Session for Innovators at SSP - Beyond the platform

At the annual meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) in Boston, Bert Carelli will bring together several leaders of new technology companies that embrace innovation to solve diverse problems in research communications in a panel discussion titled “Breaking Free of the Platform” (Concurrent Session 1F, Thursday, June).

SSP brings together publishers, librarians, technologists, and researchers to discuss new technologies, business models, and partnerships in the context of creating and distributing quality scholarly research and content. This year's theme is “Striking a Balance: Embracing Change While Preserving Tradition in Scholarly Communications.”

Embracing change has been a requirement for success in the scholarly and research communications sector since the “Information Age” arrived with the 1980s. Today, integrated and distributed technologies can improve workflows from research management to dissemination. Inter-operability across open and proprietary platforms will drive change faster than the transition from print to online over the past three decades.

Our panelists are committed to advancing new publishing and business models that transform the way scientists communicate and discover research. At the same time, they place high value in the scholarly record and its place in the tradition of discourse to advance human knowledge and discovery. Their organizations deliver new technologies to change how scholarly information is published, discovered, disseminated, shared, and used.

These innovators will address the problems they are solving across research workflows. As leaders, they will share their experience of developing teams that are asked to find better approaches and new solutions daily - as a creative process and to advance business goals. Panelists will offer insights to those who seek to lead change in a sector that also values tradition, reflecting on how changes in technology and process also change the way people view their own roles in scholarly publishing.

Center for Open Science is a non-profit organization with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. Promoting these practices within the research, funding, and publishing communities accelerates scientific progress. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is an open source software project that facilitates open collaboration in science research.

Collaborative Knowledge Foundation offers open source solutions in scholarly knowledge production that foster collaboration, integrity and speed and helps researchers manage and archive their research, privately or publicly, with modular software tools and workflows. Their goal is to offer researchers ways to collaborate and build on each others’ work without throwing out more traditional forms of assessing, editing and improving the work.

eLife is a non-profit publisher of life sciences and biomedicine research. While adhering to the highest standards in open access publications, eLife is transforming the way scientists communicate their research.

Hypothes.is offers open source software to enable readers, authors, and editors to annotate and view contextual comments on any web-accessible content. Their mission is to support conversation and collaboration about the world’s knowledge.

Science.ai is breaking barriers to entry for researchers who want to start their own journal with new pricing models and modular solutions for all aspects of the article publication process. They support ‘start-up’ journals from concept to sustainable funded publication. Scholarly societies and established publishers seeking to update their publishing pipeline and user experience also benefit from the modular platform

TrendMD is a discovery engine for scholarly research. The TrendMD article recommendation widget increases awareness of recommended research articles across its network of world-leading peer-reviewed journals, professional blogs, and publications that are read by millions of researchers and professionals every day.

While publishing companies have traditionally supported investment in research communications technology, these organizations have attracted the interest of major funders as well as angel and venture capital investors. These innovative organizations include foundations that have a long-term commitment to research and dissemination including: Arnold, Sloan, Moore, Helmsley, Hewlett, Shuttleworth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Institute, National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust.

These funders are embracing change and innovation to increase accessibility to research and foster open, reliable, and rigorous scientific research for the next generation of researchers who will make their mark on the scientific record in nontraditional and unpredictable ways in the next 30 years.