The preposition is “at”. Next Thursday the RSC is organising a one day meeting in Burlington House London (next to the Royal Academy if you want a change afterwards. Here’s the programme
Open Access Publishing in the Chemical Sciences
Final programme for the one-day meeting at Burlington House on May 22nd, 2008.
Time Topic and Speaker
0930 Registration and coffee
1000 Welcome and Introduction to the meeting
Barry Dunne, CICAG Chairman
1010 Open Data – why it must become universal
Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
1045 Coffee
1100 Open Access – the publishers’ perspective
Ian Russell, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
1135 Open Access and the Wellcome Trust
Robert Kiley, The Wellcome Trust
1210 Some new chemistry in European Bioinformatics
Christoph Steinbeck, European Bioinformatics Institute
1315 Lunch
1415 Designing data repositories to support preservation & publication for the chemistry community
Simon Coles, University of Southampton
1445 Title to be announced
Diana Leitch, University of Manchester
1520 Growth of support for Open Access, and its spread from biomedicine
Bryan Vickery, ChemistryCentral
1555 Tea
1610 How will NPG provide better access and impact with chemistry content?
David Hoole, Nature Publishing Group
1645 General Discussion All
1700 Close of Meeting N/A
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My spies tell me there are already attendees from “publishers, a wide variety of universities (both library/information and technical staff), industry, and some from organisations such as the British Library, CAS, STN, MIMAS and the RSC.” So drop what you were planning to do on Thursday and come and see the future of chemical publishing.
The RSC operates a hybrid journal policy (RSC Open Science) which is an author-pays free-to-read policy. (Every major publisher shuffles the words “Open, Free, Author” and “Choice, Science, Access” to describe its own particular hybrid OA. So that’s a good trivia question for Mastermind or Millionaire – which major publisher operates “Open Science”). They say:
“You may deposit the accepted version of the submitted article in other repository(ies) as required, with no embargo period, except that you are not permitted to deposit your work in any commercial service.”
Since this is the removal of a permission barrier, this is now “strongOA” – although the name will be changed soonish.
The Google snippet for this page announced
“Yes, but with the caveat that, along with many other publishers, RSC considers the author-pays open access model to be an experiment rather than a proven …”
I can’t find this phrase any more, so I’m assuming it’s a year old. So probably by now the RSC has had a chance to see that OA is no longer an experiment but a shining success. And this meeting will confirm it…
What will I say? I have no idea in detail as there has been so much going on. It will be on data.
- I will show our latest demo which should convince you that by publishing semantic data chemistry has the opportunity to become the pre-eminent data-driven physical science.
- I will urge everyone to take data seriously. It’s tragic – and I think an abrogation of the duty of a learned society – that the ACS has declined to give a clear steer to Chemspider on whether the our (Cambridge) CrystalEye abstraction of their openly-visible-but-inappropriately copyrighted crystal data (==facts) can be re-used. It was a simple, polite, public question.
- The last few days have convinced me that data MUST be treated as a first-class-citizen, and not tagging along under whatever Open Access licence or mumble is attached to the full-text. Data are free (as in air). Publishers should rejoice in this.
Because, publishers, the quality of your science depends in large part on the data related to those publications. That’s why many of you publish supplemental information. It says:
“We, the authors, did this experiment. Here’s the data to support our claims. We made these compounds. They are what we say they are. If you don’t believe us, here are the spectra. And the melting points. And the crystal structures. And we are reinforced in our claim because the journal reviewed this data and agreed it stands up. We challenge you to download it and show any different. Recalculate the NMR spectrum. We are brave enough to claim it’s right. Re0analyse the crystal structure. You’ll find that atom really is an oxygen and not a nitrogen. And the chirality really is R- not S-“.
But to make these claims the data must be free. Not licensed. Not mumble. Free as in air. The human race has an automatic right to data.