Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, August 10, 2008

Blog notes on LIBER conference

John MacColl, LIBER, Equality, Fraternization, hangingtogether.org, August 8, 2008. Blog notes on the LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche / Association of European Research Libraries) conference (Istanbul, July 1-5, 2008).

... A lot of attention in the European research library community at present is on Europeana, the European digital library which is being built collaboratively with the assistance of large-scale digitisation funding from member states. Elisabeth Niggemann, Director General of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and Chair of the Conference of European Librarians, updated the conference on its progress to date. A final prototype is expected in November this year, which will provide access to 2m items. When finally launched to the public, it should have 6m items. But there are some concerns about the pace of development. ...

Ricky [Erway] gave a presentation on mass digitisation of special collections material, based on the Shifting Gears work which she and Jen Schaffner reported last year. ...

Among other highlights was a presentation from the academic perspective by Professor Sijbolt Noorda (Chairman of the Dutch Association of Universities). We thought digitisation would save us money; now we know it’s about investment. Universities should be paying for their own libraries’ investments in this area, and not leaving it to external bodies. ...

A presentation which also gave me heart was that of Dr Ralf Schimmer of the Max Planck Digital Library, who updated us on SCOAP, the initiative in high energy physics (HEP) which is seeking to convert the whole commercial journal literature to author-pays open access. A lot of funding has now been obtained from funders worldwide, and the collaborative effort is inspiring. Consortial regions and entire countries are being asked to assess their collective spend on HEP journals, and to divert it to the initiative. A tender will be issued, and publishers who respond will be obliged to unbundle their HEP subscriptions from their other offerings. If successful, this will be an important breakthrough in allowing the consumer to influence the terms of the offer. It would also offer an example to other disciplines which could open some powerful new directions in scholarly publishing ...