I haven't been to a conference for a very long time, but UKSG very kindly asked me to lead a work-out session at their conference in Edinburgh which starts tomorrow. How could I refuse? Once one of the globe-trotting conference going jet-set of the library world, I haven;t been to one for too long. And Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the whole world. I look forward to a run round or possibly even up Arthur's Seat. I type this on a train with German wifi—it defaults to German Google and invites me to Melden Sie sich in Ihrem Google-Konto an.
It's a beautiful afternoon and I shall not moan about the troubles I've had with trains; that's what Twitter is for. I've taken a quick break from preparing my presentation on the Economics of Information Supply – is free information good enough? to reflect briefly on the conference ahead. I'll blog, of course.
There are some fascinating plenaries with an impressive range of international speakers:
- the technology of information consumption, with Adam Bly on Rearchitecting science: a vision for STM in the 21st century, Richard Wallis on Technology and change and Conrad Wolfram on Computation, communication and the new era of knowledge
- economics of scholarly information, with Ted Bergstrom on librarians and the terrible fix: economics of the Big Deal, Marybeth Manning on Reset – a publisher’s response to the changing economy and Carol Tenopir on University investments in the library: measuring the return
- rights and licensing, with Dorothea Salo on Who owns our work?, Eelco Ferwerda on New models for monographs – open books and Jill Russell on paved with gold: an institutional case study on supporting open access publishing
- researcher behaviour, with two speakers I've long wanted to hear, Tony Hirst on network ecology and the knowledge economy: why researchers need to get online and social and Lucy Power on life scientists go online – collaboration, communication and credit
- research quality assessment – controversies and challenges, with Hugh Look on the raw and the cooked: bibliometrics and the flight from judgment, Alain Peyraube on research assessment in the humanities and the ERIH project (European Reference Index for the Humanities), Peter Shepherd on PIRUS 2: developing a standard for individual article usage statistics and James Pringle on citation impact and research evaluation: current trends
- the intriguingly named Light Programme, with Brendan Dawes on stop making sense: human approaches to exploring information and Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research on Improbable research and the Ig Nobel Prize
