The conference theme – "Sharing strategies for Research Improvement" – for us represents an ambition to move beyond the articulation and description of problems, to instead provide greater focus on possible solutions; their development, testing, evaluation and dissemination. We will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement from the perspective of Ethics Committees and Regulators, Publishers, Institutions and Researchers, and Funders; and will have themes running through the conference on new methods for measuring and testing interventions. By involving communities beyond biomedical research we hope to broaden the discussion, that we can learn from each others‘ experience.