Videos of all of the talks from the 2016 Society for Scholarly Publishing Meeting are now available online (select “2016” under “Annual Meeting” to see the whole list). I recommend anyone pondering the next steps (or questioning whether steps are necessary) toward better security and authentication to view the session on Cybersecurity and the Scholarly World.
This was but one of many superb sessions, and given the onerous task of choosing one to present here, I’m going with the one session that strongly resonated with nearly everyone in attendance at the meeting, Margaret Ann Armour’s keynote on diversity in academia and publishing. Armour is the Associate Dean, Diversity, in the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. Her talk looks at at the reasons why we have such a lack of diversity, particularly as one goes up the ladder into leadership positions. She talks about the subtle, ingrained biases we share, and how these unconsciously affect our decisions. Armour shows convincing data on why diversity is beneficial and concludes with practical suggestions on what we can do to make things better.
