berlin5: final thoughts

Some final thoughts on the berlin-5 meeting on Open Access in Padova – I have spent more blog time than I thought and I am probably driving any chemical/software readers up the wall. This should be the last post with the tag. Some discussion is reported in Chatham House Rule manner.
Splendidly organised. Wonderful food and drink. Very relaxed atmosphere.
Fantastic location. Italy is fortunate to have preserved many of its medieval town almost intact. The best analogy in the UK is probably Cambridge or Oxford, but they don’t have the same compact city boundaries as in many Italian counterparts.
A reasonably good mix of funders, policy makers (EU, etc.), publishers, researchers, library/IT.
A positive atmosphere. Alma was very upbeat that Open Access was now unstoppable.
I was pleased to see that Open Data was now much higher on the agenda. General agreement that it must be addressed and quickly and I think several people have taken this away and will work on it. Similarly the idea that “Open Access” is not a licence and we have to use CC or SC. Kaitlin Thaney from Science Commons was there and I am sure that people will get in touch with her.
eTheses were also higher on the agenda. Good. At earlier meetings I had asked whether I could run robots over the Dutch theses and was told there was a copyright problem. Now I am told that was incorrect – I can do whatever I like. There are over 10,000 Open theses in NL, so we’ll start pointing our robots there.
Because of my diffident nature I have been in the habit of asking permission for this sort of thing. Now I am getting braver and shall “ask for forgiveness rather than permission”. So here come text and data-mining robots. After all it’s C21.
There was a mixture of views about the legality of Foo, Bar, and Bananas. I am urging that in the C21 copyright is inappropriate for eScience and we should simply declare all scientific data unencumbered by publisher copyright. I pushed one or two publishers like this…
PMR: “are images (graphs, gels, cells) of the scientific record copyright”
Publisher: “well, we put lots of effort into the design of lettering in images”
PMR: “on gels?”
Publisher: “… er um”
So I think there are an increasing number of publishers who see that the scientific record per se (i.e. the wider “data”) must be free and Open. I talked with one publisher who has got excited about the possibility of Open Data and although they might not be Open Access, see the advantages of making data visible.
I think a lot of people hadn’t seen the power of data- and text-mining and although I had to compress a lot into 27 minutes the message came through.
One a slightly more critical note:
There was very little awareness of what Web2.0 and the rest is about. There is a vast difference between berlin5 and www2007 (scifoo is something else, of course). We who are in the middle of it forget how many academics have never heard of Flickr.
I was disappointed that no-one else was blogging and presumably the awareness of tags and folksonomies is low and I’ll address that in another post
I am looking forward to the video and will let you know when it happens.
And as always new contacts and opportunities. I am always happy to visit and demo or spread the word. Open Access, Repositories, Open Data … we are taking off.