Celebrating 35 Years: A Moment for Reflection and Looking to the Future

Symposium

The symposium featured several speakers who shared their personal views on the future of science publishing. Topics covered technology and artificial intelligence (AI), and Editors-in-Chief of some of IOS Press’ most prominent journals spoke about their experiences guiding publications in the fields of cancer research, life sciences, and statistics (see Box 1). 

The Tech Session began with a fascinating demonstration of the IOS Press linked data portal LD Connect, with dynamic visuals covering 35 years of IOS Press’ publications (including the "Country Race" visualization of article output from 1987 to 2020 along along with other highlights of IOS Press data, which you can explore further here). The Tech Session continued with five inspiring presentations on intriguing topics such as the potential collaboration between humans and AI with regard to science publishing, the future of publishing technology, and technical advancements for the industry. A recurring theme in several presentations was “nanopublications” (read about this in our previous Labs blog post). 

The Key Editors Session, presented by Editors-in-Chief of some of IOS Press' most eminent journals, included personal perspectives that provided insights into the origins of these titles, successful editorial practices, and tips for nurturing relationships with journal communities.

_{Photo: Symposium at De Balie, Amsterdam; view larger here (credit: Philip Jong Loy)}

Digital advances impacting future of science publishing

IOS Press devotes resources into investigating and developing cutting-edge technologies to support the advancement of science, in a sustainable way. Prioritizing shared data initiatives is key and the importance of published articles and metadata being interpretable and readable by machines is without doubt. Unsiloing data is a key driver that can enable researchers to easily retrieve, communicate, and share data. The crux of open science is to make scientific research and data accessible to all, with the end result of sharing this knowledge through the publication of open scientific research, campaigning for open access, and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge. The implementation of guiding principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) relies on public endorsement and cooperation. Advances in these areas were presented during each of the presentations in the tech session at the symposium. 

A series of pre-recorded presentations, also part of the anniversary celebration, covered technical topics as well. The power of digital technology to advance scientific discoveries is covered in the recording by Sudeshna Das, PhD (Harvard Medical School) in her talk "Alzheimer DataLENS: Omics Analytics Portal for Alzheimer's Disease Research," and a different side of the digital world – where AI-supported tools are not used for the good of science – was highlighted by Bernhard A. Sabel, PhD (Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg) in his presentation "Fake Publications from Paper Mills: A Global Threat to the Permanent Record."

Watch out for posts from a number of contributors to the IOS Press anniversary celebrations appearing on this blog in the future!