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It was so good last time, we're doing it again! The next #FuturePub London on January the 27th is joining forces with Scholarly Social and London Open Drinks to bring you an evening packed full of science and publishing goodness :)

Six quickfire talks will explore the latest developments in science and publishing tech (our first three speakers are unveiled below!) to kick off the discussions and conversations about what's up and coming in 2015.

Speakers

Ian Mulvany, Head of Technology for eLife

How to make the probably the best online article reading experience even better.

I will talk about our current iterations and future plans for eLife lens. ELife lens is an innovative tool for viewing research articles on a screen. We have had great feedback in the tool, and we would like to get peoples reactions and thoughts on our current experiments with the tool.

Ian is head of technology for eLife, an open access publisher, and has previously worked on a number of tools for academics, including connotea and Mendeley.

Christopher Rabotin, back end developer at Sparrho

Sparrho: Our recent progress and next challenges

Sparrho is your recommendation engine for scientific information. Interactions like indicating your keywords and favourite articles in Sparrho teach us how to aggregate, distill and recommend content relevant to you - allowing you to keep a bird's eye view on science. I'll talk about our recent progress, and the next challenges we plan on tackling in 2015.

Chris holds a Masters degree cum laude in electronics and computer science from ESIEE Paris (Université Paris-Est). He has a passion for space engineering and before Sparrho he worked on satellite procedures for SES.

Kaveh Bazargan, founder of River Valley Technologies

How publishing can be better, faster, and cheaper

Despite the technological advances in recent decades, the basic model of scholarly publishing has remained the same, except that manuscripts and proofs are sent as email attachments, rather than by post. I will show how a fully browser based workflow can reduce cost, increase speed, and improve the quality of scholarly publications.

Kaveh Bazargan is a physicist by training, specializing in 3D imaging. In 1988 he founded River Valley Technologies in London, in order to introduce computer generated illustrations to UK publishers. The main business is now typesetting for STM publishers, using the only "pure" XML-first system in the industry. In recent years River Valley has been working on cloud-based platforms for publishers, including an end-to-end XML-based authoring to publication platform.

Look out for our second set of speakers to be announced in the new year, along with final confirmation of the venue, and I look forward to seeing you in London on the 27th! Don't forget to book your free ticket today to reserve your seat.

About Scholarly Social

Scholarly Social is an open and collaborative space to share ideas and make connections. We host social gatherings where you can share top tips and network with people involved in scholarly communication. You don’t represent your organisation, just your individual self, and everyone connected to scholarly communication is welcome, including publishers, librarians, researchers, consultants, intermediaries, and students.

If you can't make this one, join the Scholarly Social LinkedIn group to be informed of future events, and if you have any questions you can find the organisers Bernie and Ginny on Twitter.

About London Open Drinks

London Open Drinks is a (very!) informal get together for anyone with professional or personal interests in Open Access, Open Data, Open Knowledge, and Open Anything Else. Previous events have attracted around 30 people, most of whom work in and around the sciences (including researchers, publishers, funders, journalists). We want to actively encourage interaction between interested parties who might not otherwise come into contact.

For information please visit our website, and follow us on Twitter for more details as the night approaches.

If you have any questions about London Open Drinks please direct them to the Wellcome Trust’s Adam Dinsmore at a.dinsmore@wellcome.ac.uk.

About Overleaf

Overleaf is a collaborative writing and publishing system that makes the whole process of producing academic papers much quicker for both authors and publishers. Developed by the writeLaTeX team and now with over 150,000 users worldwide, it aims to make science and research faster, more open and more transparent by bringing the whole scientific process into one place, from idea to writing to review to publication.

Find out more and give Overleaf a try today.