The Event:

This September, the jubilee Tenth Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science, held in Zadar, covered themes such as research assessment, open peer review, open science infrastructure, sustainability, training and education, and artificial intelligence.

"Changing research landscape and the strategic use of policies and emerging tools to create comprehensive systems that enhance practicality at all research stages, from planning and tracking to assessment." 

Natalia Manola, CEO of OpenAIRE

Major Topics:

Generative artificial intelligence and its ethical dilemmas are currently a "hot topic," especially in the academic community, where we find AI-generating content for students' assignments and authors' works. The concluding keynote lecture left us pondering if AI can truly be called intelligence, emphasizing that we still employ automated systems characterized by fast data processing, lacking in their own free will or emotional intelligence. This suggests that AI functions more as an auxiliary tool than a form of intelligence.

The spotlight also shone on some thought-provoking posters, with brief presentations from their authors. One of these posters, presented by Ivana Končić, focused on the challenges associated with identifying research-related entities in the context of building a connected, open scholarly communication system. To tackle these challenges, OpenOrgs was introduced, an OpenAIRE tool that combines automated processes with human curation to disambiguate organizations involved in the research process.

With training and education of Open Science being another key theme of this year's conference, Sanja Jurković presented a poster on the PATTERN project. This Horizon Europe initiative aims to advance open and responsible research and innovation across Europe through training activities for researchers at all career stages. PATTERN involves a total of 19 European organizations and institutions, including the Ruđer Bošković Institute, contributing to the development and implementation of training programs empowering researchers and institutions alike, and improving the overall interaction between science and society.