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Zhang Peiran, a visiting doctoral student from Fudan University, Shanghai is a Research Assistant at the Living Analytics Research Centre (LARC), School of Information Systems (SIS), SMU. He won a travel fellowship to ‘Beyond the PDF2 Conference’, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as a student representative for SMU.
Robert Kauffman, Associate Dean (Research), SIS, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (an Elsevier journal), nominated Peiran for this travel fellowship. Since one of the key areas of change is related to the publication of research that involves the curation of large data sets, it was natural that Elsevier would be interested to invite a junior colleague from LARC who had some experience with big data.
The conference was intended to explore issues related to scholarly communication across multiple disciplines that are being rapidly changed under the influence of new technologies. New models, tools and standards are being developed that aim to enhance, enable or entirely replace prior approaches to communication, including publications, courses, conferences and policies. The aim of the discussion forum was to encourage broader awareness of current efforts across disciplines, and to define the future of modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology.
Before Peiran’s visit, SMU’s University Librarian, Gulcin Cribb gave him a briefing on a variety of related issues that were to be discussed at the conference. These included current changes that are underway in scholarly communications; the structure of the market for academic publishing; the new technologies that are resulting in the current pressures; and other issues including research article and data set peer reviewing and various citation tracking mechanisms.