Open Access News

Svenja Hagenhoff and Chris Armbruster have written a report on the APE 2008 conference, Academic Publishing in Europe (Berlin, January 21-23, 2008).  (Thanks to Arnoud de Kemp.)  Excerpt:

In the Opening Keynote, Prof. Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer (Research Director, DESY Hamburg, Director- General elect, CERN, Geneva) stressed the traditional importance of preprints in High-Energy Physics since the 1960s, with online circulation beginning in 1991. In a community in which the authors are the readers and vice versa, repositories have become the vehicle of scholarly communication as researchers need full access to text, data and all kinds of ancillary objects (e.g. conference slides). Journals serve as evaluation agencies and keepers of the record. CERN and the Helmholtz Alliance have committed themselves to establish open access as the publishing solution for HEP by redirecting subscription money to pay for publishing. The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) estimates that EUR10M is needed annually to fund the publishing of about 5,000 articles. Nearly half the sum for SCOAP3 has already been pledged by major European players and efforts are underway in North America and East Asia. Prof. Heuer clarified that he sees HEP OA publishing as an ideal test-bed for scientific OA publishing more generally
- in order to get the costs for peer review and publication controlled in the long run.

In the second keynote Dr. Arne Richter (Executive Secretary, European Geosciences Union) gave a visionary presentation of the future confluence of the internet and open access. Any scientific community may organise itself to publish the best journal in the field, strive for the highest impact factor and comprehensively enable re-use by adopting a Creative Commons Attribution License. Rent-seeking publishers would be unable to stop this trend because of the complementary nature of open access and the internet, which favours open content that may be searched, mined, downloaded, re-used and so on. Moreover, digital publishing technology and software has advanced to the point at which much of the publishing process may be automated, enabling a business model based largely on service charges for authors in need of support with preparing an article for publication....

Dr. Ulrich Pöschl (Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz) demonstrated how open access journals may reinforce their mission and standing by adopting a collaborative peer review process by having public peer review and an interactive discussion (e.g. the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics)....

Dr. Birgit Schmidt (Göttingen University Press) emphasised that GUP was pro-actively pursuing an open access publishing strategy [for books], relying on a repository and connecting to DRIVER – the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research. Up to 40% of GUP publications are in STM....

The closing panel Information in Science and Society was chaired by Arnoud de Kemp (Electronic Publishing Working Group in Börsenverein). The panel consisted of Barbara Casalini (Managing Partner, Casalini Libri, Fiesole), Gary Coker (Director of R&D, MetaPress, Birmingham (USA)), Dr. Annette Holtkamp (Scientific Information Specialist, DESY, Hamburg), Dr. Elisabeth A.L. Mol (Editorial Director, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht), Prof. Dr. Rudi Schmiede (Darmstadt University of Technology) and Dr. Ing. Herman P. Spruijt (Vice-President, International Publishers Association, Geneva). Firstly, panellists gave their impressions, noting the presence of the Humanities alongside STM, voicing the conviction that OA was here to stay, encouraging further dialogue between the proponents of subscription-based and open access business models and highlighting that preservation costs are gaining more attention....Finally, a desire was expressed to investigate the consequences of top-level green mandates by funders such as NIH and the ERC....