The Electrochemical Society (ECS) is the first scientific society to host an OpenCon satellite event.  ECS OpenCon will take place on Sunday, October 1 at the Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center in National Harbor, MD, in conjunction with the 232nd ECS Meeting. The gathering will bring together some of the top advocates in open access and open science to explore issues and topics related to the next generation of research communication. 

ECS OpenCon will be the Society’s first, large-scale community event to discuss the future of how research is designed, shared, vetted, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster, more transparent, and more collaborative. And, because ECS advances sciences that are key to the future sustainability of our planet (i.e. renewable energy, biomedicine, clean water, sanitation, communications, transportation, and infrastructure), the Society is committing to openly promoting these discoveries for public benefit. These efforts to push more openness are part of ECS’s Free the Science initiative.

Featuring vocal advocates in the open movement, ECS OpenCon will examine the intersection of advances in research infrastructure, the researcher experience, funder mandates and policies, as well as the global shift that is happening in traditional scholarly communications.

“Shifting towards a more open paradigm, especially in electrochemistry and solid state science, is important for the advancement of our sciences and, quite simply, creating a better world,” says Roque Calvo, ECS executive director. “ECS OpenCon brings together some of the top minds in the open movement to discuss how research communications is changing and the new ways technology is  providing access to knowledge for people from around the world.”   

Featured speakers and their topics include:

• Ashley Farley, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 
  Keynote: “The Importance of Open Science in a Changing Scholarly Communications Paradigm”

• Brian Nosek, Center for Open Science 
  Open Science

• Nick Shockey, SPARC 
  Open Access

• Meredith Morovati, Dryad 
  Open Data

• Dina Paltoo, National Institutes of Health 
  Open and Government

• Dan Schwartz, University of Washington 
  Open and Academia

The event is free and open to ECS meeting attendees and the general public. ECS OpenCon will also be broadcast live via the ECS YouTube channel.

ECS OpenCon is one of two meeting events being held in National Harbor in October demonstrating ECS’s commitment to a shift towards open science and the Free the Science initiative. The ECS Data Sciences Hack Day will be the Society’s first foray into building an electrochemical data sciences and open source community from the ground up. Dataset sharing and open source software have transformed many “big science” areas such as astronomy, particle physics, synchrotron science, protein and genomic sciences, as well as computational sciences. There is a critical need is to build a community of electrochemical data scientists and ECS is taking the first steps to fill that role.

General public can register for ECS OpenCon here. Attendees of the 232nd ECS Meeting can register for this event here.