The program committee for the FORCE2019 meeting in Edinburgh (October 15 – 17) now invites proposals for talks, posters, panels, and workshops to be submitted. The deadline for submissions is June 2, 2019.

The FORCE11 annual conference is a different kind of meeting, where stakeholders come together for an open discussion, on an even playing field, to talk about changing the ways scholarly and scientific information is communicated, shared and used. Researchers, publishers, librarians, computer scientists, informaticians, funders, educators, citizens, and others attend the FORCE11 meeting with a view to supporting the realisation of promising new ideas and identifying new potential collaborators.

Accordingly, the theme of this year’s meeting is collaboration – how people are working across sectors, disciplines and geographies to identify needs and develop solutions to accelerate research communication. Across the different tracks of the meeting we’ll be looking for examples of collaborations and lessons learned from them, as well as ideas for new ways of working together.

Every FORCE11 meeting is different, providing a special forum for the community each time, and taking on at least a little local flavour. In addition to having a wealth of cultural heritage, this year's host city of Edinburgh aspires to become the "data capital of Europe" (https://ddi.ac.uk/). As such, with "collaboration" as the overall conference theme, you can expect open data, data science and data stewardship to appear throughout the program. The committee proposes to explore each of the following tracks through the program, but are also open to proposals that may not seem to fit:

• Trail-blazing: A lot is changing in scholarly communications and it's hard to keep up. Can you give an up-to-the-minute review of the landscape of data or software citations, reproducible code, responsible metrics, developments in peer review or anything else that's changing quickly? Are you working on anything cutting-edge? What are the new frontiers of scholarly communication? What will the next generation of researchers want and expect?
• Promoting open research: How are people and organizations promoting open research and the necessary changes in culture? What's happening at local levels as well as national ones? What role do preprints play? What's happening with Plan S and are you excited or concerned by it? How does it compare to initiatives like Alemi? What other initiatives are being run? How are researchers responding, what works, what doesn't and what remains to be done?
• Infrastructure for research communication: How, why and when should we be building new infrastructure, be it for doing research, writing, reviewing, publishing or assessing it? Are there times we shouldn't be? When should infrastructure be open? How do open standards help facilitate knowledge exchange, whether the systems are open or not? What areas should we be looking at next?
• Skills: There is so much for everyone to learn in order to help transform scholarly communications. Can you help researchers learn new skills to function well in an open research environment? How can we get senior researchers to ‘unlearn’ habits of secrecy and embrace academic culture change? What are your top tips for teaching research data management? Can you give an analysis of the changing skills needed for libraries and service providers? How do staff involved in scholarly communications roles acquire the right skills and keep these up to date?

The program committee will consider proposals for:

• Rapid-fire presentations (maximum five minutes)
• Individual talks (maximum 25 minutes)
• Panel discussions (up to 90 minutes)
• Workshops (no longer than three hours)
• Hack-a-thon (one day)
• Posters

Sales pitches will not be considered.

To submit a proposal, complete this form no later than June 2, 2019.

We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

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FORCE2019 will be held October 16 and 17, 2019 at the BT Murrayfield Rugby Stadium, with pre-conference workshops at the Hilton Grosvenor Hotel on October 15. Please join us.

Sponsorship opportunities are available.  

Details on the program and how to register will be made available later this year. To be kept up-to-date, join us on Slack, sign up to receive email alerts, or follow @force11rescomm on Twitter.