[Today’s live-blog is brought to you by Yvonne Nobis, science librarian at Cambridge, UK. Thanks, Yvonne! — Mike.] Session 1 — The Journal Article: is the end in sight? Slightly late start due to trains – ! Just arrived to hear Aileen Fyfe University of St Andrews saying that something similar to journal articles will be needed for ‘quite some time’. Steven Hall, IOP.

I’ll try to live-blog the first day of part 2 of the Royal Society’s Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication meeting, as I did for the first day of part 1. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s the schedule for today and tomorrow. Session 1: the reproducibility problem Chair: Alex Halliday, vice-president of the Royal Society Introduction to reproducibility.

When a paper goes for peer-review at PLOS ONE, the reviewers are told not to make any judgement about how important or sexy or “impacty” the paper is — to judge it only on methodical soundness. All papers that are judged sound are to be published without making guesses about which will and won’t improve the journal’s reputation through being influential down the line.

The REF (Research Excellence Framework) is a time-consuming exercise that UK universities have to go through every few years to assess and demonstrate the value of their research to the government; the way funding is allocated between universities is largely dependent on the results of the REF. The exercise is widely resented, in part because the processes of preparing and reviewing the submissions are so time-consuming.

I’m at the Royal Society today and tomorrow as part of the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference. Here’s the programme. I’m making some notes for my own benefit, and I thought I might as well do them in the form of a blog-post, which I will continuously update, in case anyone else is interested.

Matt’s post yesterday was one of several posts on this blog that have alluded to Clay Shirky’s now-classic article How We Will Read [archived copy]. Here is the key passage that we keep coming back to: … and of course as SV-POW! itself demonstrates, it doesn’t even need a WordPress install — you can just use the free online service. This passage has made a lot of people very excited;

…is not actually about scholarly publication. It’s Steve Albini’s keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference. It’s about the music industry, and how the internet transformed it from a restrictive, top-down oligarchy that mostly benefited middlemen into a more open, level, vibrant ecosystem where artists can get worldwide exposure for free, and yet are often compensated better than they were under the old system.

When Susie Maidment presented her in-progress research at SVP in Berlin last week, someone came in late, missed her “no tweeting, please” request, and posted a screenshot of the new work (since deleted). On the back of that, Susie started an interesting thread in which it became apparent that people have very different assumptions.

In a comment on the last post, Mark Robinson asked an important question: As so often in these discussions, it depends what we mean by our terms. The Barosaurus paper, like this one on neck cartilage, is “published” in the sense that it’s been released to the public, and has a stable home at a well known location maintained by a reputable journal. It’s open for public comment, and can be cited in other publications.

I am just about out of patience with academic departments putting up endless idiot arguments about open access. Bottom line: we pay you good money out of the public purse to do a highly desirable job where you get to work on what you love — jobs that have tens or dozens of candidates for every post. That job is: make new knowledge for the world. Not just for you and a few of your mates: for the world.