Plenary Events

Opening Session

Monday August 3rd – View the Recording 

8:30AM – 10AM, repeats at 5PM – 6:30PM (all times Pacific, UTC-7)

A 90 minute kickoff session, presented live over Zoom, will be repeated twice on this day to allow participants from all time zones a chance to join in. We’ll begin with opening remarks from FSCI organizers, and some brief updates on logistics and orientation. That will lead into our opening panel discussion:

Science at the Speed of a Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the issues of speed, trust and validity for research communications into focus as never before. In this session of talks and discussion we will probe the issues with the people dealing with challenges in reprints and efficient peer review, experts on reproducibility and data management and the people who need to turn data and claims into policy on the ground. We will discuss the challenges for science and scholarship in communicating rapidly and effectively to different audiences. Probing the challenges from peer review processes to preprints, data sharing to deliberate misinformation the panel will pick apart the issues based on their experience of the current crisis.

Confirmed Panelists:

• Theodora Bloom is executive editor of The BMJ where her responsibilities include publishing, business, platform and operations, as well as ethical and policy matters and dealing with complaints. Following a PhD and research work in developmental cell biology and cell cycle regulation, she moved into publishing, first as an editor on the biology team at Nature. She was at the centre of developing several new journals, including being the founding editor of Genome Biology at BioMed Central and Chief Editor of PLOS Biology. At PLOS she also took the lead on issues around data access and availability. In the context of this panel, she has been at the centre of managing both journals and preprints servers seeking to manage the flood of COVID related submissions in a timely and appropriate way.
• Richard Sever is Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Following his PhD, Richard worked as an editor at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and later for Trends in Biochemical Sciences. He subsequently served as Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science, before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2008 where he also serves as Executive Editor for the Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives and Cold Spring Harbor Protocols journals. His work as Co-Founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv and an advocate for preprinting more generally has been thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic as challenges of both volume, pace and quality assurance have come to the fore.
• Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Exeter University and Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), where she leads the Data Studies research strand. Her research spans the fields of history and philosophy of biology, science and technology studies and general philosophy of science. Recent work has focussed on issues in data-intensive science especially the impact of Big and Open Data on research and wider society, and the scientific and social implications of implementing Open Science policies and procedures. She has also looked specifically at the issue of time and its relationship to data collection and communication. She is Editor in Chief of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and currently preparing a large topical collection on the historical and philosophical perspectives on COVID-19.

Midpoint Plenary

Friday August 7th

Just as we do in-person, halfway through FSCI we pull everyone out of their courses into a curriculum-driven series of plenary events, centered around a theme.

This year’s theme: The Past, Present and Future of FAIR Data.

We’ll have speakers and panelists throughout the day, from time zones around the world, to form a dynamic global panel session featuring leading experts on FAIR Data, with insights on its founding, its current limitations and challenges, and what happens next. We will have a rolling 24-hour schedule of panels, online statements and discussion on the past, present and future of the FAIR principles, and of the principled and respectful use of data in general. 

Cameron Neylon and Natasha Simons, who as Australians are consistently ahead of the rest of us, will take turns moderating the 5 scheduled panels (between naps), including a rotating cast of the following honored guests:

• Prof. Ginny Barbour, Director, Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG)
• Dr Lesley Wyborn, Adjunct Fellow, National Computational Infrastructure Facility and Research School of Earth Sciences
• Leyla Jael Garcia, Team Leader, Semantic Retrieval team, at ZBMED Information Centre for life sciences
• Ingrid Dillo, Deputy Director, DANS: the Netherlands institute for permanent access to digital research resources
• Steve McEachern, Director, Australian Data Archive at the Australian National University
• Mark Parsons, Senior Research Scientist, CODATA Data Science Journal
• Stephanie Carroll, Assistant Professor, Public Health Policy and Management and Associate Director for the Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona; co-founder of US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network and International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Group, Chair of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance; Ahtna (NATIVE VILLAGE OF KLUTI-KAHH) 
• Ivonne Lujano, Ambassador for Latin America, DOAJ
• Lorretta Ntoimo, Senior Lecturer, Department of Demography and Social Statistics, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria
• Māui Hudson, Associate Professor, Maori and Indigenous Studies, University of Waikato; co-founder of Te Mana Raraunga Māori Data Sovereignty Network and founding member of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance; Māui affiliates to Whakatohea, Ngā Ruahine, and Te Māhurehure.

Links to the pages for each panel are below, along with starting times for a selection of time zones.  Note: the Panels start Thursday night at 9pm Pacific Time, and in some time zones they will run into Saturday morning. FSCI registrants can click below to reach all 5 different sessions in Sched to 1) join and contribute to any of the sessions during your waking hours, and 2) watch the recorded versions of the rest (as soon as they're available).  

Closing Session

Thursday August 13th

8AM to 10AM and 2PM to 4PM (all times Pacific, UTC-7)

In our two non-repeating closing sessions, each presented live over Zoom, we will be presenting reflection and inspriation from this year's courses.  In those sessions and in other asynchronous ways, we’ll pull together threads from the courses, the plenaries, and the community events, and begin to sum up what we’ve learned from each other and to lay out pathways to stay connected beyond FSCI.