So, I would like to start by saying thank you, thank you very much indeed to all of you who have come and who have spoke, but a conference is not just about the two days

that we have enjoyed in Stirling. This conference is a year in the making and there's one person who works for the conference, Charlotte. I don't think Charlotte's in the room at all, but Charlotte from Bioscientifica is

the person who takes all the heat for our organisation, she takes the responsibility for making sure everything is booked, the food turns up and so on. Charlotte and Charlie from Bioscientifica work with extraordinary efficiency to make sure that this conference happens and I'd like to thank them very much indeed. I'd also like to thank Ian and Karen at the back there who have been running the cameras

and sorting out the problems with the microphones. We heard earlier today from one of our presenters that he's not a theatre director, I am a theatre director. I spent two weeks this summer being showered with ants and other insects as I was doing

the tech for a two week production of The Three Musketeers. I know how it feels to be the person there who's got the power on the sliders there, so thank you very much indeed. And finally I'd like to thank the people who do the organising, the committee members.

Every fortnight we turn up and we talk through what we want to do and we're all volunteers and it's a moving group. We are extremely open. We want new people to join the organising committee, we want people to volunteer.

It is a fortnightly commitment to be online and to join us, to listen, to have some conversations about what it is that we want to talk about at the AM conferences. We are looking for volunteers to join us, we are always looking for volunteers.

So I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was going to be summing up this conference yet again and she sent me this cartoon. But if we didn't measure things we wouldn't know how good we were at measuring the things that we're measuring, which defines quite nicely the gap that we occasionally find ourselves

sitting into in the bibliometrics community, that we count, we measure, we analyse the data that is available to us. But this year the theme of 6 AM was bridging worlds and this is another really good reason to volunteer because you get to set this theme, you know, if you volunteer imagine

the power, can you feel that power surging through your veins? Bridging worlds. And over the course of the two days we've heard various presentations about what it is to be building bridges and to be joining altmetrics up to the wider world.

I think we've heard a great deal about engagement and this has been really exciting for me and a couple of others who have been involved in the altmetrics conference for six years now that we've always thought that one of the things that we could be doing with altmetrics

is to gauge the efficiency at which the research community is engaging with, mobilising knowledge, supporting the transition and on a personal level I consider that given the changing in the political world where we're seeing more interrogation, more scepticism of research,

that ability to make sure that the ideas that are coming out of academia are being translated into messages that can be understood and appreciated and valued by members of the wider community is all the more important. We've had a number of side conversations outside of the hall about some of this rise

of scepticism, this rise of doubt in the research community and I think that it falls to us as people in academia to be very aware of what we're doing, to make sure that we're reaching out, engaging and communicating, building bridges between worlds.

Building bridges between different parts of the worlds as well, not just taking a northern or a western perspective on it and again it's been a great personal privilege for me to have chaired this afternoon's panel. We have wanted to do a panel with people like Taney and Sarah and Juan

on the emerging research communities and parts of the world. So to be able to put together that panel and to hear very interesting, very different use cases from other parts of the world was enormously personally satisfying.

Again, one of the great things about volunteering is that you get to shape some of these sessions, you get to fulfil what you see as being an important part. And different parts of academia, different parts of the academic institution. And again I think it's been really interesting to hear more about that translation,

translating the messages from different parts of the academic community and really beginning to engage in some of the challenging messages around metrics and engagement and communication. I mean for me a lot of this is about that translation.

I spoke this morning about the stages of research and where we have peer research, hacking away at the cold face if you like. We have people who are engaged in translating research into practice, into clinical practice. We have people who are engaged in different sub-areas of research.

And for me one of the things that has been quite challenging is to take the areas of psychometrics and bibliometrics which are quite niche and quite specialised and to communicate our values, to translate those to the wider population because increasingly everybody is being affected by metrics, research evaluation, different approaches.

And we can't just assume as people who are experts in the field that everyone else is also an expert in the field. We need to be able to communicate those values, to reach out, to engage, to listen to people's objections, to listen to your personas and to reflect on how we communicate

those values and how we show that we are listening to them as well. We need to build trust I think because otherwise people will worry that data is being imposed on them and that they are other people's data and other people's metrics. We don't really want to fall into that trap. There is more emerging sources, there is more imagination, there are more people engaging.

And again I often reflect on my career in scientific communications and think well a lot of the movement, a lot of the emotions if you like associated with the open access movement, the open research movement can be seen as having their genesis in the Napster

type worlds of sharing, the early sort of web technologies where people were really understanding the power of connecting with each other and exchanging assets and exchanging ideas. And Napster was one of those things that affected a generation, at the time they were perhaps 20. We are now talking about the Napster generation is now in their 40s, they are senior academics

and those values are being found in the open research community and the way that people are coming together to exchange and the way that they value the exchange of information and data and research. And when I think about this I look then at the people who are in their 20s now, what

are they doing, what social platforms are they using, how are they choosing to curate their profiles, how they choose to curate the message that they use, the production values if you like of the individual person and their profile management. And I think to myself well this is kind of interesting because clearly as we go forward,

as academics go forward those people in 20 years time will be senior professors, they will be choosing to determine how they appear to the audience, they will be looking how do I judge my, how do I curate my profile, how do I manage my profile. So I think that we are going to see another 20 years of change and that's going to

be an interesting thing because as far as I am aware there will be another 20 years after that. These are interesting times that we live in and they are also quite challenging times as well because we think, in the committee we think oh metrics, it's been around for 10 years now or something like that, aren't we getting terribly mature,

isn't this the thing that is now accepted. We as a community understand the value, other people don't necessarily understand the value and we also have to be very open to listening to how podcasts are being used, how people are choosing to communicate their values,

how do we integrate those new approaches, how do we build bridges with those emerging communities. So the first conversation of the next time the organising committee will meet, there will only be one topic the next time we meet and that will be do we another altmetrics conference. So I don't have an answer to this, I think it's best

to go into these things asking ourselves this question. I would like, we would like, the organising committee, actually who is the organising committee, who are these mysterious people behind the scenes, we have got Kat here, perhaps you could wave, organising

committee, we have got David from Kudos, Hunt from Elsevier, who else is here, we have got Joe and me, who else is here, Taney, so pretty much every table has somebody from the organising committee. We, those of us, we would like to hear from you about

what you would like to hear discussed, do we need to have another conference this time next year, do we want to take a gap free year, do we need to refocus, do we need to rethink, do we need to build new bridges with other communities, do we have any thoughts,

should there be a 7am, I am happy to have silence as being a deep consideration, but it would be great if someone had something to say on the subject. Joe you have opinions about it, okay, definitely. Thank you. So what I had noticed, so I have been organising

the Altmetrics workshop since we moved it to the Altmetrics conference, I haven't been actually, this is only my second am conference after 2am, so what I did notice

was that the talks are maturing, that they are however moving away from the very specific Altmetrics scenario and are very similar to what we now find at larger bibliometrics conferences like the ISSI and the STI conference, so I see that we, I think Isabella told

me yesterday that each and every day of the ISSI in Rome this year had an Altmetrics panel or a track, so I think that a lot of people would actually benefit from that community would benefit to hear a couple of the publications or talks that we have seen and it's a much

bigger community, while what I noticed comparing this year to 2am, we are a much smaller group, so from that perspective I would definitely think about maybe joining or yeah coming

together. So I think one of the issues with that is that we have wanted to be more closer to the practitioner, the user rather than the research community, I think that's one of the tensions between this conference and another one, I mean you are quite right

about the size of this, what did we have in London last year, it was about 140 last year, so much bigger last year, okay a little bit bigger, I am told, good, thank you Kat.

And I think that's an interesting perspective and potential location, obviously we have like national events like the UK List Bibliometrics, LIS Bibliometrics, that probably gets about 100 odd people just from the UK, those are practitioners rather than researchers,

people who are exchanging ideas about how we use bibliometrics and scientometrics. So anyway, just a suggestion that potentially a slot or a section of the conference next time where we actually host research, the people we have been talking about, stakeholder

groups from outside academia, members of the general public who have engaged with public engagement events, et cetera, and hear their perspective on what their experience of research is via all these things that we have been talking about, I am coming

obviously from the impact sort of public engagement side of things. Yeah, that's a really interesting one, I don't think we have ever had that conversation before, have we? I am involved with an organisation, Pint of Science who do those kinds of engagement

activities, it would be very interesting actually to make that, try and make that build that bridge. Any other observations about the conference, the organising committee?

Well, if we have, sorry. Is my mic working? It is. Okay. I think one of the things that we have on our side now is a well established field is we are starting to see the secondary effects and there has been lots of discussion about kind of the long tail of how influence and

whatever kind of goes out to the community and comes back as traction. I found the panel with Africa, South America, that was fantastic, you know, and I think now that the kind of practices we have been talking about from, let's face it, kind of the European-American

perspective, those are starting to really be felt around the world and, you know, the influence of those things is in an entirely different context and the results that come out are entirely different because of that. I think this might be a good venue for kind

of focusing the discussion about top metrics in a new direction, from a new perspective, kind of start with those conversations rather than kind of saying, okay, now how does all this affect these other people, right? Broaden up and, yeah, so this event was

very much bridging worlds, you know, really trying to extend and I think we did that in quite a, let's face it, quite delineated way in that panel. I think, to be honest, if we expand that out, then I think we have very good motivation maybe for another conference with a broader perspective. Yeah, I think a little bit of the dilemma,

at least I see that as a little dilemma, is size versus quality, right? I think we see 6 a.m. we are a relatively small group, but the quality is very high, right? If you compare it to, I've been like you at many of the a.m. conferences, I think the variety

we see now, the development and the quality is very high. Do we want to go for size and do we then accept a little bit of loss of quality or should we stay with small size, high quality? That's a bit of the dilemma. Obviously, it's also about money in the end.

Can we finance things properly, et cetera, et cetera. Any people in the audience just want to say something about that? Yeah? So this is my first a.m. meeting and it worked out really well because I was planning to go to Force 19 next week, so the timing

and the place and everything worked out perfectly. It's been a really wonderful meeting. I love these groups. I was at the Transforming Research Conference a few weeks back in D.C. You were in my face then. It was a similar venue where we have this very diverse group

of people that come together and we all rely on one another in a certain way, but we don't have the opportunity to sit and talk and meet with one another very often. I really appreciate the small. I have to go to too many big conferences and you get lost in it. I also really appreciate being in one place and I don't have to choose.

I think I had to choose once. We did for the breakout once. I just like that opportunity. I think the bigger conferences are becoming impossible for administrations, at least from

a library perspective, to send many people. They're just so expensive nowadays and traveling places. I know here I am from Massachusetts to here, but it was actually cheaper than going to Seattle to the Medical Library Association. I just think that it's a great opportunity.

For people who work in areas that just sort of cross all these different boundaries, it's just a nice thing. I'm gay. Thanks to all of you for organizing. It was a really great meeting. Thank you. That's a really lovely comment.

We do work really hard with transforming research to keep it at that size because we want to provoke conversation, supporting communication. Well, thank you very much. I think that probably nicely wraps us up. We really, really appreciate your kind words there. Thank you very much for having made the journey to Sterling. Thank you.