PUBMET2018 Conference in Zadar, Croatia

The fifth PUBMET2018 conference, the Croatian national OpenAIRE event,  took place on September 19-21, 2018 in Zadar, Croatia. The surroundings – three thousand years old Mediterranean city - were well suited for our discussions about open science. Participants from different countries such as Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Spain, Great Britain, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia came to present and discuss their work in the area of scholarly publishing. PUBMET2018 gathered more than 120 participants and dealt with the latest trends and changes in this very dynamic area.

During the conference opening the participants were welcomed by the University of Zadar vice-rector prof Ivanka Stričević, Department of Information Sciences prof Franjo Pehar and the state secretary of the Ministry of Science and Education Branka Ramljak. The PUBMET2018 conference was held under the auspices of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and SPARC Europe and was supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education and the OpenAIRE Advance project within Horizon 2020.

The conference was organized by the Department of Information Science of the University of Zadar, the Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology at the University of Zagreb and the Ruđer Bošković Institute Centre for Scientific Information. Information about the speakers, abstracts, presentations and posters are made available at the PUBMET2018 web site http://pubmet.unizd.hr, and you can find also tweets about the conference at http://www.twipu.com/PubMet.

PUBMET2018 keynote and invited speakers presented different open science topics: Katarzyna SZKUTA in the co-authorship with Jean-Claude BURGELMAN presented the European Commission Open Science policy with a particular focus on the European Open Science Cloud that aims to give Europe a global leader in scientific data infrastructures and by promoting FAIR data create the level playing field for sharing data. Vanessa PROUDMAN from SPARC Europe spoke about the latest initiative of openness (Coalition S) from the aspect of financial sustainability. Ignasi LABASTIDA y JUAN from the University of Barcelona talked about the role of academic and research institutions in support of open science. Gareth O'NEILL from the University of Leiden presented the results of the study on the perception of scientists on particular segments of open science, and particularly emphasized the importance of open science for young researchers. Silvio PERONI from the University of Bologna presented The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), and Jon TENNANT, the founder of the Open Science MOOC educational platform, considered the challenges of today's scholarly communication and presented a proposal for its transformation. From other lecturers and poster authors, we learned about the features of good editorial policy, ethical and legal issues, and the various ways in which open science and open access to scientific information can contribute to and improve scientific communication.

PUBMET tradition is to offer practical workshops too, and this year we organized workshops on plagiarism, authorship, and bibliometrics, as well as the SPARC Europe session on copyright and licensing.

PUBMET2018 was supported by  Clarivate Analytics, EBSCO, IOP Publishing, Emerald Group Publishing and Copernicus Publications, sponsoring the conference and taking part in the discussions. The preparations for the next PUBMET2019 conference which will be held in Zadar 18-20 September 2019 already started and you are all welcomed!