Diplomat-Speaker Sandra Vengadasalam
Max Planck Digital Library/ Coordination & Strategy

Sandra Vengadasalam is responsible for future developments and the realization of ideas at the MPDL. As a former researcher in molecular biology and biochemistry she supports Open Access passionately but also knows about the challenges of publishing Open Access in science. Before she joined MPDL, her biggest dream has been a Nature paper.

Diplomat-Speaker Prateek Mahalwar
Max Planck PhDnet, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

Prateek Mahalwar, PhD Student at The Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology – works how different cell types interact with one another and form various patterns in the lab of Prof. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Besides his PhD, Prateek is the new Spokesperson (2015) of PhDnet at Max Planck Society and also an early-career advisory group member of the Journal eLife. Before joining Max Planck for his doctoral education, he studied Neuroscience at Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology and University of Magdeburg, Germany. He joined the Open Access movement as a co-organizer of Berlin 11 satellite conference, 2013 in Berlin. He is involved in educating and advocating about Open Access among early stage researchers because he thinks early-stage researchers are the future of science and could revolutionize the research communication.

Diplomat-Speaker Frank Sander
Max Planck Digital Library

Frank Sander is General Manager of the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). With his team at MPDL, the central digital library of the Max Planck Society, he ensures availability of digital scientific information and related information infrastructure services to the scientists at the Max Planck Institutes worldwide. Before MPDL, he has collected over 10 years of experience in software development and IT management, as executive board member and as strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company. He holds a PhD in physics and worked scientifically with Ted Hänsch at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. His various memberships include the steering board of the Alliance of German Science Organisations’ Priority Initiative Digital Information, the programme committee of the Berlin Open Access conference series, and the Review Board of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Science.

Diplomat-Speaker Georg Botz
Max Planck Society/ Open Access Policy

Georg Botz studied physics in Bielefeld and Heidelberg and received his Ph.D. from Heidelberg University for a thesis in the field of theoretical particle physics in 1993. After employments with the Spektrum Verlag, the Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag and the TÜV-Akademie, he joined the Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society in 2004 where he is in charge of open access policy issues. His acquaintance with the topic goes back as far as 2002 when he, then a member of the Executive Board of the “German Physical Society”, was deeply involved in establishing the “New Journal of Physics”. From the very beginning, Georg was involved in the planning and the implementation of eLife, the Open Access journal founded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA), the Wellcome Trust (UK) and the Max Planck Society. Last, but not least, Georg Botz initiated the first open access conference for students and early career researchers which took place in Berlin in 2013.

Diplomat-Speaker Astrid Orth

Göttingen State and University Library/ FOSTER

FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) aims at training stakeholders, especially young researchers, for open science. During the two year project training events are supported and co-funded across Europe covering policies and practices of Open Access, open data and tools in various research areas and how to embed them in workflows, as well as licensing and managing research data. High quality training material is collected and made available for re-use in learning and training activities at http://fosteropenscience.eu. Astrid Orth works in the Electronic Publishing unit at Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. For the FOSTER project she manages the Dissemination work package and contributes to the development of the training program. Previously she worked as knowledge manager at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

Diplomat-Speaker Nick Shockey
Right to Research Coalition, USA

Advancing Research by Returning Research Communication to its Roots
Nick Shockey, Director of Programs & Engagement for SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and founding Director of the Right to Research Coalition, will discuss Open Access, the origins of the Open Access movement, and what the next generation of researchers is already doing to open up science and scholarship.

About Nick Shockey (http://www.sparc.arl.org/about/staff/nick-shockey)

Diplomat-Speaker Ulrich Pöschl
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry

Open Access in the Scientific Discourse and Quality Assurance
The importance, achievements and perspectives of open access for the scientific discourse, quality assurance and progress will be outlined, addressing both general concepts and practical examples.

About Ulrich Pöschl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Pöschl)

Diplomat-Speaker Erin C. McKiernan
National Institute of Public Health, Mexico

My experiences with open access publishing as an early-career researcher
Working for over three years in Latin America, first in Puerto Rico and now in Mexico, I have seen the access problem firsthand. Lack of access to the academic literature slows progress in research and education. I will describe my personal experiences and talk about the many ways to make your work open as an early-career researcher.

About Erin McKiernan (https://emckiernan.wordpress.com/)

Diplomat-Speaker Björn Brembs
University of Regensburg

If only access were the only problem of our infrastructure!
After more than ten years, “Open Access” is finally a household name. However, access is only one of many functionalities that is badly broken in our scientific infrastructure. Our literature would lose little of its functionality if we carved it in stone, took pictures of it and out them online. Our data – if it is made accessible at all – all too often rests in financially insecure databases. And our scientific code is hardly available at all, with no institutional infrastructure to speak of. What can young researchers do about that? 1) Use a publishing strategy that does not risk your career but will make a difference. 2) Ask you seniors to arrange for infrastructure to take care of your data and your code – this should not be your responsibility.

About Björn Brembs (http://brembs.net/)

Diplomat-Speaker Randy Schekman
University of California, Berkley | Editor-in-Chief, eLife

Publishing your most important work
The assessment of scholarly achievement depends critically on the proper evaluation and publication of research work in scholarly journals. Investigators face a dizzying array of journal styles that include commercial, not-for-profit and academic society journals that are supported by a mix of subscription and page charges. The Open Access (OA) movement, launched in Britain but greatly expanded by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), seeks to eliminate the firewall that separates published work from public access. OA journals are funded by a mix of page charges and philanthropic or foundation support. Most OA journals embrace a more liberal licensing agreement on the use and reuse of published work, favoring the creative commons license rather than a copyright held by the publisher. Some publishers, particularly commercial firms, view the OA movement as a threat to the viability of their business plan. Major commercial publishers, particularly Elsevier, have fought against government mandates for OA publication of publicly funded research.
The most selective and successful journals, Science, Nature and Cell (a life science journal owned by Elsevier), maintain a firm hold on the high end of the scientific literature by appealing to investigators to submit only their most important work. Typically, these journals publish only a small fraction of the papers they receive and for the most part they rely on professional editors rather than active scholars to make key editorial decisions. These publishers, particularly Nature and Cell, reinforce their high standing by relying on a metric, the impact factor (IF) that computes the average number of citations of papers published in the journal during the preceding two-year period. As a consequence, many investigators, who quite naturally seek career advancement, strive to publish in these journals even at the expense of repeated cycles of review, wasteful additional experimental work and ultimately lost time. I will argue that it is time for scholars to reassume authority for the publication of their research work and to eschew the use of IF in the evaluation of scholarly achievement and favor OA publications over what I have called the “luxury” journals.

About Rany Schekman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Schekman)

Diplomat-Speaker Mark Patterson
Managing Executive Editor, eLIFE

DORA the reformer – prospects for new approaches to research assessment
Research assessment based on journal titles or their impact factors is widely regarded as problematic and unreliable. The intense competition to publish in high-impact journals also incentivises behaviours amongst researchers that are detrimental to scientific progress.  This talk will summarise some of the deficiencies in existing practices, and will discuss how digital tools, such as altmetrics, and policy developments, such as those encouraged by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, are helping to improve approaches to the evaluation of research and researchers.

Mark Patterson was a researcher in human and yeast genetics for 12 years before moving into scientific publishing in 1994 as the Editor of Trends in Genetics. After a few years at Nature, where he was involved in the launch of the Nature Reviews Journals, he moved to the nonprofit open access startup publisher PLoS in 2003. As an editor, Mark helped to launch several of the PLoS Journals and was appointed as Director of Publishing in 2005. He was also one of the founders of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. In November 2011, Mark joined the eLife team and has been building the professional staff team in Cambridge, UK, to help get the journal off the ground.

Diplomat-Speaker Meredith Niles
Harvard University

Talking about open access with your colleagues and advisors 
Publishing Open Access can provide significant benefits to both authors and society, but many people are unaware of these potential benefits. Navigating conversations with co-authors, colleagues and advisors about open access publishing can often be challenging. In this session we will discuss some of the potential and perceived challenges of open access publishing and how to overcome these perceptions and challenges. This session will give you tools and tips for communicating effectively with co-authors, colleagues and advisors about open access.

About Meredith Niles (http://bit.ly/1vxfNqR)

Diplomat-Speaker Ross Mounce
University of Bath

Data mining & re-use of published research: copyright problems & the benefits of full open access, elucidated
This talk will discuss the potential scale & power of content mining techniques to improve and support knowledge synthesis across ALL disciplines, and how/why open access publications tend to be particularly amenable to mining. Copyright problems (restrictive licencing) and how they impede mining & re-use will be a focus, with examples from many different disciplines, including both ‘STEM’ & ‘Humanities’ applications.

About Ross Mounce (http://rossmounce.co.uk/)

Diplomat-Speaker Kai Geschuhn
Max Planck Digital Library/ Open Access Coordination & License Management

Kai fosters Open Access strategies within the Max Planck Digital Library. She is a member of the Open Access working groups of the Max Planck Society, the Alliance of German Science Organization and part of the program committee of the German Open Access Days. Kai formerly worked as a librarian at a biomedical research institute where she was giving lectures on scientific publishing and Open Access at the institute’s graduate school. Additionally she has been teaching information literacy at Hamburg University.

Diplomat-Speaker Michael Franke
Max Planck Digital Library

The MPDL Collections department, managed by Michael, takes care of the stable and sustainable operation of MPG cyber-infrastructure, containing the institutional publication repository MPG.PuRe, various digital research environments and research data repositories.

Michael studied sociology in Munich and got seven years of experience in business software development in the corporate sector before joining Max Planck in 2007. He is representing the Max Planck Society in national and European working groups on Research Data Management.

Diplomat-Speaker Andreas Vogler
Max Planck Digital Library

[Workspaz] is a generic, web-based cooperation, collaboration, and communication platform. In my talk I will shortly introduce this tool and highlight different applications how you can exchange conference related material or stay in touch via [workspaz].