ASA CONFERENCE 2015: "RESEARCH-TO-RESEARCHER"
16-17 February 2015, BMA House, London

The ASA Conference is the key annual event that brings together all the
participants in the academic content supply chain to discuss the latest
trends in research processes, publishing workflows and commercial practices.

The Conference Planning Committee (CPC) is inviting members of the research,
publishing and library community to contribute papers/presentations to the
event, and is also inviting volunteers to chair workshop sessions.
Suggested themes and topics for these papers and workshops are given below.

PAPERS
Papers can be in the form of either presentations lasting approximately
20-30 minutes or 'lightning talks' where the speaker will have a brief
four-minute opportunity to introduce a topic.  Presentations should be
relevant to the themes of the conference and can be presented by any member
of the research, publishing and library community. Presenters employed by
intermediaries, publishers or other commercial organisations are encouraged
to participate, but their presentations must be of general interest to the
community, and commercial or product 'pitches' will not be acceptable,
except possibly in the form of 'lightning talks'.

WORKSHOPS
The workshops (a new feature of the conference) are intended to be highly
interactive, with good levels of audience participation and engagement, and
aimed at creating results that can be presented back to the whole
conference.  It is anticipated that a choice of several different workshop
streams will be available to the conference participants, and that each
workshop will have a duration of 1-2½  hours, probably conducted over 2-3
separate sessions during the conference. The roles of the workshop chair
include setting out the topic under discussion, encouraging broad
participation and ensuring that the outcomes are documented and presented
back to the conference as a whole (by the chair or another volunteer).
Workshop topics may be following up on presentations that are being given at
the conference, or cover other issues of relevance to the creation, supply
and consumption of academic research information.

CONFERENCE THEMES
The overall theme of the 2015 conference is Research-to-Researcher, meaning
the complete workflow of creating, validating, publishing, supplying,
finding and consuming research information.  This gives a wide scope for
presentations on funding, researcher practices, peer review, publishing
processes, commercial models, discovery, delivery, usage and metrics.

Within the overall theme, the conference will focus on three core areas:
Research Practices, Publishing Workflows and Using Research:

1.	Research Practices could include how researcher funding, behaviour
and tools relates to the creation of published content, and also to changes
in the nature of this content with the trend toward increased publishing of
methods and data.
2.	Publishing Workflows could include the management of funding
workflows, plus the traditional publishing workflow issues around editorial
tools, peer review processes, outsourcing, delivery platforms and many
related topics.
3.	Using Research could include how researchers (and students) search
for, discover and use content.

In all of these topics, the services provided by publishers, intermediaries
and libraries, and the interactions between them, could be usefully
explored.

PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP TOPICS
The Conference Planning Committee has already identified some potential
topics that they believe would be of interest to those attending the
conference and would particularly welcome proposals for presentations or
workshops on these topics or related areas:

•	Predatory Publishers – the scale of the problem and methods to
combat it.
•	Corporate libraries – their views on open access and other research
publishing innovations.
•	The dumbing-down of search (Google) and content (Wikipedia).
•	How social media may be changing the way people use research
information and metrics.
•	How to put the library (back) at the centre of searching and content
management.
•	Subscription agents and other intermediaries – new services they
could be providing.
•	Technology intermediaries – their roles, capabilities and potential.
•	The Sustainability of the Big Deal / Is the Big Deal dead?
•	The discoverability of open access content.
•	Continuous publication (and the impact on editorial processes and
the supply chain).
•	The growing volume of published content; both number of articles and
amount of data.
•	Outsourcing of publishing processes.
•	Internationalisation of author submissions – issues of language,
credibility, funding, etc.

SUBMISSIONS
Please send an abstract of up to 500 words outlining the proposed topic of
your presentation or workshop to the ASA Secretary General, Nawin Gupta by
15 September 2014 at [log in to unmask] The abstracts will
be reviewed by members of the CPC and you will be contacted by the end of
September.

We would particularly welcome proposals from people who would like to
present a paper and also chair a workshop, whether on the same or different
topics.  We are also particularly seeking participation by librarians,
researchers & editors, and by people based outside the UK.

Presenters and workshop chairs will be invited to attend the conference
without payment of the conference fee.  Please note that any other expenses
of attending the conference (including subsistence, travel and
accommodation) will be the responsibility of the presenter or workshop
chair, although we are occasionally able to offer some support for travel
and accommodation costs on request.

CONFERENCE PLANNING COMMITTEE
Mark Carden, Naughton Consulting / Mosaic Search & Selection (Chair); Chris
Banks, Imperial College London; Laura Bonald, Swets; Greta Boonen, John
Wiley & Sons; Luke Davies, EBSCO Information Services; Lorraine Ellery,
Semantico; Nawin Gupta, ASA; Monika Krieg, Harrassowitz; Peter Lawson,
Karger Libri / Karger Publishers; Sameer Puri, CNA India; Sue Wolper, Wolper
Information Services

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