CIRSS Seminar: Naomi Penfield (eLife)

Naomi Penfold, eLife Chief Innovation Officer, will give the talk "Accelerating discovery at eLife with open-source technology."

Backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust, eLife aims to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. The online-only open-access eLife journal for outstanding advances in life sciences and biomedical research was just the first step in this mission. Now, we also actively champion the development of open-source tools, technologies and processes aimed at improving the discovery, sharing, consumption and evaluation of scientific research.

Naomi Penfold will discuss how eLife is working to accelerate discovery, increase transparency and improve incentives in the life sciences through the use and development of cutting-edge technologies. From preprints to reproducible analyses to artificial intelligence, she will present challenges and opportunities for the next innovators. We invite the community to contribute feedback and ideas for future innovations, and we welcome the opportunity to form new collaborations with the best emerging talent at the interface of research and technology.

In addition to the topics highlighted in the abstract above, she will discuss publishing perspectives on related research issues, such as open source, reproducibility, attribution and transparency.  

Penfold joined eLife in February 2016 after completing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Her research experience motivated her to help with efforts to improve the research workflow and researcher evaluation. In her role as Innovation Officer, Naomi acts as an innovation scout amongst the wider research and technology community, with the mission to discover and champion new tools and technologies that make the research process more rapid, open and collaborative.