Miguel PdL

What a week, 2 tutorials, 1 massive demo session, 1 workshop, 2 key notes, 8 paper sessions and 1 special session later and I’m shattered … but it was worth it. TridentCom wasn’t so easy to get off the ground late last year but the Innsbruck event has ran extremely smoothly with many happy conference attendees and that’s all I could have hoped for.
Firstly the conference location in the Hotel Grauer Bar was excellent, right in the middle of the Innsbruck town, the conference rooms were spacious, the av equipment was in excellent working order, and the lunches and gala dinner scrumptious. I know these should be a given but ….. once you get to a location that’s not always the case, for the Hotel Grauer Bar it was all spot on.
While not everything was perfect, there were some great surprises from the conference, there were a number of international attendees, I mention this because even from Ireland Innsbruck is not the easiest to get to ….. I took the Cork (air) – Munich (train) – Innsbruck route. The other item that got me was that all papers were presented, even with some very late minute replacements …… now this really got me because I was fully expecting a couple of papers not to have presenters. This did have no knock-on event effect, the sessions in the evening ran fairly late.
And the next time ……… well …. I definitely need sometime to take a breather after all of this, and I must say there were some great lessons to be learned from this experience. You need interested and strong TPC co-chairs, I had this in Frank & Raheem, it was invaluable. You need a person understanding the fine detail in event coordination (Dorothy) , a very understanding web-chair (Eamonn), a shoulder to cry on, on the steering committee (Csaba), a publicity chair that’s willing to push your conference and to fill a gap with a special session (Peter) when called upon, a workshop chair that just helps out everywhere (Pablo), a local chair to handle regional specific tasks (Jens & Karin), a publication chair (Thomas) that makes sure all papers are in & copyright forms are complete, a Demo Chair (Sandor) with an excellent demo background and a Panel chair that can drive lively discussion (Ina).
The things I didn’t get right was the programme schedule, this should have been completed earlier than it was, and I didn’t appoint an overall session chair coordinator, now this item got handled in the end by Frank, but this is something I should have looked at much earlier also.
And so I leave Innsbruck with one quote (from John R) ringing in my ears

I don’t like going to conferences like this….. ……. I find so many interesting people and topics it triples my own research work load once I get back to the office.

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This week I received a call for papers from a new open access journal called Scholarly Research Exchange. Now I must admit when I first saw the email, I just didn’t click any of the embedded links as I wasn’t sure what type of site or what type of request this was.
This introduction from Open Access News helped a little to understand, and I’ve also been keeping an eye on the Science Commons project.
Its worth having a read of the SYREXE FAQ as there is cost for the author, and the peer review process is interesting in which

the author interacts directly with reviewers during the course of the peer review process. After submitting a manuscript, the submitting author will be asked to provide the names of up to 10 proposed reviewers.

These reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institution as the submitting authors, and should not have had any input into the submitted manuscript, or have had any collaboration with any of the authors during the last 3 years. The proposed reviewers should also be geographically dispersed (e.g., they should be based in at least 2-3 different countries).

I may look to see if this is a viable/possible avenue for research dissemination.