Even small societies can have long arms. Our global ornithology community brings together researchers from every continent.
As a ‘union’ of ornithologists, our togetherness comes in different forms, but there are several key components that brings us together as the BOU.
Face-to-face
Conferences are a key component of the BOU’s ‘better together’. We run up to two events a year, with autumn one-day meetings complementing our annual residential spring conferences.
If you haven’t been to a recent BOU conference, then you really are missing out. Feedback tells us that we are doing things right, event after event. Our themed events contrast to the wider more general ornithology events run by others. Within each theme we deliver on speakers, poster presentations, and a great age range with increasing number of young researchers not just attending, but presenting their work from MSc students to post-docs.
What makes a BOU conference?
Do what’s good for you; get yourself to the BOU Annual Conference
Birds in time and space: avian tracking and remote sensing
#BOU2017: International and inspiring
Online
Social media is key to our online community. These platforms cross all boundaries allowing people to find, share, exchange and collaborate.
Online togetherness also brings with it many benefits, including contributing to the altmetrics of your research articles. With the advent of social media and increased online coverage of science, altmetrics have come to the fore. This new metric measures the online attention of research articles, with each article building a score based on the coverage received from news media, social media and other online sources.
What is Altmetric?
Let the BOU work for YOU . . on social media
Let the BOU work for YOU . . altmetrics
How social are ornithologists?
Society publishing
Another key component that helps us build our community is our journal, IBIS – the international journal of avian science.
Society journals don’t just publish cutting edge science, but also contribute to community. Over 10,000 researchers across the globe have contributed papers or reviewed a paper for us in recent years. Our research community understands that we’re not a fat cat publisher, but a small society and the modest return we receive from IBIS is ploughed back in to our community supporting everything we do, including those conferences and social media activities, plus grants and awards and much more.
What does it take to run the #1 ornithology journal?
IBIS – the international journal of avian science
Highlights from the latest issue of IBIS
And there’s more . . .
In recent weeks we’ve been posting a series of blog posts detailing more about what we do and why we do it. See the links above and below.
You can also learn more about some members of our community, about why they are BOU members and why and how they help us deliver our many activities.
More about the BOU
The BOU’s global ornithology community
The BOU – a personal perspective from the US
Listing into the future – the work of the BOU’s Records Committee
Recent BOU conferences
Developing early-career researchers
Meet some of our members and those who help run the BOU
Social media is relevant to your research
Social media – bringing it all together
Blog with #theBOUblog
If you want to write about your research in #theBOUblog, then please see here.
