By Leah Hinds, Executive Director, Charleston Hub

The 52nd annual LIBER conference is being held July 5 – 7 in Budapest, Hungary, held at the Central European University campus. The conference theme is “Open and Trusted: Reassessing Research Library Values,” and just shy of 500 total participants have joined together to attend.

The opening ceremony began with a warm welcome from LIBER President Julien Roche, Director of the Libraries at the University of Lille. There were also welcomes from Istvan Monok, Director General of the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Tamas Freund, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Anna Smit, the Secretary-General of LIBER, announced the upcoming votes for re-appointment of board members that will be held in tomorrow’s member meeting. And Giannis Tsakonas, LIBER Vice President, gave updates from the program committee: they received 135 submissions (99 oral presentations, 16 poster presentations, 7 panel presentations, and 13 workshops) and accepted 60 (36 oral presentations, 11 posters, 2 panels, and 11 workshops).

Following an introduction by Lars Burman of Uppsala University Library, Sweden, was the opening keynote presentation from Sándor Soós, Head of the Department for Science Policy and Scientometrics at the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Soós’ presentation was titled “The complex interactions between Open Science and the world of research metrics galore.” His aim was to provide a critical overview of the different levels of measurements of the benefits of open science. He covered this in three parts:

1) The measurement of open science (prevalence and benefits) – The Open Science Citation Advantage should show that publications which are open access are cited more often and have a higher impact, but the results of systematic reviews are inconclusive.

2) The measurements powered through Open Science – Altmetrics are designed to measure the social impact of research, but the construct actually measures scientific quality and impact.

3) The measurements provided by Open Science (open data and infrastructures) – A comparison of citations in Web of Science and CrossRef showed that the open citations network is “not yet ready to replace WoS.” The problem shown here is the sampling of citations, but an even more fundamental problem is the lack of standardization of assessment.

Summary and a Proposal for moving forward:

Soós said his presentation may seem too critical, but since solutions can’t be provided immediately he put forth a proposal he called “scientific impact reloaded, a different pathway to social impact.”

The evening concluded with an amazing conference dinner, held at the Pesti Vigado, a historical building of Budapest that opened in 1865. It was previously used as a concert hall, with Ferenc Liszt giving concerts here as well. It featured a wine tasting dinner with 5 varieties of Hungarian wine paired with delicious food. There were presentations of each type of wine from award-winning winemaker Bardos Sarolta of Tokaj Nobilis winery, as well as a traditional music and dancing group.