and conversations.

Over the next few weeks, we will complete the remaining programme discussions and publish the full R2R 2027 programme.

In the meantime, the conversation has started.

The Known will keep expanding. So will the Unknown. But perhaps the most interesting territory is everything we have yet to think of asking.

Registration for R2R 2027 is open.
Join us in London on 23–24 February 2027

(Updated 12 Oct 2026 – Programme Description)