Berlin 8 Conference 2010

30.12.2010

Berlin 8 Conference 2010

From October 25-27, I represented FAO at the Berlin 8 conference on open access publishing,

More than 300 institutions have now signed the Berlin declaration. The next conference will take place in the United States to underline the truly international character.

I focused in my presentation on the importance of openAccess for Agricultural Research for Development

Berlin8 keizer 2010-10-25

View more presentations from Keizer.

Some Highlights:

- The first keynote speaker Pan Jiaofeng from CAS expressed the accademy's commitment to push open Access publishing in China. The Chinese Academy of Science has more than 100 directly affiliates research institutions with 55,000 employees. At the moment CAS has 63 institutes with repositories, 40 of them are open to the public. They represent overall 85500 records with 60% links to fulltext.

- Dr. Mehlhorn, the keynote speaker from MPG emphasized that the idea of open access to scientific material is already present in the institution of national libraries. The MPG is committed to open access publishing, but would never force their scientists in open access publishing. To get scientists to accept open access publishing boundaries needs to be set in the appropriate way:

getting journals open access
improving open access journals
second publishing of articles from non oa Journals in appropriate repositories

MPG is investing in both. The new OA journal "Living Reviews in Relativity" has already an impact factor of 10.6. With PubMan Max Planck Digital Library is putting an Infrastructure in place for the easy maintanance of institutional repositories.

- It seems that openAccess journals are gaining Momentum. PLOS will make in 2010 first time profit. Within 2020 openAccess Journals will have 25% of the market. The biggest open access publisher is now Springer after the takeover of BioMedCentral. Both PLOS and Springer are waiving the payment of the publishing fee (about 2000 USD) for low income countries. In BioMedCentral this is automatic. BioMedCentral has also developed a mechanism that transfers automatically the article plus metadata into the institutional repository if this is agreed. This is mediated by the SWORD protocol, which has been developed in cooperation with MIT.

- In Germany it is particularly complicated to mandate open access. This is not only true for MPG, but also for universities (example was given from Goettingen) as the original copy right of the scientific article is with the scientist. Germany has also very particular copyright laws, which allow to digitize conten from journals for teaching and research purposes. This law is contested by the publishers, but there is no sign that the law will be changed. At the contrary open Access is expressively on the agenda of copyright reform in Germany.

- MPDL held a specific seminar on PubMan/EScieDoc. (www.esciedoc.org). eScieDoc is a infrastructure for virtual research environments to manage linguistic data, laboratory data and a publication infrastructure.

It does not deliver only storage but a working environment. The platform is open source and integrates easily with other open source CMS. With CONE it has a strong internal name/entity service, which by default uses DDC, but can use any vocabulary. The system stores URIs and easily outputs RDF for Linkend Open Data.

It made a certain effect on the participants that one of the MPD developers/presenters was Chinese.