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Sunday, January 27, 2008

More notes from APE 2008

Peter Murray-Rust has blogged some notes on the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (Berlin, January 21-23, 2008).  Excerpt:

...The second plenary was from Arne Richter: European Geosciences Union. He concentrated on the success of their OA journal - J. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics....

Points from the talk…

The internet is key and effectively drives scientific communication to Open Access. There is enormous benefit when everything is Open.  It’s the only realistic platform for digital info - full multimedia....Search engines are only possible with the Internet and support actions against plagiarism and IPR violations (OA is fundamental here).

OA supported by scientific organizations. We need worldwide repositories. These will be domain-specific, e.g. topical data bases and archives (e.g. space science)....

New models of publishing process for authors and publishers:

  • authors compile entire work in digital
  • all software free of charge
  • camera-ready[*]  -  if publishers provide macros, then it can be compiled into journal style
  • servers have customised XML files
  • upload to all archives, databases, etc.

[* PMR “camera-ready” extends easily into semantic content and I think this is the more appropriate term. The idea  is that authors author in a natural fashion, not driven by the needs of the journal.] ...

ACP uses Copernicus. The better the software gets the cheaper the artcile. => 300 EUR or less.

The EGU has shown how learned societies can have a major role. The messages I took away was then when you have an enthusiastic and competent learned society (or international union) which is committed to communication and the support of its discipline then this is the ideal medium. This was reinforced during the meeting - there seem to be significant costs in conventional closed access publishing which simply go away for OA -  one example is licence management - another is access control....

Update. Peter has blogged more notes on APE2008 (one, two).