Universities, Scholarship and the Web

Dr Alma Swan will be in Australia next week for the Open Access and Research Conference 2008. She will also be giving a free seminar at ANU in Canberra September 22:

Back to the Mission: Universities, Scholarship and the Web
Monday 22 September 2008, 12.30 - 1.30pm
McDonald Room, R.G. Menzies Building, ANU

Abstract: The Web has turned upside down many of the ways in which things are done. It is also changing profoundly the way people in the academic community are thinking and interacting. Scholarship is becoming increasingly 'big' , multidisciplinary and multinational and scholars have long been changing behaviours to enable these trends. Universities are adjusting as well, with some innovative and promising developments of their own. In many senses, these shifts represent a return to the original mission of universities and help us to reflect upon recent and future directions for higher education. This presentation will review what is going on in scholarly communication and how universities are repositioning to take advantage of new opportunities on behalf of both their researchers and the institution as a whole.

Bio: Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives Ltd, Truro, UK
Alma Swan obtained a first class honours degree in zoology in 1974 and a PhD in cell biology in 1978 from Southampton University. After research fellowships funded by the Cancer Research Campaign at Southampton General Hospital and St. George's Hospital Medical School (London), she took a position as Lecturer in Zoology at the University of Leicester. Her research was in medical cell biology and she taught a range of courses from vertebrate biology to the biology of cancer. In 1985, she moved into science publishing as managing editor of a Pergamon Press (later Elsevier Science) biomedical research indexing service, published both in print and online. In 1996, she jointly founded Key Perspectives, a consultancy serving the scholarly publishing industry. Though she has worked in the commercial sphere for 20 years, she retains links with academic life: for four years she was tutor and consultant for the Open University Business School's MBA programme and since 1991 has been tutor for two business strategy courses on Warwick Business School's MBA programme. She is a Visiting Researcher in the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Associate Fellow in the Marketing and Strategic Management Group at Warwick Business School. Alma has an MBA from Warwick Business School, is a Member of the Institute of Biology, is an elected member of the Governing Board of Euroscience (the European Association for the Promotion of Science and Technology) and is editor of its magazine, The Euroscientist.

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Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
Copland Building 24
Room G037, Division of Information
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia