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Last month, Mithu Lucraft, Senior Consultant, attended the Researcher to Reader conference in London. Here are her reflections on the event.
The Researcher to Reader conference has established itself as a forum for collaboration and discussion over the years. Taking place over two days, it combines thoughtful conference sessions alongside action-oriented workshops, with ample time for a good chat over excellent food.
This year, there was a continued focus on industry disruption, from AI to OA.
Alongside this, there was a strong focus on the continued role and importance of people in surviving and thriving in these turbulent times. This was the headline for Antonia Seymour’s superb keynote, showing why performing and transforming is a formidable challenge for our industry that necessitates collaboration. She spoke about IOP Publishing’s investment to make people resilient and cultivate a positive mindset. She emphasised the need for new skills, including data management, data analysis, AI, and marketing. She also discussed Purpose-Led Publishing, IOPP’s collaboration with AIP Publishing and The American Physical Society. She noted that our sector is strategically aligned towards a shared purpose and a common goal: accelerating discovery. The only way to build trust in science and innovate is to tackle these shared goals together.
Open access remained a focus for many other sessions. In a session with Kamran Naim and Ana Heredia, we learned that open access transformation is possible in local contexts, such as disciplinary (SCOAP3) and regional (Latin America). Kamran’s presentation on SCOAP3’s extraordinary achievements were, in his words, only achievable through CERN where organising a global collective around High Energy Physics has delivered over 90+ of all articles in the discipline OA. The challenge is who can replicate this for other disciplines.
A panel on the future of scholarly publishing provided insights from the researcher (Bjorn Brembs, Universitat Regensberg), publisher (Roheena Anand, PLOS), and librarian (Yvonne Nobis, Cambridge University) perspectives. As Roheena summarised, there has been little shift from the print era of communication, and more emphasis is needed on incentivising non-article outputs such as data, code, methods, and protocols. There was a sense from Bjorn that monopolistic commercial structures are to blame, and institutions need to align around the infrastructure for open science. However, from Nobis’ perspective, it is also clear that there are continued perceptions and concerns within the research community that prevent a total shift to open access. For example, where preprints are the norm in specific fields, there is resentment about a shift to Gold OA, regardless of funder policies. Nobis also commented on the global nature of research, making it challenging to identify sometimes who should pay for the costs of open access.
In a further insightful panel session on research cultures, it was evident that there are myriad pressures on researchers, of which funding for OA is just one. We heard from Dr Rashna Bhandari, Makoto Yuasa, and Prof. Zhang Hongliang about the burdens of many reviewer requests (3-5 every day), and the pressure to get grant funding. The discussion centred around the need for publishers to be more inclusive, providing more training for Asian researchers, support funding mechanisms, and facilitate more conversations between authors and editors in the region.
The institutional challenges were also considered in a session exploring US University Perspectives on Transformative Agreements. There is a continued discrepancy between data sources (including external sources such as Dimensions and Web of Science as well as internal sources), which adds to the challenge of understanding how much OA an institution’s authors are already paying for. There is a need for more support in understanding publication data when negotiating transformative agreements. Many remain sceptical about the future of these agreements, and whether they are truly transformative.
The workshops were once again the heart of the conversation at R2R. I joined a small but engaged workshop session on publisher initiatives for early career researchers, where we learned that most ECRs don’t hear much at all from publishers. There is an opportunity for publishers to articulate the value and benefits of the ECR activities they offer, particularly those related to career development. Other workshops also delved into peer review, AI, OA books, and research data.
There were other notable sessions:
Mandy Hill and Keith Webster’s lively discussion on the necessity of academic libraries led to a conversation about academic officers supporting research in shared spaces, which could be described as…a library!
Jo Wixon, Roger Worthing, and Chirag Patel discussed the importance of improving communication between academics and practitioners, and how AI is facilitating this.
Kaveh Bazargan provided a guide to detecting research integrity issues, covering papermills, AI, and malicious misconduct.
Insights were shared from librarians-turned-publishers and publishers-turned-librarians, demonstrating that switching roles can lead to better mutual understanding and support.
Ultimately, in what is an ever-more turbulent climate, there was a real focus on the value and importance of our people. There’s a sense of optimism for what our sector can – and will – achieve if we continue to invest in our skills, culture, collaboration, and wellbeing!
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