The Researcher to Reader Conference, which takes place online on 23-24 February 2021, will be offering free online sessions in the weeks before the Conference, where people will be able to meet some of the presenters, moderators, and facilitators, to discuss their planned topic with them.  This will give a preview of some Conference content, and help our contributors to finalise their session – eliciting interesting issues and questions from registered participants and potential participants.

These will be brief online sessions, scheduled for just 30 minutes, but with the opportunity to run for an hour if the conversation continues. Registration instructions will be announced within a few days. These sessions will be free to join, whether or not someone has registered for the Conference.

People are encouraged to save the dates for the sessions that are of interest to them (there are more details of each topic on the Programme page).

These will take place at 4 pm (UK) / 11 am (US Eastern) on the following days:

• Mon 25 Jan       
Workshop B: Academic Writing (Christine Tulley, Sara Rouhi & Anna Sharman)
• Tue 26 Jan        
Panel: Inclusivity (Kim Eggleton)
• Wed 27 Jan       
Workshop A: New OA Models (Tasha Mellins-Cohen & Stuart Taylor)
• Thu 28 Jan        
Interviews: China Research and Publishing (Nicko Goncharoff)

• Mon 1 Feb        
Workshop E: Peer Review (Iratxe Puebla & Chris Graf)
• Tue 2 Feb          
Panel: Research Realities (Heather Staines)
• Wed 3 Feb         
Presentation: Funding OA Books (Martin Eve & Frances Pinter)
• Thu 4 Feb          
Panel: COVID-19 Rapid Review & Preprints (Sarah Greaves)

•  Mon 8 Feb        
to be advised
• Tue 9 Feb           
to be advised
• Wed 10 Feb      
Workshop C: Antiracist Framework (Jocelyn Dawson & Sabby Kaur)
• Thu 11 Feb       
Workshop D: Usage Metrics (Lorraine Estelle & Catriona MacCallum)

Mark Carden
14 January 2021

It is confirmed today that the Researcher to Reader Conference on 23-24 February 2021 will be online-only. We have been planning, throughout most of 2020, for a hybrid R2R Conference, aiming to provide both online and physical participants with a real conference experience. Despite good news about vaccines, the current infection rates and new restrictions in the UK (and many other countries) have now caused our BMA House venue to close, and have forced us to switch to an online-only event. This is a disappointment, as we were looking forward to seeing people at the venue, and were relishing the challenge of integrating our physical and online participants.

Our hybrid hopes during 2020 have been useful however, as ‘thinking hybrid’ has helped us to keep working on delivering a real, fully-interactive conference experience for our participants, not just a drab online webinar for a largely passive at-home audience.  We are continuing to invest heavily in planning, facilitation and technology to ensure that R2R will be a real conference, even though online. The Conference will be supported by a web-based ‘online event platform’, which will help the participants to engage fully with all aspects of the programme, including support for live Q&A and networking. We will also have a professional audio-visual production team, who will ensure that multi-way communications are highly effective. This will be supported by our experienced facilitators, who will be encouraging full engagement for all participants.

The online R2R will still be an intense and absorbing two full days of interaction, conversation and collaboration.

In recognition that our venue costs are now capped, we feel able to share this saving with our participants, and so we are lowering our Standard registration rates to the same level as our previous ‘early-bird’ discount (which ended in November). All those who have registered at the higher rate in the meantime will automatically receive a partial refund.  We remain very grateful to those who registered with us early, in October and November, even though the advantage of doing so has been somewhat eroded!

We look forward to collaborating with members of the scholarly communications community – online, but face-to-face – in February.

Mark Carden
13 February 2021

Researcher to Reader has added a Frequently-asked Questions page to the website, to try to answer some of the many questions about the Conference. The FAQ provides information about how the upcoming conference will work online, as well as more general information about the conference and how it is organised.

The FAQ is intended to be a ‘living document’ and will be constantly updated with new information, particularly in response to community questions that are sent to us.

Mark Carden
13 January 2021

We are delighted to announce that Atypon has renewed their Silver Sponsorship of the Researcher to Reader Conference. Atypon has been a Silver Sponsor of all five of our previous Conferences, and we are very grateful for their continuing support.

Atypon develops publishing technologies for getting mission-critical content into the hands of the practitioners and researchers who need it most. Atypon’s online publishing and website development tools let publishers manage, deliver, and monetize all of the content they distribute—from standards and scholarly articles to online courses and videos. Atypon’s tools for researchers let them easily author, discover, and access the content they need. Founded in 1996, Atypon is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with over 470 staff in 9 offices around the world.

Registration is open for the fully-live and highly interactive Conference which will take place on 23-24 February in London and Online. Researcher to Reader has been describing how the Conference will be a real and immersive event, in a series of ‘frequently asked questions’ messages on Twitter.

Mark Carden
15 January 2021

We are delighted to announce that Ringgold is returning as a sponsor of the Researcher to Reader Conference for 2021. Ringgold was R2R‘s first ever sponsor, and they have supported every single Conference since our opening event in 2016.

Ringgold maintains a global, multi-sector database of organizations complete with relationship hierarchies, multiple standard identifiers, and deep metadata that allows anyone with a need for trustworthy information to simplify, understand, and navigate the complex world of research and scholarly publishing.

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

Registration is open for the fully-live and highly interactive Conference which will take place on 23-24 February in London and Online.

Mark Carden
17 December 2020

We are pleased to be able to announce the proposition for the Debate at the Researcher to Reader Conference on 23-24 February 2021. The proposition will be:

“Resolved: Journal publishers should pay academics for providing peer review.”

The debate will be a reasoned but impassioned argument on the merits (or otherwise) of the proposition, conducted in a formal manner by two opposing teams of debaters. The Conference participants will join in, by voting on the proposition before and after the debate, and by asking questions. We plan to announce the debate teams shortly, but would also welcome last-minute volunteers or recommendations.

Videos of previous debates are available on YouTube:
2020 Debate: The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper
2019 Debate: Sci-Hub is doing more good than harm to scholarly communication

The debate forms part of our lively and interactive Programme for the hybrid R2R Conference which will be a full two-day collegiate meeting, in contrast to the passive afternoon webinars that have been commonplace recently. As well as the debate, the programme includes workshops, panels, an interactive participant survey and much more.

Registration is open now, with discounts available for academics and librarians. Prompt registration for this hybrid event is risk-free, there is no need to choose between online or physical participation, and full refunds are available until the end of January.

Mark Carden
15 December 2020

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

Karger Publishers is a worldwide publisher of scientific and medical content based in Basel, Switzerland. Connecting and advancing health sciences since 1890, Karger has been continuously evolving, keeping pace with the current developments and shifts in research and publishing. The publishing house is dedicated to serving the information needs of the scientific community, clinicians and patients with publications of high-quality content and services in health sciences. Karger Publishers has 240 employees and is present in 15 countries around the globe.

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

Registration is open for the fully-live and highly interactive Conference which will take place on 23-24 February in London and Online.

Mark Carden
4 December 2020

The Royal Society of Chemistry has upgraded their support for the Researcher to Reader Conference to take the unique Gold Sponsor position.

We were delighted to have been able to announce the RSC returning as a Silver Sponsor in November following the great support provided for R2R 2020. We are now extra grateful for their increased support for the upcoming fully-live, highly-interactive hybrid event scheduled for 23-24 February.

The Royal Society of Chemistry is an international organisation connecting chemical scientists with each other, with other scientists, and with society as a whole. Founded in 1841, the RSC has an international membership. The RSC uses the surplus from their global publishing and knowledge business to give thousands of chemical scientists the support and resources required to make vital advances in chemical knowledge. The RSC is a catalyst for the chemistry that enriches our world.

The full Programme for the 2021 Conference on 23-24 February has been announced and Registration is open.

Mark Carden
3 December 2020

We are delighted to announce that registrations for the 2021 Researcher to Reader Conference are higher (at the end of the October/November early-bird period) than they were at the same time last year. This is a great display of confidence that R2R will be able to deliver its outstanding levels of quality and interactivity in a hybrid environment. People are desperate for a real conference where people can talk to each other, and R2R will be delivering exactly that on 23-24 February 2021.

Registration continues to be open, with great discounts available for librarians and academics.

Mark Carden
2 December 2020

We have an outstanding line-up at the hybrid, fully-interactive Researcher to Reader Conference on 23-24 February 2021, including Dr Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of Retraction Watch.

See our full Programme for the complete agenda.

Mark Carden
30 November 2020