Force11 Scholarly Communication Summer Institute

In science, as in Doomsday Machines, the important thing is the communication. Research, unless it is disseminated, is no different from study. It is one thing to define a good problem and develop what you think is a productive answer. But if you don’t tell others what you did and why you did it, you may as well have not bothered. Dissemination, so that others can test and respond to your work, is what makes research research.
                                             

These are truisms, of course. But if you look at how science communication is actually taught, you might wonder. It takes years of schooling to become a scientist or scholar. This schooling teaches you the basic techniques and tenets of your field. You learn how to conduct research in a responsible fashion. Your instructors test your knowledge of the core literature and ideas. Once you work in the field, you are expected to stay on top of the most recent trends and developments.

How you communicate this research, however, is something that in many fields you are expected to pick up on your own. You learn by working with your supervisors on joint papers. In others, there may be a professionalisation course (usually taught by one of the research faculty, rather than a specialist in the latest trends in Scholarly Communication) or your supervisor might suggest a journal for you to try.

The Force 11 Scholarly Communication Summer Institute (FSCI) has been developed to address this gap in how we learn the crucial art of Scholarly Communication. FSCI is modelled on the very successful Digital Humanities Summer Institute (the Digital Humanities are another domain in which networked computing has disrupted the field faster than traditional training can accommodate). In the last 16 years, DHSI has trained thousands of humanities researchers in a very supportive atmosphere in how they can make the most of the latest computation and communication techniques to improve their traditional research practice. FSCI brings the same approach to the latest developments in Scholarly Communication more generally: bring together the leaders in the field and those who want to improve their daily practice; allow the community to set the topics that are taught; emphasise hands on work whenever possible.