Join together with members of your research community to watch a live conference session from the OAI13 conference (The Geneva Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication). At 16:40, we'll be tuning into the 35-minute session "Scholarly Publishing is broken. How do we fix it?". Following the session, we will have time to informally chat about the content over drinks and nibbles. If you're interested in joining, please sign up below!

This session is open to all researchers, students, and professional services staff at Essex, so feel free to share amongst your friends and colleagues. The full description of the session we'll be watching is:

Scholarly publishing has been criticized for decades because of its commercialization and its exclusionary design. The problem is even deeper: scholarly publishing as it is designed today is unable to address major scientific emergencies, as the COVID pandemic demonstrated (as publishers were pressured to suspend licenses and many researchers and practitioners used preprints to communicate their ongoing findings). These ad hoc suspensions, however, do not address other global emergencies (such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity) and it is morally indefensible to adopt them for some diseases and not others. There is vast experimentation, however, and there will be new models that we cannot even conceive of. It is impossible to be prescriptive about what each of these new or emerging models can do to address the current failings, but some principles can be identified. We are proposing a four-part test that can help decide which models to support, with the goal of starting a debate on what are the appropriate principles that should be adopted.

Presented by Dr Caludio Aspesi, Indepdent Consultant

For further information about the OAI13 conference, head to their website.