New Developments in Scientific Collaboration Tech

Every year, millions of academic seminars and thousands of research conferences take place. This large scale dissemination of knowledge has been happening for centuries, is complementary to the published literature, and much of it is now recorded.

However, sifting through millions of hours of recorded research isn't very practical. How can we make these videos searchable, citable, and a core part of the future of academic publishing? In this talk I explore cutting-edge ideas and concepts.

TooWrite is a digital platform that seeks to transform the process of scientific writing into an experience that is faster, healthier, and more accessible to researchers at all career stages. This lightning talk begins by following our founder journey and the creation of TooWrite - starting with two academics with a problem to solve, all the way to being acquired and hired by world-leading publisher, Springer Nature - and ends with a look at what’s coming next for TooWrite!

PeerRef is a journal-independent open peer review platform. Its goals are to make peer review open, make peer review more researcher-centric, and eliminate the need for repeated peer review in successive journals. In this talk, I discuss how technology and new processes can improve peer review.

There is a growing need for reliable data on Open Science practices to better understand researcher behaviour, and to understand the effectiveness of policies – of institutions, funders and publishers – at increasing adoption of Open Science [1]. In 2022 PLOS launched ‘Open Science Indicators’, (OSI) an initiative that tracks adoption of Open Science practices – such as sharing data, code, protocols and preprints – over time in the scholarly literature [2]. PLOS developed requirements for an OSI measurement framework underpinned by six guiding principles [3] and then selected DataSeer as a partner to deliver OSI using an artificial intelligence supported method.

The initial results [4] analyse adoption levels across approximately 60,000 articles published in PLOS journals and approximately 7,000 comparator articles in PubMed Central. Articles were published between the start of 2019 and the end of June 2022. New results are being released in March 2023, and then each quarter. The results show that rates of data sharing, code sharing and preprint posting are increasing between 2019 and 2022. The results also reveal differences in adoption – and potential for adoption – between research fields and geographies as well as infrastructure (data, code and preprint repositories/ servers) used, enabling analysis of trends in different communities of researchers.

The data and methods are being shared openly [5] to engage stakeholders in a conversation about how we can use quantitative, longitudinal evidence on Open Science practices to support increased adoption of Open Science globally.

The word "metaverse" means different things to different people - including those who are working to create it. A mistake is to think of it as a single type of product or a single grouping of functionality; In reality, it will be something that arrives gradually and evolutionarily as the Internet continues to develop, rather than with the bang of a product launch.

At its heart, the metaverse is about services on the Internet becoming more spatial and more interoperable. Spatial considerations and connecting mathematical models to one another have been at the heart of computational scientific disciplines for decades. So in many respects, computational scientists are already creating what could be thought of as pieces of a metaverse.

In this talk, I shall discuss some of these scientific pieces of the metaverse, the value of communicating ideas spatially, some of the capabilities Hadean is working on, and where the future might take us.