Taking place from Oct 11 to 12 in Montreal, QC, FORCE 2018 is a multi-disciplinary conference dedicated to creating a more open future for scholarly communications. This year, the conference will bring together a diverse mix of publishers, librarians, students, and policy makers—as well as several members of the ScholCommLab!

The ScholCommLab is pleased to welcome three visiting scholars to Ottawa this fall: Kate Williams, Enrique Orduña Malea, and Rodrigo Costas. Each of these visitors will spend a short stay at the lab, working with the team on a research project of their choosing. The hope is that these partnerships will pave the way for future collaborations, and interesting research in the long term.

The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is one of the cornerstones of academic life, influencing how and where faculty focus their attention, direct their research, and publish their work. In a recent study, the ScholCommLab analyzed this process from a new perspective—textual analysis of a representative sample of RPT guideline and policy documents—to understand the incentive structures that reinforce traditional

How do we measure the impact of research? And how can we learn to do it better? From September 12 to 14, the ScholCommLab’s Asura Enkhbayar will attend STI 2018, an international bibliometrics and scientiometrics conference dedicated to answering these questions.

How is public policy shaped by research? How is the public already actively involved in science?

This July, ScholCommLab’s Stefanie Haustein attended the sixth ever Brazilian Meeting on Bibliometrics and Scientometrics in Rio de Janeiro. In this short Q&A, she shares highlights from the event, including a keynote presentation about her work on Twitter and scholarly communication, connections with researchers from around the world, and a healthy dose of delicious Brazilian cocktails.

Why do we make bad political decisions, and how do we make better ones? On Thursday, June 21, ScholCommLabber David Moscrop will unpack these questions and more on the TEDxYYC stage. Drawing from his own and others’ research, as well as from his personal experiences as a media commentator, he’ll examine the way our current democratic system functions—or, rather, dysfunctions— and how it could be improved in the future.

Starting this week, ScholCommLab co-director Stefanie Haustein is publishing a series of guest posts on the Altmetric Blog about the role of Twitter in scholarly communication. Read on for a small taste of what to expect, and find the whole series at at altmetric.com/blog/. It’s almost been a decade since altmetrics and social media-based metrics were introduced.

Support for the open access movement has grown in recent years, and today more than a quarter of scholarly literature is freely available. Yet, despite years of advocacy work and countless policies and mandates promoting openness, the majority of researchers are still not compelled to make their research outputs publicly available. Why is this the case? What barriers stand in the way of creating real change?

From May 16 to 18, the ScholCommLab’s Research Associate Dr. Katherine Reilly and Carol Muñoz Nieves attended RightsCon Toronto, an international event that brought together policy makers, human rights advocates, business leaders, scholars, and others to tackle leading human rights issues in the digital age.

On May 2, ScholCommLab director Juan Alperin flew to Mexico City to attend the annual Congreso de Revistas, a three-day long event focused on Latin American scholarly publishing. The conference, which took place at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together researchers, journal editors, students, and speakers from across the world to discuss the advancement of scientific publishing from the global south.