Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group December 2017 Newsletter (No. 37) Welcome to the December VMSG newsletter! Voices in Volcanology By Janine Krippner Welcome to the last quarterly VMSG newsletter of 2017. After a busy year, the VMSG annual conference is Utilizing Facebook for outreach Social media has only a few mince pies away and will welcome the become a powerful means of getting information, quickly. community to Leeds in early January. In this issue we have When the right information is not there, it is simply made more student bursary awards, details of a new open up and it spreads like wildfire. This is made worse by access geoscience research platform, outreach initiatives scaremongering media, as I have seen throughout the and the announcement of changes to the VMSG Agung crisis in Bali. A growing number of scientists are on committee. Twitter, but most of us only use Facebook for personal use. We have a communication gap in this international 2018 VMSG Annual Conference in Leeds online community, which is a place where people go to Leeds Event Website discuss and share information. Through the Agung crisis, Facebook groups have formed where people make their Dates: 3-5th January own interpretations using the data and predictions are Location: Leeds City Museum made. These have become toxic environments. The public Website: https://vmsg2018.leeds.ac.uk/ page ‘Voices of Volcanology’ will be a reliable source of Program: Four broad multi-disciplinary themes include 1. information from the volcanology community. A space for Volcanic Arcs (Keynote: Dr Hugh Tuffen); 2. Rifts, Islands us to share correct and factual information, promote and Intraplate Volcanism (Keynote: Dr William Hutchison); official information sources (and other official social media 3. Beyond the Vent; 4. Explosive ideas. groups), address misinformation, assist observatories by sharing their reports, share our research, and interact with the public Facebook community to help build trust in our field. This is also a place for all of us to interact and network. This is not a place for people to make their own volcano forecasts or undermine anyone in any way. It is a place where all of us in the broader volcanology community can show a united front and work together. All volcano professionals are welcome, including petrology, geology, geochemistry, geophysics, social science, I have kept the details here brief as the event website archaeology, emergency management, hazards, energy & (see above link) is very well presented and comprehensive, mineral resources, etc. I invite you to join the community so please follow the link to find out more details on even if you don’t want to post publicly. I am also open to additional features such as workshops, accommodation comments and suggestions, and I am happy to share and travel etc. The event looks set to be a great meeting information for you if you are not comfortable (Dr Janine as always, see you all in Leeds! Krippner: [email protected]). www.vmsg.org.uk 1 VMSG Newsletter (37): December 2017 EarthArXiv pre-print server more in the pipeline. Major funders (e.g. German Science By Chris Jackson and Craig Magee Foundation (DFG), Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, Cancer Research) now encourage preprint submission in support of grant applications; preprints may thus inform grant review process and academic advancement at all levels of experience. In fact, some major US-based academic institutions actively encourage job applicants to include preprints in support of their applications. Major publishers, such as Nature, also actively encourage the use of preprints to help enhance the quality of research they receive and may ultimately A ‘preprint’ is a version of a scholarly paper that publish, and AGU have recently announced their intention precedes publication in a peer-reviewed journal; a to launch their own Wiley-supported preprint server, ‘preprint server’, such as the community-led, volunteer- ESSOAr. We should also add that EarthArXiv, like several ran ‘EarthArXiv’ (www.eartharxiv.org), is an online other preprint servers, also hosts and can thus act as a platform purpose-built to host preprints. A preprint may repository for ‘postprints’ (i.e. published articles), helping represent the same manuscript eventually submitted to a facilitate (Green) OA and meeting the needs of the many peer-reviewed journal, although other content, which researchers who lack an institutional and/or national may currently be difficult to publish (e.g. datasets, method scholarly publications repository. papers), can also be uploaded and, if appropriate, A group of international volunteers, organised by the explicitly linked to the associated manuscript. In this way, Earth Science Information Partners preprints provide access to important scholarly content (http://www.esipfed.org/), recently built EarthArXiv a that would otherwise be lost. community-led preprint service for the Earth Sciences, Preprints are an effort to address several aspects of the which is built on infrastructure provided by the non-profit traditional publication system that may be considered, Center for Open Science’s (https://cos.io/) ‘Open Science given the technological benefits of the internet, somewhat Framework’. Since launching in October, EarthArXiv has antiquated. For example, they can speed up received >150 submissions in just 6 weeks, with material dissemination, utilisation, and citation of scholarly spanning a range of Earth Science disciplines, some of outputs, and can also help build your network and may which is relevant to the VMSG community (e.g. igneous facilitate establishment of new collaborations; this may be geology, thermochronology, etc). There have been almost particularly beneficial for ECRs and/or researchers moving 3000 visitors to the site, so we strongly encourage you to into new areas. Furthermore, because they are visit and personally assess the quality of material available timestamped and receive a DataCite-minted DOI, for consumption. We have been featured in Nature preprints provide an undeniable record of priority and (http://www.nature.com/news/giant-pandas-gender- ‘ownership’, which all but eliminates the chance of being lawsuit-and-more-disaster-havoc-1.22664) and Science “scooped”. Preprints also allow for no-cost publishing, are http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/dueling- Open Access (OA) on submission, and are indexed by preprint-servers-coming-geosciences), and on several Google Scholar and discoverable by web-tools such as science podcasts Unpaywall. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYccGyVh4g). In the new year we will visit SpringerNature and PLOSone to Despite being new to many if not most Earth Scientists, discuss future developments in the area of preprints, and preprints have been in use for >20 years. For example, the we will host a ‘Townhall’ meeting, alongside AGU, at the original, Cornell-ran preprint server, ArXiv, which covers, EGU General Assembly in Vienna. If you have any amongst other things, Physics, Mathematics, and questions, please do not hesitate to contact either Chris Computer Science, hosts >1.3 million preprints. Jackson ([email protected]) or Tom Narock Furthermore, several new preprint servers (e.g. BioRxiv, ([email protected]), two of the co-founders of PsyArXiv, Paleorxiv) have recently been launched in many EarthArXiv. Some additional information and ‘FAQs’ are branches of the physical and social sciences, with many available here: http://bit.ly/2BqagsH. We welcome www.vmsg.org.uk 2 VMSG Newsletter (37): December 2017 feedback and look forward to discussions on how we can complete a PhD at Bristol, looking at distal deposits from improve this service! large explosive eruptions, uncertainties in their analysis, and the volcanic record. During my PhD, I became Craig will also be at VMSG in Leeds, so you can also interested in the development, application and catch him there to discuss. uncertainties associated with of numerical modelling VMSG Committee changes techniques, particularly applied to explosive eruptions. On completion of my PhD, I moved to INGV, Pisa as part of the At the upcoming January meeting there will be a Marie Curie ITN NEMOH, where I focused on these issues number of changes to the VMSG committee. Mike in relation to coignimbrite plume formation and ash Widdowson who has chaired the committee for the last dispersion. I currently work at the British Geological three years, following many years of invaluable Survey, where my research uses a combination of contributions to the committee as both ordinary member fieldwork and deposit analysis with numerical techniques and secretary, will step down and pass the baton on to to understand eruption dynamics and hazard Sally Gibson. Congratulations Mike on exemplary steering assessments, combining information from the geological of the VMSG and a thank you on behalf of all of us for the record with numerical techniques across a range of selfless time and efforts you have devoted to VMSG and a volcanic environments. big welcome to Sally! Working at both universities and governmental Kate Dobson, Sebastian Watt and Janine Kavanagh institutions has given me a unique perspective into wide will also rotate off the VMSG committee and so a huge range of scientific techniques, and the expectations from thankyou on behalf of the committee and the community different institutions. It is upon these experiences that I for all your hard work and invaluable input over the past base my collaborations, work and outreach