Tell the world about your conference! Part 2
In our recent, Tell the world about your conference! Part 1 post, we listed some of the free websites that conference organisers can use to announce their conference and encourage greater participation. Here’s some others:
ourGlocal
ourGlocal (www.ourglocal.com):
Sign-up to announce your conference and to receive notifications from conferences that interest you.
Research Raven
ResearchRaven (www.researchraven.com):
list calls for papers (for conferences as well as for periodicals) in the health sciences and the health-related social sciences and allied fields such as the medical humanities.
A Quick Guide to Writing a Solid Peer Review
Nicholas and Gordon’s paper “A Quick Guide to Writing a Solid Peer Review” summarises how to make the peer review approach as productive and efficient as possible.
Download a PDF of the paper published in EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union from David M Schultz’s eloquentscience.com blog here.
The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing
As part of their Open Science series, the University of Oxford hosted a debate on “The Evolution of Science: Open Publishing” in February 2012.
A distinguished group came together in Oxford’s Rhodes House to publicly debate ‘The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing’.
The diverse panel included publishers, funders, academics and entrepreneurs: Tim Gowers the Fields Medal winning mathematician, Victor Henning the co-founder and CEO of Mendeley, Robert Kiley from The Welcome Trust, Alison Mitchell from Nature Publishing Group, Cameron Neylon the open science activist and blogger, Lord Robert Winston the advocate of public engagement, and Alicia Wise from the publisher Elsevier. The event was organised by Victoria Watson and Simon Benjamin, and Simon also chaired it.
See the full debate on the University of Oxford’s website here.
Coffee Break: Crowd-Sourcing Expands Power of Brain Research
Today’s NY Times has a really interesting article on brain research.
In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists using imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have for the first time zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in intelligence memory.
Scientists working to understand the biology of brain function — and especially those using brain imaging, a blunt tool — have been badly stalled. But the new work, involving more than 200 scientists, lays out a strategy for breaking the logjam. The findings appear in a series of papers published online Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics.
“What’s really new here is this movement toward crowd-sourcing brain research,” said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of one of the papers. “This is an example of social networking in science, and it gives us a power we have not had.”
See the full article in the NY Times here.
Reviewing the Peer Review process
Nature, the international weekly journal of science opened a debate on the peer review process.
Peer review is commonly accepted as an essential part of scientific publication. But the ways peer review is put into practice vary across journals and disciplines. What is the best method of peer review? Is it truly a value-adding process? What are the ethical concerns? And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?
Click here to link to this Nature web debate consisting of 22 articles of analyses and perspectives from leading scientists, publishers and other stakeholders to address these questions. The debate continued on the peer review blog, which is now closed for new entries, but you can access the blog archives here.
Tell the world about your conference! Part 1
You’re organising a research conference and are ready to invite papers. You’ve compiled a mailing list but would like to invite a wider audience. How do you encourage a greater response to your call for papers, and ultimately a better set of research output at your conference?
One easy (and free!) way to do this is via a web-based conference announcement service – a kind of dating service for research conferences. These are websites that allow organisers to upload details of their conference under relevant categories. Authors/delegates registered under these categories are then notified about your conference and can access your website for further information. Two of the most popular sites are:
Conference Alerts
Conference Alerts (conferencealerts.com) who say that they bring together two groups of people – conference organizers, and academics who need to stay informed about conferences. They work with both small first-time conference organizers and established professional societies to ensure that notification of their conferences reach specifically interested parties.
WikiCFP
WikiCFP (wikicfp.com) has over 20,000 Call for Papers on the site, and is used by over 100,000 researchers every month.
So, next time you’re issuing a call for papers and are looking to attract interest from outside your immediate circle, why not use these services? It only takes a couple of minutes to register and it is free!
We’ll highlight some more of these sites in a later blog entry. If you know of any others, let us know and we’ll add them to the list.
Thanks,
Dermot.
Ex Ordo scoops “Best New Web App” and “Best Practice” at the Realex Irish Web Awards.
- Paul Killoran, CEO of Ex Ordo, accepts the Best Web App Award at the Realex Irish Web Awards.
Ex Ordo scooped two awards at the Realex Irish Web Awards 2011 which were held at the Mansion House in Dublin earlier this month. Ex Ordo is a spin-out company from Starlight Solutions, a leading developer of web applications based in Galway.
As Paul Killoran, NUI graduate and the CEO and founder of both Ex Ordo and Starlight Solutions, explains “We’re thrilled that Ex Ordo has been acknowledged by the Irish web community with these two awards. We’re on a journey to build a world-class application for the global academic community. These awards from our peers are an important step on that journey. By 2015, our vision is for Ex Ordo to power 1,500 conferences annually all over the world, employing 25 people in our base here in Galway”.
Ex Ordo started life in 2007 when Dr Fearghal Morgan from the discipline of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in NUIG asked Starlight Solutions to build a piece of software to help him manage a conference he was chairing. “I told Fearghal, ‘No problem – that should take about a week’. Six months later, we finished the project!”, recalls Paul, “Fearghal was delighted with the result and we were even happier when we were approached by two other conference organisers who wanted to use our system. This was the first time we thought, ‘hang on; there might be something interesting in this.’”
In 2009 and 2010, Starlight Solutions worked on another 20 conferences. “Every single conference came to us from word of mouth or referrals. We deliberately kept the marketing side of things low-key; we didn’t even have a website. All the time we were adding and testing new features, listening hard to the feedback and making changes to the system”, explains Paul. “The response from our users at the end of each conference was really positive – I’ve even had some conference chairs hug me, which was a bit unexpected! So late last year, we decided to go for it.”
This year, with backing from Galway City and Country Enterprise Board and some private funding, Paul says, “We took six months out, distilled everything we had learnt in the past three years, and re-built Ex Ordo completely from the ground up. We wanted Ex Ordo to be completely scalable, fast, and most of all, a joy to use. I guess that the Best Practice web award recognises our use of the very latest web technologies to achieve this. And because our market of academic conferences is quite niche, we’re really pleased that Ex Ordo won the Best Web Application”
Ex Ordo picks up 2 gongs at 2011 Irish Web Awards
….we’re thrilled to have picked up 2 awards at last night’s Irish Web Awards, Best New Web App and Best Practice (under Technical).
A Complete Paper & Abstract Management Suite
Ex Ordo gives academic conference organisers a full set of tools to manage your conference from start to finish. We built Ex Ordo with a modular design, giving you the flexibility to pick only the modules you need. The modules are: Submission, Registration and Programme.
Submission or abstract management starts when a chair issues a call for papers/abstracts. The chair invites authors to submit their work, receives their submissions, invites reviewers and gives them a marking system, allocates papers to reviewers, receives the reviews and recommendations on each submission, decides which submissions to accept, which to reject and finally informs the authors.
Sounds complicated? It can be, but not with Ex Ordo’s Submission module. Manage the process within Ex Ordo and save up to 5 days of effort.
Simplify the submission process for both delegates and reviewers and keep your communication crystal clear.
Coffee Break: A self-arranging conference room!
Is this the way of the future? A conference room that can re-arrange itself? Find out more in Josh Romero’s blog article in IEEE Spectrum here. Enjoy….