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Impression at the Frankfurt Book Fair (© Frankfurter Buchmesse / Peter Hirth)

By Paula Gantz

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) will once again hold its popular STM Frankfurt Conference on Tuesday, October 13 at the Westin Grand Frankfurt Hotel prior to the opening of the Book Fair. The Conference will address strategic issues of interest to senior managers in the STM publishing business. Over 350 STM publishers, suppliers, publishing services and technology executives are expected to attend.

According to Matt McKay, Director of Communications and Events for the STM Association, this annual conference is a great opportunity for networking and catch-up before the Book Fair. “But it is also a time to find out what’s working in STM publishing and what’s not, what’s new and what’s up-and-coming. People come from across the globe to our annual Frankfurt Conference,” McKay explained.

This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Robert “Bob” Hariri, a surgeon, scientist and serial entrepreneur in both biomedicine and aerospace. Dr. Hariri will share his thoughts and insights on his current research and the expanded role the publishing community should play to better support his research efforts, as well as the efforts of the research community as a whole.

Following up on the keynote theme of the publisher’s role in promoting research endeavors, the Communications Panel, a regular fixture at the Frankfurt Conference, will this year focus on industry efforts to establish a core set of principles that clarify how, where and what content should be shared using collaborative networks and sites. Some of the topics to be explored include:

• A collaborative industry campaign about to launch that will raise awareness of the issues surrounding deceptive publishers;
• Research4Life — a partnership of programs HINARI, AGORA, OARE and ARDI — that provides developing countries with free or low-cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online;
• ORCID, cross-collaboration between publishers and researchers to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.

The afternoon’s speakers — Roger Schonfeld, Director of Ithaka S+R’s Library and Scholarly Communication program, and Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network (RIN) — will speak about research trends in the scholarly communications industry. They will especially focus on emerging needs of researchers in conducting, validating and disseminating research results.

A Chief Executive Panel will close the Conference. CEOs from Elsevier, Wiley, the American Chemical Society, the Institute of Physics, and the Copyright Clearance Center will field questions from attendees regarding upcoming challenges facing the STM publishing industry. An STM members-only forum will follow.

The STM Frankfurt Conference takes place on October 13, 2015 at the Westin Grand Frankfurt Hotel. Follow the conversation on Twitter via #stmfrankfurt.