At VIVO 2012, two keynote speeches on the first and second day of the conference highlighted two important aspects of making research activities and results more accessible.

Caroline Wagner’s keynote speech illustrated the networked nature of global science and highlighted some issues that are relevant also for agricultural research: the “emergent” nature of collaboration, the complexity of the network (studied with mathematical methods) and the absence of a global organism that facilitates it. She advocated for the need to understand the way global networks works, their rules (incentives, interaction, having something to exchange) and stressed how capturing and valuing what happens in these informal networks can help developing countries, especially considering that research from developing countries is not much visible and not recognized and that bibliometric studies show that only around 3% of journal titles cited worldwide in bibliographies are actually present in global indexing and abstracting services like SCIE - Scientific Citation Index Expanded, once called ISI - owned by Thomson Reuters, or Scopus or Google Scholar (see here). Her conclusion was: we need to understand how unseen knowledge works in order to make it visible.

On the second day, Peter Murray-Rust (reader of Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge) gave a very interesting (and, as he anticipated, controversial) keynote speech. His presentation is on his blog.

He talked about the "scholarly poor" in the world, who don't have access to scholarly data, and didn't just limit this category to students in the developing countries, but included categories like doctors, teachers, unaffiliated scholars etc. everywhere. Murray-Rust advocates for a re-definition of "open" (free to use, re-use, re-distribute), challenges the assumption that publishers are entitled to earn on the content they publish (given to them for free, he stresses) because they can do more and better than authors and Institutions to disseminate it, and invites researchers, universities and libraries to "reclaim their scholarship": they should not give in too easily to publishers' requests and restrictions. He insisted that individuals and small groups can change things and he gave some interesting examples of small initiatives that can become big and make a difference. He pointed to the Open Knowledge Foundation, and to the Panton Principles for open data in science.