Comments on ECSP2 Conference: Friday, 5 September 2008

I am very pleased with having attended the 2nd Eur...

2008-10-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased with having attended the 2nd European Conference on Scientific Publishing. It was inspiring to listen to the many different talks, all addressing important issues within scientific communication. One of the main topics was how Open Access (OA) is changing the way we communicate scientific results. Personally, I had never heard of OA before so this was a real eye-opener for me, and I believe that it is important for me as a PhD student to be aware of matters like this. As Yvonne Hultman Özek commented, OA is not particularly controversial to us PhD students; to us it is rather obvious that your work should be accessible for all. I would find it very interesting to hear the arguments for not publishing your work as Open Access, since I have trouble finding any good arguments myself!
In the end I guess the hardest part is to raise an awareness that actually leads to real changes regarding the accessibility of scientific work, since I do believe that most people agree on OA being valuable to us all. This conference did certainly increase my knowledge on the subject, and I would definitely recommend other PhD students to participate in the 3rd European Conference on Scientific Publishing!

Sophie Lehn, PhD student
Dept. Laboratory Medicine
University Hospital, UMAS, Malmö
Lund University, Sweden

As one of the few students in the audience, I got ...

2008-10-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

As one of the few students in the audience, I got the suggestion to share some thoughts about the conference from my point of view. First, I would like to thank all speakers and participants for making the meeting interesting and educational, at least for me since my knowledge about open access and evaluation was somewhat limited. I am still in the beginning of my PhD studies and have not yet published any articles, so all information about this process and especially the different ways of publishing was very useful for me. I have to say that I hope and wish that other students in my position know more about open access and all the benefits that could be obtained from using it, but I suppose that this kind of information comes with the program. With that said, I would like to thank Yvonne Hultman Özek from Lund University for the opportunity to participate in this meeting and listen to talks and discussions from those with most knowledge in the subject. I also would like to add that I agree with one of the comments that were said in Workshop 1 (Open Access & Evaluating Research) about how important it was to personally inform students and their PI about open access and what good that can come from it, since that directly increased the number of papers sent to open access journals.
To me, open access sounds like the way of publishing with most benefits since there is a greater chance that more people will read the article. I still believe that it could lead to more citations, even if Philip M Davis et al (BMJ 2008;337) showed that the number of citations in open access journals was not higher compared to citations in subscription journals during the first year after publication. I was also glad to hear that there are other ways of getting the articles evaluated than just by the journal’s impact factor and number of citations, i.e. with the usage factor. I just really hope that the people that are “judging” and evaluating the work, are taking this in consideration.
So to reply to Alma Swan’s comment; I hope too that other young researchers will see the advantage in using open access, and I believe that, in the next coming years, we will see a change in the way researchers share their work which in turn can eventually create a more stimulating and exciting field to work in.

Sofie Nilsson, PhD student
Dep. Laboratory medicine
University Hospital, UMAS, Malmö
Lund University, Sweden

My reflections of the ECSP2 conference:When I came...

2008-09-19T04:34:00.000-07:00

My reflections of the ECSP2 conference:

When I came to Oslo to participate in the conference I did not know much about this subject area. It was truly interesting and instructive to meet and listen to people from the field. I learned a lot about Open Access and the importance of availability for the research community. The discussions about how to evaluate and analyze scientific research using different methods and tools like impact factor, citation and usage factor, gave me a better understanding how articles are valued and what different analyzing methods can indicate. I also got insight in the process of peer reviewing during the workshop with Trish Groves, which I really appreciated.
During education it is important to truly enlighten and point out the importance of Open Access publishing, what to think about when writing and publishing a research article, and basically inform students how this can be achieved. I think that the knowledge concerning this field can be improved among students. I believe that this conference has given me a broader comprehension and a lot of new knowledge.
I warmly recommend the ECSP conference to other researchers and not least to other PhD students!

Anna-Karin Boström, PhD student
Dep. Laboratory medicine
University Hospital, UMAS, Malmö
Lund University, Sweden