Open Scholarship 2006 – 2

My colleague and DSpace superguru Jim Downing has also blogged parts of the meeting:
These are some impressions of the Open Scholarship meeting so far… Some are notes, so it may be a bit jerky in places. I shan’t blog all talks.
IRs have made massive progress in last year. Hundreds even thousands of institutions now have them. There are commercial technology offerings and commercial hosting services.
Stephen Pinfield (Nottingham) reviewed progress – 250 repos (2004) 790+ (2006). 12 million records worldwide. Self-archiving has become common and recently – catalysed by Wellcome Trust – journals have moved towards hybrid publishing. He emphasised the bit-by-bit nature or progress “We overestimate the importance of short-term change, and underestimate the significance of long term change” (after John Kay). Even publishers are starting to take OA axioms on board. Challenges:
* Cultural change – the biggest problem. The “awareness” problem is being solved. But lack of incentives for *individuals” – they accept the idea intellectually, but…
* Practical support – still not easy enough. Must be drag and drop, self-archiving by proxy
* IR and institutional strategy – IR must be part of institutional policy – so IR managers must engage with *whole research process*, not just dissemination. Promote the institution, liaise with industry…
* discipline differences. Ginsparg believes all will converge on repository model, but others believe we have to have different models for different disciplines (I believe this – PeterMR). Early adoption happened in specific domains.
* Is self-archiving publication? Publication is now becoming a process, not an event (I shall show this in my presentation – PeterMR).
* versioning. “version of record”? “self-published”
* quality control. Current IRs are quality neutral – but quality flagging is essential. Not homogeneous within single IR.
* Metadata – cannot be worldwide agreement. but need standards and coordination
* standards – OA standards are community owned so still fluid
* digital preservation – which versions? Is institution responsible for preservation, or national agency
* IPR – who owns copyright is not clear. Institution? Author? we are still ducking the questions
* business models. costing and funding?
Don’t yet have enough examples of good service providers.
Open access in NOT just about access – it is about USE. (Dear to my heart – PeterMR)
Institutional vs Subject? Shouldn’t matter, but until we get better services it does. (Agreed – PeterMR. I need to know where to look for thousands of article in a subject)
Directions…
* OA but otherwise limited change (Harnad model). No reason for anything to change
* Hybrid business model – income from input (publication charge)… cf Wellcome
* Deconstruct the journal. Quality control does not have to be done by publisher
* Overlay – virtual journals draw from IR. Maybe quality at time of assembly
* multi-layered process – screen – IR – submit to peer-review – then mounted – dialogue etc. Citation could determines course of future research. Demise of journal article?
* fluid communication model (this is me – I shall show it in my talk – PeterMR)
Bill Hubbard
(Open DOAR – 797+ repositories).
Quality assessment of repositories – does it have data? is it OA? broken links? metadata-only sources?
2/3 have no metadata policy, harvesting policy, some forbid robot harvesting. most don’t allow commercial re-use of metadata. We need clear policies and DOAR hopes to have machine-readable policies in a few months.
Authors must find what they want in repositories.
A lot of repositiories are run on marginal costs – not easy to get startegic funding. Learned societies had the opportunity to creat subject repositories but have failed to respond.