This Tuesday marked the first ever Altmetric and figshare publisher product day. Invited delegates from across the industry came together in Camden to hear from our guest speakers, and to participate in product workshops to help shape future development.

Up first were Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare, and Euan, from Altmetric, to give an update on what each company had been working on, and what we were hoping to get from the day.

They were followed by David de Roure of the ESRC, who gave an interesting insight into how the reporting of research is evolving beyond the standard PDF and into the open distribution of results, data, and alternative outputs. David’s talk included some fascinating anecdotes and prompted us all to give thought to where our own tools and services were leading.

Natasha Martineau, Head of Research Communications at Imperial College London took to the stage next. Natasha gave a great overview of all of the work that the Communications and Public Affairs Division at Imperial does to raise the profile and impact of its research – from the online news site for news and longer form pieces about research, to working with journalists, and running public engagement events. She also talked about how they evaluate this work; how they work with researchers to report of the results of their efforts, and how communications and public engagement can increase the impact of research. Natasha’s talk raised a lot of interesting talking points about how publishers can work better with institutions to ensure effective coverage, and how Imperial academics had responded to the new initiatives.

We also asked along innovators Sparrho and Writelatex, who each presented a quick overview of their platforms and further demonstrated how disruptive technologies can be effective in supporting and helping to evolve established processes.

Insight into how publishers are making our current tools work for them came from Julie Sutton at Taylor and Francis, who gave a great run through of their figshare implementation (including some very clever looking data!), and there were some suggestions from Euan on how publishers could make best use of the Altmetric data across marketing, editorial, and sales departments, as well as ensuring website users are understanding the context of the article level metrics.

The afternoon was dedicated to product sessions, with attendees given the opportunity to discuss 2 products of their choice in a group format.

Run by the Altmetric and figshare teams, these sessions gave us a chance to ask some key questions of our audience and get valuable feedback, which we now hope to align with when establishing future development priorities.

It was a really interesting day – having never run one before we weren’t quite sure what to expect, and were delighted that everyone who attended was so willing to give us their time and share their opinions. We hope to run more in the future so do drop us a line if this sounds like your kind of thing – we are always looking for feedback on how we can make our tools work better for all of our users.