For our final webcast of 2015 Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman joined us. Together they discussed innovation in scholarly communication and how new tools are changing researchers’ workflows.

Bianca and Jeroen are librarians at Utrecht University Library conducting a global survey on research tool usage. They also maintain a partly crowdsourced database of online tools for all phases of the research cycle. Their survey aims to empirically test researchers' choices for openness, transparency and/or efficiency in their workflows. They test this across disciplines, career stages and countries, and they have  garnered 6,500 responses so far. With the survey available in 5 languages—and soon to be 7—this might be the biggest multilingual survey into how open researchers really are in their work. All results will become public, for anyone to analyze.

Watch the webcast

Take away messages

If you don’t have time to watch the whole webcast, here are some key points:

• Use their database of over 500 tools to find new tools to work with, and add any tools that are not yet listed

• Take their survey and spread the word about it within your community. If your institution might be interested in distributing the survey among its own researchers and getting the corresponding (anonymized) data find more info here and please get in touch!

• Follow the Force11 Scholarly Commons working group to stay informed about the workshops Force11 is organizing around defining the scholarly commons. We aim to have people from around the globe involved in these workshops and the activities around them. 

If you’d like to download, use, or just take a closer look at the slides from the webcast they can be found here. More information about this project can be found here

With Open Access Week behind us and OpenCon just a few days away, we wanted to look to the future of collaboration for our community. OpenCon aims to empower students and early career researchers to advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data. Currently, we do this by hosting OpenCon, facilitating OpenCon satellite events, and through our community calls, webcasts and discussion list. Today, we’re happy to release a new initiative hoping to bring us closer to achieving this mission: OpenCon Community Collaborate.

OpenCon Community Collaborate accelerates the impact of ideas, individuals, projects and organizations by connecting them and providing a range of support. 

Check out OpenCon Community Collaborate

Alongside our public work, behind the scenes we support a number of initiatives. When we’re working with individuals and projects looking to make an impact many of the same issues surface. Below, are some of these issues and how we want to alleviate them.  

1. A lack of time, or specific skillsets,

During the OpenCon application process, we collect information on literally thousands of students and early career academic professionals who want to advance open research and education. With this data, we’ve cr eated a searchable list of 3000+ individuals that people, projects and organizations can use to find people they need to take their work forwards. The list can be filtered by interest, location and skills while protecting privacy - we’ll then help you reach out to these people.

2. Struggling to find support and resources,

We know the challenges faced in creating initiatives to advance openness, we’ve faced them ourselves, and we work through them with people daily. With this initiative we’re hoping to surface some of the support we can provide to people, and make it easier to request that from us. From strategic guidance, to advise on building websites and getting funding, we’ve done it all and want to help you do the same. We hope that other organizations that can provide assistance to projects looking to push our issues forwards might join us in doing this (get in touch).

We’ve also started to put together a resource list, not about open issues, but about turning ideas into impact, projects into progress. While the internet is certainly already useful for doing this, there are certainly some gems we’ve found that aren’t on the first page of Google. This will be released soon, but you can contribute to the list here.  

3. Not being sure how to get involved in impactful projects

For many of the 3000 people mentioned above, and the thousands more who’ve been engaged through OpenCon in the past 18 months, the perfect way to really get engaged in advancing these issues hasn’t come their way (we know, because we’ve read their applications). We’d really like to change that by providing them with diverse, interesting ways to get engaged, not just petition signing and going to events. To do that, we want to build up a directory of ideas, projects, and organizations people can get involved with.

We also hope this list will show just how much fantastic work is being done in the community. So, if even if you’re not interested in getting more people engaged we hope that  you’ll sign up!

Register your project with Community Collaborate

OpenCon Community Collaborate is still in an early phase of development, and we’re actively looking for feedback, especially constructive criticism. We’re excited about where this initiative could go, and if you are too we’d welcome your support in helping it get there!  

Check out OpenCon Community Collaborate

In the run up to OpenCon 2015, we’re holding a series of three pre-conference webcasts to update the community on Open Access, Open Data, Open Education.

We’ve invited Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, to discuss what progress has been made toward establishing open as the default for research publications over the past year. During the webcast, Heather will touch on social, economic and political progress which has been made.

The webcast will be held on Monday, November 9th, at 11am EST, 4pm GMT, 5pm CET. Join live to ask questions and participate in the discussion online using #opencon on Twitter. If you can’t join us, leave your question in the comments now and watch the webcast later! 

Let us know you’ll come

If you want to learn more about Open Access before the webcast, we recommend you watch our previous Open Access 101 webcast from last year.

In the run up to OpenCon 2015, we’re holding a series of three pre-conference webcasts to update the community on the conference’s issue areas. We’ve already covered Open Access and Open Data, and we’re excited to announce the Open Education webcast is coming up tomorrow 4th November at 9am EST / 3PM CET.

In the State of Open Education 2015 webcast, we’ll hear updates from the following leaders in the field:

• Nicole Allen, SPARC (@txtbks)
• Kelsey Wiens, Creative Commons (@bella_velo)
• Megan Beckett, Siyavula (@MeganBeckett2)
• Kamil Śliwowski, Polish Coalition on Open Education / CC Poland (@kasliwowski)

State of Open Education 2015 Webcast

Wednesday November 4, 2015

9am EST / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET / 11pm JST

Watch the webcast

Today we’re opening our call for proposals for sessions at the OpenCon 2015 Unconference. Submissions are open to all OpenCon virtual and in-person participants.

The OpenCon unconference allows participants to take control of the conference. Participants can propose, vote on, and run sessions themselves both in advance and on the day. This arms to enable peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and diverse session types and topics.

Submit a session and learn more about the unconference

Opening up a call for sessions officially begins the unconference,  and we hope unconference activities will continue even after OpenCon 2015 ends. Using Sched to organize the unconference will allow session proposers to pitch their session, contact interested people and collect resources for the session. This means that session proposers can—and are even encouraged to—organize sessions after OpenCon is over if their session isn’t selected or they want to continue the discussion. We’ll also be making special efforts to ensure virtual participation is possible throughout the unconference.

We hope in person participants will use the unconference to interact on topics that interest them, teach and learn new skills, and work on projects they care about. Throughout the unconference, short lightning talks will help facilitate sharing between groups and everyone will be encouraged to ensure their session has an outcome people can take away from the day.

Similar to in-person participants, virtual participants can use this time as a spark to set up a hangout on a topic, convene people to work on a project or join activities happening at the venue. If this sounds like your thing, sign up to be a virtual participant at OpenCon.

To purpose, vote and find further details about the unconference including advice for participants see here.

In the run up to OpenCon 2015, we’re holding a series of 4 pre-conference webcasts to update the community on Open Access, Open Data, Open Education and the basics of the EU political system. We’ve invited Amye Kenall, BioMed Central’s Associate Publisher of Open Data initiatives and journals to discuss the state of Open Research Data globally. Amye will discuss what progress has been made toward establishing open as the default for Open Data over the past year touching on social, economic and political aspects.

The webcast will be held on Friday, October 30th, at 1pm EDT, 4pm GMT, 6pm CEST. Join live to ask questions and join the discussion online using #opencon. If you can’t join us, leave your question in the comments now! 

Let us know you'll come!

If you want to learn more about Open Data before the webcast, we recommend you watch our previous Open Data 101 webcast from last year.