User Forum & Final Event
The “User Forum & Final Event” of the EU-funded Sci-GaIA project will be held on March, 23-24, 2017 at the CSIR International Convention Centre (CICC), Pretoria, South Africa. The event will be hosted by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a member of the Sci-GaIA consortium.
Goal and organisation
The Sci-GaIA “User Forum & Final Event” is organised in two consecutive days. The first day will be devoted to a scientific workshop especially targeting the users and early adopters of the Sci-GaIA Open Science Platform while the second day will aim at presenting the final outcomes of the Sci-GaIA project and discussing the present and the future of e-Infrastructure(1) and Open Science(2) in Africa. Speakers of the first day will be selected through a peer review process while those of the second day will be invited.
Topics
The topics of the Sci-GaIA “User Forum & Final Event” include, but are not limited to:
- E-Science(3) (use cases and applications);
- Open Science (use cases and applications);
- Open Access (services and/or best practices);
- Open Data (services and/or best practices);
- Open Education and Open Educational Resources (services and/or best practices);
- E-Infrastructure and its services (Education & Research Networks, Certification Authorities, Identity Federations, Digital Repositories, Science Gateways(4), etc.);
- Grid and Cloud Computing based services and applications;
- High Throughput and High Performance Computing based services and applications;
- Cases studies of the new and emerging Communities of Practice supported by the Sci-GaIA project(5).
Instructions to authors
Scientists, researchers and educators are invited to submit papers related to at least one of the topics listed above to be presented at first in the User Forum.. All papers should be written in English using either this MS Word template or this LaTeX template and their length should be comprised between 4 and 8 pages. During the submission phase, authors should also include a separate and self-consistent abstract containing no more than 500 characters (including spaces). Authors of accepted papers are expected to also attend the Final Event on the second day.
Accepted papers will be published as Open Access articles with unique Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Additionally, authors of selected accepted papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue of a scientific journal.
Important dates
- Paper submission deadline to the User Forum: February, 12, 2017
- Acceptance/rejection notification: February, 20, 2017
- Camera ready papers: March, 6, 2017
- Registration deadline: March, 20, 2017
Participation grants
The participation to the Sci-GaIA “User Forum and Final Event” is free of charge but interested people are invited to register at their earliest convenience to let the local organisers better define the logistics of the event. Some participation grants, which will cover travel and accommodation, will be made available. Grantees will be selected by the Organisation and the Programme Committees among the registrants and they will be notified in due time before the start of the event.
References
(1) e-Infrastructure refers to a “combination and interworking of digitally-based technology (hardware and software), resources (data, services, digital libraries), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organisational structures needed to support modern, internationally leading collaborative research be in the arts and humanities or the sciences”. [ref.]
(2) “Open science is a means and not an end in itself and it is much more than just open access to publications or data; it includes many aspects and stages of research processes thus enabling full reproducibility and re-usability of scientific results.” [ref.]
(3) The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom’s Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as“the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modelling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications”. [ref.]
(4) A Science Gateway (also known as Virtual Research Environment or Virtual Laboratory) is a “community-development set of tools, applications, and data that is integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is further customized to meet the needs of a specific community“. [TeraGrid/XSEDE]
