Earlier this month, Technica attended the CSE conference in beautiful New Orleans. The theme of the meeting was “Publishing in the Changing Climate of the Research Ecosystem,” very timely given how many areas of publishing are evolving in new and exciting ways. As is always the case at CSE, the conference was a great opportunity to network with other attendees and learn about the state of the industry at the many engaging talks the program committee put together.
“Preprints and Ethics” was one of our favorite sessions, at which Heather Tierney from ACS, Brooke La Flamme from Nature Research, and Richard Sever from bioRxiv facilitated roundtable discussions about various ethical dilemmas journals have encountered with preprints. It was a great opportunity to learn more about preprints and the different policies journals have about them. It certainly seems as though we are approaching critical mass in reaching a consensus that posting on preprint servers does not constitute previous publication. As the emphasis on transparency in science grows, in addition to rapid communication of significant work, preprint servers will become even more integral to the publishing process.
The “Learning from One Another” session epitomized the goals of the annual CSE conference by facilitating a laidback conversation between presenters Windy Boyd (Environmental Health Perspectives), Liz Fathman (MBG Press), and Michael Friedman (American Meteorological Society) and attendees. From defining the roles and recruitment of technical editors to moving to online only and revising author guidelines, it’s always great to hear how others are handling the ever-changing expectations of the scholarly publishing community.
Another particularly lively session was “Data-Informed Decisions,” where 5 presenters went through case study examples where their organization used what the data were showing them to implement new changes and improve workflows. For example, Jody Plank of the American Chemical Society discussed how they utilize surveys sent to authors two days after reject decisions to improve author satisfaction at their journals. Angela Cochran (American Society of Civil Engineers) detailed how their journal portfolio altered review reminder times to increase turnaround times. Based on the Q&A session after, attendees seemed particularly interested to learn more about the five initiatives discussed in this session.
Another interesting session was “Implementing Standards: A Review of ORCID, CRediT, and CHORUS.” These three initiatives for assigning persistent identifiers (PIDs)—ORCID to researchers, CRediT to research roles performed by authors, and CHORUS to funding organizations—are working to standardize and streamline how data about published work is standardized and exchanged. It will be fascinating to see if leading PID services emerge for all parties involved in the scholarly publishing process as well as how these services can integrate with each other in order to seamlessly share and verify the metadata attached to a published article.
These were just a few of the many thought-provoking talks at CSE. For anyone who has not attended the meeting, it is a great opportunity to meet peers in publishing as well as learn about best practices in the field, emerging technologies that people are using to optimize editor, author, and reviewer experiences, and new frontiers in the industry. Many of the presentations are now also available online.
Did you attend CSE? What did you think about the meeting? We would love to hear your thoughts!
