This was the tenth Researcher to Reader (R2R) Conference, ably led and chaired by Mark Carden. Why is it different to other events? It includes plenary sessions, lightning talks, and workshops. That’s not so different to other conferences; what makes R2R unique is the mixture and calibre of attendees – most scholarly publishing conferences are dominated by one sector, such as publishers or libraries. Most importantly, there is a relaxed atmosphere, helped along by the chair’s wit.
Nonetheless, there is always the risk industry-based events of this kind that stakeholders just talk to each other. It was noticeable with this year’s R2R that, for me, the best sessions took the attendees outside that very closed circle of academic publishing – and to state the obvious, academics publish for other academics. Not much outward-looking there.
Two sessions stood out. The first was the opening keynote, by John Willinsky, founder of the Public Knowledge Project, which is today probably most visible for the Open Journal Systems software, the platform for more than 44,000 journals, he told us. Willinsky’s story, presented impressively without slides or notes, is a remarkable one. After ten years as a schoolteacher, teaching reading to children, he became a teacher trainer, then, eventually, an academic at Stanford. He founded PKP in 1998, before the Open Access movement, with the goal of making knowledge accessible. He linked the teaching of reading with making knowledge accessible, which didn’t quite gel: I can’t imagine five-year-olds stating “How awful! Now I have learned to read, I don’t have access to all scholarly journal articles”. Nonetheless, I can see the democratization of knowledge theme applying to both – it made for a great narrative.
The other session that impressed me was a discussion about how research is accessed by policymakers. This session was quite an eye-opener. Unusually for a scholarly conference, here were real users of content, specifically, UK government policymakers, and the content discovery path didn’t sound like a very successful one. The policymakers largely use Google, not even Google Scholar, to find content; they want instant answers (which academic articles will not provide); they tend not to look at what other countries do; and there is a lack of “knowledge brokers”, intermediaries between the research and the user. These knowledge brokers may simply be a curated content collection, such as Policy Commons, or a human agent. The policymakers’ preference would be to see an elevator pitch for every article – Toby Green revealed that the most effective format for communicating OECD reports was just two pages, one page of charts, and one page of explanation. And, as with the PKP project described above, there remains a lack of access to knowledge. Policymakers typically don’t have the access to subscription resources enjoyed by academic libraries. I got a clear example of this when attempting to access a famous paper by Carol Weiss on “The Many meanings of research utilization”, a 1979 article about the links between academic articles and policy – yet the article full text is hidden behind a paywall.
Even within the scholarly communications world, there is a need for knowledge brokers. Journals about the academic process such as UKSG Insights and the ALPSP Learned Publishing might contain valuable nuggets, but for the most part, I suspect, they remain unread unless someone, in these cases the journal editors, create the elevator pitch for each article.
Apart from those two sessions, there were the other usual items. The closing keynote, on the BMJ flagship journal, by the editor of the BMJ, no less, was unfortunately just the kind of product pitch that the conference frowns on elsewhere in the talks. After the presentation, there was not a single question from the audience. The debate, another annual fixture of R2R, had a great subject (“Scholarly Publishers are no longer necessary”) but failed to ignite much passion. Some of the most valuable outputs seemed to come from the workshops, but this, of course, depended on which of the six available workshops you chose. My feeling here was that the more specific the workshop theme, the more likely the group were to reach a practical conclusion.
So, all credit to Mark Carden for persevering with this small-scale but successful conference format, and for creating an informal atmosphere where people were happy to be approached and to talk. It all comes down to who you chat with, in the end.
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