Open Scholarship at #pmrsymp and #pmrhack

We’ve had a very encouraging registration for the hackfest 15/16 and symposium on January 17^th (/pmr/2010/12/23/pmr-events-at-unilever-centre-january-1516-and-17/ ) – there are over 70 registrants and we have had to move lecture theatre. Please register as soon as you know you are coming.

Here’s what we shall send to speakers and registrants today…

#pmrsymp is taking place at an important time in Open Scholarship (much of which has developed in the time since the symposium was conceived) and several speakers and others have remarked on this. #pmrsymp now comes after the emerging success of Open Bibliography, Open Citations and Open Data and we shall pull much of this together on the day. The intention is that #pmrsymp will show the power of semantic science and emphasize that making it Open is a necessary step for the academic knowledge economy.

I have asked Cameron Neylon to “chair” the meeting. Cameron has an excellent interaction with all the speakers and will help to tie the threads together. We deliberately haven’t constrained the invited speakers other than asking them to look forward as to what we could achieve. We know there are barriers to overcome but if the future is sufficiently appealing then the barriers will disappear.

We are hoping to have a variety of ways of communicating including those who cannot physically attend. 2/3 speakers will have remote presentations and we intend that the meeting is streamed and twittered. As always there is a risk of bandwidth problems and we ask everyone to be sympathetic. We intend that the meeting is recorded.

It has now become clear to several of us that we need to identify an ethos of Open Scholarship. This means that – when and however disseminated – scholarship should be created in a semantic manner which allows us – and machines – to make better decisions and bout what we do, and to re-use the material that we create. By transferring the power of semantics to authors we give them greater voice; the costs can be very low and toolsets can be free and transparent. I shall pull this together in my presentation and several of us will have worked to create a first draft of Open Scholarship principles and practice, building on Panton and other initiatives.

The symposium will also highlight the major fruits of colleagues in our group, supported by JISC, EPSRC, Unilever and Microsoft. We have built a number of open-source systems for semantic science and these are at a stage where they can be taken and re-used widely. They link into ideas of semantic authorship, publication of data and reproducible computational science. The key question, which we’d like delegates to consider is how we continue to develop and sustain Open-source tools in science. This is not a new problem, but it’s becoming increasingly important to address.

The group, with extended membership such as Quixote, Bue Obelisk and the Open Knowledge Foundation, will be presenting these products and ideas through posters, demos and videos. We have been asked, and agreed, to make these available as publications in J.Cheminformatics.

 #pmrsymp is also fortuitously placed just before “Beyond the PDF” – a workshop in San Diego run by Phil Bourne and Anita de Waard. There is a natural progression in that #pmrsymp will have an emphasis on the principles and practice of Open Scholarship which we hope can be taken as one of the starting points of BTPDF.

Please also sign up for the #pmrhack if you wish to take part, and also let us know if you want to come on a special tour of the Cambridge University Library to see Open Bibliography in action on manuscripts. #pmrhack is unstructured and we have no expectations other than that people will come and we’ll have a fun time.