Digital Science Webinar: Grand Challenges for Academic Publishing: Defining Data & The New Scientometrics

6th November 2017

| Katy Alexander

Tune into our latest thought leadership webinar, “Grand challenges for academic publishing: Defining Data & The New Scientometrics” on Wednesday 22 November at 3-4pm GMT (10-11am EDT).

Publishers, intermediaries, technology providers, institutions, libraries and funders are all part of the scholarly communication industry. Each of these stakeholders have their own specific needs but do have one thing in common; a need to understand the research landscape in a way that informs strategic decisions. The nature of those decisions vary by organization type but might include title acquisition, editorial strategy, or investment in technology and infrastructure.

Traditionally, research has been classified by discipline and measured by citations, but that framework is changing. A fundamental shift has occurred over the last two decades with research increasingly being funded, published and organized around specific challenges and problems such as climate change, or Alzheimer’s Disease. At the same time, funders and governments are expanding the ways that they assess research to include direct economic and social impact, which in turn changes researcher incentives and needs.

The new framework for academia is more complex than the old and requires new approaches and tools in order to understand and quantify it. In this webinar, you will hear about some of the work being done in topic modelling, scientometrics, research classification and assessment.

Join our expert panel as they explore these issues, attendees will take away concrete examples of approaches they might take in order to more completely understand the needs and behaviours of their customers and stakeholders that in turn inform better and faster strategic decision making.

You will learn about:

How the structure of academic research is changing and what that means for your business
The cutting-edge techniques that are changing the way we classify research and build taxonomies
How publishers, universities and governments are using new types of data to make strategic decisions
Some simple ways that you can begin to harness scientometrics to help your business

Thought leaders speaking on the webinar:

Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation, Digital Science

Phill has spent much of his career working on projects that use technology to accelerate scientific discovery. He joined us from portfolio company ReadCube, where he held the position of VP of Business Development. Prior to Digital Science, he was the Editorial Director at Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first academic video journal. Phill is a member the SSP educational committee and the STM association early career publishers and future lab committees.

In a former life, Phill was a cross-disciplinary research scientist. He held a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, working in bio-physics and neuroscience, despite having originally started out as a plasma physicist at the UK atomic energy authority. He has also worked as a microscopy consultant and scientific advisor for a number of startups and small companies.

Phill lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two children. He holds a 2nd dan black belt in TaeKwon Do and occasionally enjoys a dram of single malt whisky, although not at the same time.

Helene Draux, Research Data Scientist

Before joining the Digital Science Consultancy team, Hélène worked both in Academia and the private sector as a computational social scientist. Her work included the development of Havfriluftsliv, a web-mapping participative platform to facilitate the participation of the public in Marine Spatial Planning in Denmark, and a web-mapping platform to facilitate discovery of places described in Trap, the Danish landscape encyclopedia.
Hélène obtained her PhD in social geography from the Cities Institute (London Metropolitan University). Her work was funded by SECOA, a EU 7th Framework project on the adaptation of coastal cities to sea-level rise, and her research focused on the inclusive participation of the general population in decisions about the future of open spaces in Portsmouth.
Hélène has worked on many consultancy projects. For the CWASU research institute, she worked on a project for the UK charity SOLACE, to map the evolution of abused women’s social network over a two-year period. For S+G, a landscape architect company, she built a survey that incorporated a 2-week period of smartphone location/transportation tracking of students and staff on the campus of DTU, Denmark.

Mike Taylor, Head of Metrics Development, Digital Science

Mike Taylor is Head of Metrics Development at Digital Science. He has spent many years working in Elsevier’s R&D group and in the Metrics and Analytics Team. Mike works with many community groups, including FORCE11, RDA and NISO, and is well known in the scholarly metrics community. Mike is studying for a PhD in alternative metrics at the University of Wolverhampton.

Host: Laura Wheeler, Digital Science