We are really thrilled to announce our participation in, and support of, the upcoming hack4ac hackday that will be taking place in London on the 6th of July. (You can sign up now!).
The hackday is the idea of Jason Hoyt - CEO of PeerJ, and we are really happy to be involved in the co-organising of the event. We also have a great bunch of sponsors, with support from Amazon Web Services, PLOS and Skills Matter. We will have Amazon Web Services credits available for all participants, and as much coffee as you think you can consume.
The other thing that we are super excited about is the number of great people who have already signed up for the event. We have people from Papers App, altmetric.com, PeerJ, Digital Science, PLOS and many academics with a keen interest in open access. We will also have Mark Thorley the chair of RCUK Research Outputs, who will be opening the day with a few words on the importance of CC-BY licences.
Open access is important, not only because it does what is says on the tin in getting access to the literature to the greatest number of people, but also because it allows for the remixing and re-imagining of the literature. We fully believe in the benefits of data mining and the potential benefits of making the literature remixable. We hope that by making the literate as useful as possible, we can really help to reduce the frictions that still exist in the research process.
The focus of this event is going to be hacking on the CC-BY literature. If you are interested in the future of the journal, new ways to present academic content on the web, creating personalisation tools or discovery tools for the literature, then this is the hack day for you.
There is a huge amount of literature available to experiment with - the PLOS archive, PeerJ articles, eLife articles, articles available via EUPMC and their api.
Also at eLife last week we just launched eLife Lens, an experimental way to view the literature, and the code for this is available to play with.
If you are interested in tackling more front line problems, then on the same weekend there will be the [BMJ hackday][mbjhack] that will be looking at how to provide tools for digital medial students, how to increase efficiencies in the NHS - especially around preventing unnecessary deaths, and looking at issues around localisation of content.
We will be working closely with them to get as much crossover as possible, and their event will run on into Sunday, so if you really need the last few hours to complete your hack, there will be plenty of interested minds operating in London that weekend to help out.
Sign up now, or read more about the event, we hope to see you there.
