I just remembered that the Science Commons Symposium is taking place this coming Saturday. It’s promising to be a very cool event, organized by my friends over at External Research in Microsoft Research. I am really looking forward to it. The list of speakers is impressive! If you are around and haven’t joined, I encourage you to do so!

Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest

Please join us on Saturday February 20^th for an all-day symposium on accelerating scientific discoveries.

9:30am to 5:30pm
Microsoft – Building 99

The conference is international in scope and features several of the most important figures in the areas of online science and Open Access.  We are expecting a strong turnout by a broad variety of academic researchers, librarians, as well as other roles who are interested in developing alliances with scientists and technologists who are creating new modes of scientific communication.

We have an exciting lineup of speakers including:

• 
  John Wilbanks is the VP of Science Commons.  John and the Science Commons team help people and organizations from every part of the scientific ecosystem lift legal and technical barriers to research and discovery.
• 
  Heather Joseph is the Executive Director at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. She leads SPARC’s advocacy efforts to support widespread adoption of open access to scholarly research.
• 
  Anthony Williams is a leader in the domain of free access chemistry. He is the VP of Strategic Development for the Royal Society of Chemistry, the president of ChemConnector and the founder of ChemZoo Inc.
• 
  Jean-Claude Bradley  is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and the E-Learning Coordinator at Drexel University.
• 
  Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist who has always worked in interdisciplinary areas and is a leading advocate of data availability.
• 
  Stephen Friend is the founder and president of Sage, a not-for-profit medical research organization designed to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease.
• 
  Peter Binfield is the publisher of the online journal PLoS ONE, one of the journal offerings of the Public Library of Science, and is a respected innovator and analyst in the fields of online science, scholarly publishing (both Open Access and mainstream/commercial), and scientific communication.
• 
  Peter Murray-Rust is an accomplished chemist, a faculty member of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, a leader in the Open Data movement, a founding member of the Blue Obelisk organization.

The symposium will be held on the Microsoft campus (Building 99) in Redmond, Washington. Breakfast pastries, coffee breaks, lunch and an evening reception will be provided thanks to the generous support of Microsoft. 

Registration and more details can be found at:

http://scs.eventbrite.com/

and

http://sciencecommons.org/