At the start of the month I was lucky, thanks to getting a Rosalind Patrick PD award to get to Open Repositories, an international conference for people interested in repositories and scholarly publishing.
Over 300 attendees viewed 120 presentations on data management, archiving, open access, and scholarly publishing.
- Cambridge maths professor Timothy Gowers describing the UK Open Access policy as a ‘disastrous failure’ for relying on article processing charges.
- Scholarly communications officers from MIT and Yale emphasising the importance of institutional repositories for the future of academic publication.
- The emergence of second generation research data management services from Australian university libraries, with integrated planning, storage and sharing.
- ‘Layer journals’ becoming mainstream, reusing Open Access articles from repositories.
My presentation on ‘Good enough Scholarly Publishing’ is available from my blog: <http://anton.angelo.nz>. I also participated in a panel discussion (with people from Cambridge and Princeton, no less!) on the global drivers for Open Access, which was not recorded.
We’re doing well at Canterbury. We have the same problems as everyone else, and rather than throwing up our hands we are facing them well. Examples include;
- Paying for APCs – no one has enough funds to cover the demand, and the administration of them is really difficult (eh, Peter H?).
- Research Data Management. Some Australian libraries are showing the way, but must support is still pretty ad-hoc.
- The upcoming NZ ORCID hub is a first in the world, and lots of people are interested in seeing how it works out. We’re testing it at the moment.
Something that surprised me was how differently repositories are treated around the world. Ours is very much about unique material (theses and journals), and providing green open access. In Australia, they play a much larger role in their version of PBRF, the HERDC. They are not nearly as interested in getting the actual articles, but just the metadata. In the UK, because they must provide open access, repositories are much stricter about collecting as much as they can (and still only manage 50%). In the US, disciplinary open access repositories like the Arxive are more important.