From 3 to 5 July a scientific conference entitled "Methodology of Statistical Research" was held in Warsaw, Poland.

The first edition of the conference gathered about 250 people from several countries.

The conference was attended by two outstanding statisticians, Prof. Graham Kalton from the USA (Westat) and Prof. Danny Pfeffermann from Israel.

Professor Graham Kalton is the world's leading statistician and has made a great contribution to the methodology of survey research. He is a member of the editorial boards of magazines, including "Statistics in Transition", published by the Polish Statistical Association and Statistics Poland. He is also vice-director of Westat, an American institution conducting statistical surveys, providing services for government agencies as well as businesses, foundations and local governments.

Prof. Danny Pfeffermann is a professor of statistics at the University of Southampton in Great Britain and a retired professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Currently, he is also the head of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).

During the conference the President of the Statistics Poland announced some important information on Polish official statistics.

First of all, he announced the 5 "O" Manifesto for Openness and Transparency in Public Statistics. 5 "O" is nothing else but open data, open access, open algorithms, open source and open knowledge.

Another novelty is the Statistics Poland’s Scientific Portal - a separate website of Statistics Poland dedicated to scientific journals and monographs, publisher or co-publisher of which is the Office. The portal presents basic information about three journals and two series of peer-reviewed scientific monographs. All titles have separate websites fully adapted to the standards and requirements of the reference index databases and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), thanks to which they are recognisable and present in international circulation. The portal is available at: https://research.stat.gov.pl/

The portal website also offers the latest product of our institution. The 'BDL' package, prepared by Statistics Poland, is an interface to Local Data Bank (Bank Danych Lokalnych - BDL) API with set of useful tools like quick plotting and generating maps using data from data bank. Information about how to use this tool is included in R help documentation.

The Statistics Poland’s portal on European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS) has also been launched. The portal will ultimately be a platform for communication, promotion of the program and exchange of information on interesting events related to EMOS. It is an educational programme implemented under the patronage of Eurostat. EMOS is an additional programme path for master's studies, mainly in economics, covering widely understood statistical issues. Link to the portal: https://emos.stat.gov.pl/en/

Statistics Poland has also made available a new portal called dekompozycje.stat.gov.pl [currently only in Polish]. Thanks to decomposition, users can design and monitor regional development strategies and analyse growth and differences in the level of economic development of macro-regions and voivodships. The portal presents methods and results of decomposition, which aim to identify regional differences in the level of economic development divided into components, which are the subject of intervention of socio-economic policy in various areas (i.e. productivity, labour market, population policy), sectors of economic activity, age categories and groups of education of the population and the scope and time horizon (i.e. structural changes, improvement of resource use).

The next two days of the conference were filled with interesting sessions (scientific, plenary and poster), during which various issues concerning public statistics in Poland and other countries were discussed. Dynamic talks during the session were eagerly continued in the corridors, during networking breaks. In particular, two speeches by professors Kalton and Pfefferman provided an impulse for the exchange of opinions and experiences.

In the summary of the conference, the President of Statistics Poland stressed the value of so many important condensed speeches over three intensive days. He also expressed the hope that the conference Statistical Research Methodology 2019 will be recognised as a major contribution to the development of innovativeness of Polish statistics. Thanking the guests for their numerous arrivals, he also invited all those gathered for the second edition of this year's event.