The biggest European meeting on Science online – policy, outreach, tools – started this Sunday. SpotOn brings open source coders, librarians, scientists from a variety of fields, and publishers together in London.
You can follow the keynotes and sessions online and evaluation and comments can be followed in real time on Twitter. #solo12 is hashtag of the overall conference, the individual sessions have their own tags. So the backchannel is very lively but quite focused and illuminating. The comments on the keynote this morning sound quite annoyed by the Kamilla Makrams presentation of Frontiers, some calling it a sales talk. Other publishers in the audience were however quite impressed by the community efforts of Frontiers (No source here, for obvious reasons).
That’s the other good reason to be here is not available online: Meeting in person and sharing the opinions you can’t communicate online. The sessions occasionally might sound as if there’s little to discuss as everyone seems to agree on Open Access, Open Data and the inadequacies of the current publishing schemes but I think we’re often not counting the many people in the audience that hear about these things the first time. Unfortunately, the conference will continue without me tomorrow.