CCC is proud to be a Silver Sponsor of STM Week events, which will take place this year on 5 – 7 December, at the Congress Centre in London. STM is the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers, with a mission to help disseminate the results of research in the fields of science, technology and medicine.
STM is the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers, with a mission to help disseminate the results of research in the fields of science, technology and medicine.
We’ve asked members of the CCC team who’ll be in attendance for their take on “can’t miss” sessions from the Digital Publishing Conference (5 December), the Innovation Seminar (6 December) and the Future of Publishing Conference (7 December).
Miles McNamee, Vice President of Licensing and Business Development
There are so many good sessions, it’s hard to pick just one. But I’m particularly interested in the series of presentations under the banner of “Resource Access in the 21st Century: A joint project by STM and NISO” (2:45 PM, 6 December), which is part of the Innovations Seminar. Access to content – on any device, at any location – is a critical and growing need in today’s information age. Users expect reliable and rapid access to content, as well as the highest possible level of data privacy. Yet publishers also need to know who has authorized access to the content they provide to protect it from misuse. RA21, whose mission is to align and simplify pathways to subscribed content across participating scientific platforms, is currently exploring potential IP-authentication alternatives among researcher, customer, vendor, and publisher partners. This session covers outcomes from the pilot programs, with feedback from participants like the American Chemical Society and GlaxoSmithKline. It also takes a deep-dive into the technology, and tackles questions about what’s next for publishers and content subscribers in the area of authentication. These are huge challenges for our industry, and it’s exciting to see meaningful progress achieved through collaboration.
Bill O’Brien, Business Development Director
The session, “Help! I’m an Author – Get Me out of Here: A Wishlist for Better Research Dissemination for Authors” by Sally Rumsey, Head of Scholarly Communications at the Bodleian stands out to me. It kicks off the Digital Publishing Conference (9:40 AM, 5 December) and promises to be very timely and engaging. We’re all witnessing the OA environment getting more and more complex. Authors – and by extension, their institutions – are struggling to keep track of all of the policies, mandates, and options available to them in addition to their primary responsibilities as researchers. Dialogue like this, that is focused on how publishers, as well as partners like CCC, can improve the experience of authors, will be central to the future success and sustainability of OA for all stakeholders.
Darren Gillgrass, Director of Rightsholder Products and Services
While I’m no avid fan of Avatar or Titanic, I suspect that the Future of Publishing Conference session, “What Can James Cameron Teach You About Doing Business in China?” hosted by Joanne Sheppard of Holztbrinck Publishing Group (1:40 PM on 7 December) will have some interesting take-aways for publishers and other industry partners. China is expected to overtake the US in R&D spending in the near future, and the volume and quality of research output from Asia more generally is growing exponentially. Back in 2004, both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Science Foundation for China (NSFC) – two big players in the scholarly research space in China, signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. Developments like these, which have compounded across the last decade, should motivate organizations in the industry to pay attention to the needs of these authors, which differ from those in other geographies.
Interested in meeting up with CCC during STM Week? Send us a message (publishers@copyright.com) and we’ll contact you!