Phaidracon 2020 - The Vienna Sessions

"The production of knowledge serves mankind and increases prosperity. Free and open dissemination of knowledge within the scientific community and beyond facilitates exchange, collaboration and the application of research results. There should be no technical, financial or legal obstacles delaying or preventing the accessibility of research findings. All research results should be accessible to people that are diverse in physical, economic and other conditions. Access should be ensured in the long-term."

We live in a post-truth world. In these febrile times, ' dark money' is used to fund think tanks and political organisations to push political goals. This funding is deliberately opaque, giving anonymity to those who wish to influence decision making and discourse. Is there a danger that this mix of obfuscation and influence may start to result in 'dark academia'. Are we already seeing politicians, pundits and businesses citing studies based on inaccessible research that cannot be properly scrutinised? What is the role of data in all of this?

Phaidra is a vital tool to ensure the data that underpins many of the decisions that affect everyone is accessible, citable and searchable. It aims to level the playing field for data access using open source tooling. It ensures that academic data is accessible and remains permanently available for both long-term reuse and new analysis, and for reproducibility of existing research. Phaidra uses open source, encourages open standards and provides detailed open meta-data to remove commercial and accessibility barriers to data. In doing so, Phaidra hopes to maintain the openness and accountability of academic discourse, at the same time as raising the value of data through maximising its reuse.

Phaidracon brings together practitioners, experts and stakeholders from every corner of the academic world. For three days, we will explore the need for a robust, accessible and open source data storage system, and offer a space for practitioners to discuss the real-world implementation of Phaidra. 

The first round table, 'The Danger of Post-Truth Academia' will explore the social impact of hidden academia, and the dangers it can pose to the public discourse of vital subjects. Our second roundtable, 'The role of data in accessibility'  will examine  what accessibility means in the context of academic data; is it purely a case of economic exclusion, or are their further bias and privilege that needs to be understood to ensure that the many, not the few, can access academic data?

Finally, the conference will focus on our 'Data management in Practice' workshop. This is a practice-led discussion, with Phaidra partners presenting projects and work. It will allow practical exploration of the challenges of making data accessible and will allow peers to share hard-won experience and knowledge in a collaborative and productive environment.

We look forward to seeing you at Phaidracon, The thought-provoking and productive debate has been deliberately spread out in short sessions over several days (to avoid virtual-conference-fatigue) And while we would love to  welcome you all to Vienna, we hope that the sharing of knowledge, ideas and best practice can continue as much as possible online.