Dear all,

After a long break where I did not bother the AIMS consultative group with e-mails, I would like to request your feedback and support again :-) if possible. In this case with a specific proposal to take place within the Open Access Week 2012.

The Open Access Week is a global event, now in its 6th year, promoting Open Access. This year will take place from October 22nd to 26th. Essentially the proposal is to organize a Webinar during the Open Access Week to showcase ongoing initiatives to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible. The event would be composed by different online presentations covering the experiences related to Open Access in the AIMS community.

Discussing the idea in house we got a preliminary list of topics/initiatives that would be interesting to cover during the event:

General topics

1. Status of the Art of Open Access. I know personally Jean-Claude Guedon who in my opinion could be the best person, he already participated in events related to OA in Agriculture.
2. Open Access Publishing: the case of PLoS. There is an ongoing discussion whether agriculture should produce a similar initiative.
3. Copyright. To include a presentation where users can get information about the last developments in terms of copyright & open data would be of interest
4. Advocacy. Where Alma Swan would be very much welcome presenting the book “Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access” just recently published by UNESCO

Specific topics within Agriculture

1. The CIARD Movement
2. The CIARD Ring
3. AgINFRA
4. CGIAR consortium’s experience promoting OA
5. And others…

In order to collect as much initiatives as possible, we would like to combine invitations to specific speakers with a call for presentations to be distributed and promoted within the AIMS community. The call would be looking for interested persons that can submit an abstract (maximum 500 words) about lessons learned/good practices in the implementation of OA policies, digital repositories or OA journals at international, national and institutional level in the agricultural domain.

The event would take place all the week, with two or three presentations per day, depending on the number of presentations collected.

The objective of this event would be to share experiences and ideas and to make them available for all the AIMS community, and also a starting point for a series of Webinars about specific topics of interest for the AIMS users (more news about this in autumn!) to take place from the AIMS website.

How does it sound? Do you think that this could be of interest?

Thanks a lot in advance for your feedback!