A REVOLUTION IN RESEARCH COMMUNICATION
Scientific and Scholarly Communication is in the midst of a system-wide disruption largely driven by the growing need and expanded ability to generate and disseminate large amounts of data, analyses, and outcomes. These changes have affected every aspect of scholarly activity and research across all domains and disciplines, with emerging forms of publication, evolving standards and expectations, and expanding ways of measuring and demonstrating success. This new ecosystem continues to develop within our scientific research infrastructure, demanding increasingly open and transparent processes and outcomes of scientific and scholarly activities; it also requires an ever-evolving communications skill set for researchers and knowledge workers that inhabit that ecosystem, in addition to their disciplinary expertise.
FSCI | ONLINE – THE PLATFORM AND THE INCUBATOR
The FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) is the platform and the incubator for this change. FSCI was conceived in 2017 as a platform to bring together the expertise of the globally diverse FORCE11 (The Future of Research Communication and eScholarship; www.force11.org) community to address this continuing need for knowledge transfer and skills training at a high level. Organized by FORCE11 in collaboration with the UCLA Library, FSCI assembles researchers, scholars, librarians, publishers, funders and research administrators to explore new developments in open science, knowledge creation and communication. FSCI Courses range from basic orientations to advanced topics parsed by different domains/disciplines, with the goal to foster community-driven understanding and solutions for the latest trends, technologies, and opportunities that are transforming the way science and scholarship is conducted and communicated. Researchers “return home” from the summer institute with important skills training – but more broadly, are newly equipped with ideas, tools, and tactics for instigating change in their disciplines and at their institutions.
More recently, FSCI is growing into an incubator for educational content focused on the important issues in this realm. The central theme for FSCI2020 is to define, understand and teach best approaches to implementing the FAIR Data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) principles to maximize the management and open communication of scientific research data. FORCE11 was instrumental in assembling the community that brought the FAIR principles into existence, and FSCI has assembled a diverse group of disciplinary experts to collaborate on advancing pedagogical approaches to FAIR Data education and training.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the suspension of our 2020 institute, it has spawned a new focus on enhancing the online infrastructure of FSCI. Our instructors and coordinators are committed to repurposing the educational content of the summer institute into high-quality virtual educational experiences. This emerging online component will become a permanent enhancement and expansion of the FSCI model; simultaneously feeding into and deriving new direction and content from the ongoing summer institute, which plans to return in 2021, and extending the impact far beyond the current FSCI community.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
FSCI is intended for anybody who is interested in the developing new world of Scholarly Communication: researchers, librarians, publishers, university and research administration, funders, students, and postdocs. There are courses for those who know very little about the current trends and technologies, as well as courses for those who are interested in more advanced topics. Our courses cover Scholarly Communication from a variety of disciplinary and regional and national perspectives. We have courses that will be of interest to the scientist, the social scientist, and the Humanities researcher. There are courses for those who manage, organize, and publish research as well as for the researchers themselves and end-users.
ABOUT FORCE11
FSCI is organized by FORCE11 (The Future of Research Communication and eScholarship) in collaboration with the UCLA Library. FORCE11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that arose organically to study and facilitate new developments in knowledge creation and communication. In its short history, it has already had an outsized impact on the practice of Open and FAIR scholarly communication, facilitating community work on such impactful initiatives as the Data Citation and FAIR data principles. Membership is open to all who share this interest! Join Today.
