[Upd-discuss] The Zurich Symposium on Open Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Communication

[Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza]

 [lib-info-society] The Zurich Symposium on Open
Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Communication


>From SPARC Open Access Forum mailing list.
------------------------------------------
http://www.openspf.de/space/start
Friday, 15. October 2004
Zurich Open Access Symposium: encouraging steps
ahead
The Zurich >> Symposium on Open Access to
Knowledge and Scholarly Communication, 15 October
2004 provided a valuable range of insights on
current aspects of international Open Acess
discussions and on possible future trends.

Stevan Harnad (CAN - Montreal) provided a
metaphor to describe what historians might find
the current phase of the Open Access movement to
be characterized by. Understanding what Open
Access is about, Harnad holds, is no big
intellectual endeavour but equals telling a child
that if it rains you put on a raincoat. Arguments
against Open Access in Harnad's view currently
seem to be ranging from "Rain is good for you",
„God meant us to get wet“, „It is illegal to wear
a raincoat“, „The raincoat will dismantle when
you go out“ to „My hands do not know how to
button up the raincoat“. Harnad stipulates that
self-archiving is only one little step further
than the already mandatory „publish or perish“
and that St. Andrews or CalTech are offering to
their scientists proxy services that go in the
right direction to help implement BOAI strategy
1.

Carl Lagoze (USA - Cornell) addressed his
audience from the perspective of a technologist
who wishes to take into account the social
aspects of networking among scientists. Lagoze
and his colleagues are planning to build a new
technical and social fabric for scholarly
communication which is based on participatory
information environments and includes the
Roosendaal/Geurts 1997 functional steps of
Registration, Certification, Awareness, Archiving
and Rewarding. The NSF-funded project called
Pathways is centering on the concept of a hybrid
network, looking at how document and citation
network dynamics interwine with social networks
of personal communication. Lagoze's observation
that it is difficult for scientists to find
suitable metadata-tags for their publications
provided a link to the following speaker's
perspective.

Diann Rusch-Feja (D - Bremen) holds that
libraries stand in the tradition of granting
freedom of access to knowledge. With the advent
of Open Access, Rusch-Feja sees that new services
will have to be created for library users:
provision of tools for self-archiving, mediated
support for indexing and rights statements
including legal advisory (as already in view at
Queensland Technical University and at
International University Bremen). Moreover,
proficient information literacy training is a
huge field to be developed within the service
profiles of libraries, Rusch-Feja argues, seeing
the field of information provision as a library's
task which should be much better linked to an
institution's politics of knowledge management.

Thomas Dreier (D - Karlsruhe) gave a short
introduction to the legal foundations of Open
Access, arguing that copyright is not hindering
Open Access, but helping promote it. Dreier
supports the idea of Creative Commons licences
which pave a useful middle ground between 'all
rights reserved' and 'piracy' in advocating to go
for 'some rights reserved'. The strongest
instrument, Dreier believes, will be a statutory
obligation for scientists to publish Open Access
rather than the Berlin Declaration's contractual
or voluntary strategies. In Germany, a hearing of
a pertinent draft proposal prepared by the
federal state of Baden-Württemberg's government
will be held at the German Federal Ministry of
Justice soon, on 20 October.

Albrecht Hauff (D - Thieme Publishers) sees
himself and his company as having a liberal
attitude towards new ideas which improve the
system of scholarly publishing, irrespective of
which business model ('author pays' or
'subscriber pays') is being practised. Hauff
holds that if suppliers determine what is needed,
user benefits will no be as high and that Open
Access ventures will learn the costs of
publishing. Hauff cannot imagine how Open Access
publishers will be able to cover the costs for
quality in reorganizing information, copy
editing, layout, electronic coding, archiving,
printing and marketing as well as taking a
leading technological role in information
retrieval (e.g. Crossref). Re Harnad's metaphor,
Hauff holds that in his experience no kid
hesitates to put on a raincoat when it rains.

After the lunch break, Georg W. Botz (D -
Munich), introduced the audience to the Open
Access policy to be developed within the Max
Planck Society (MPG). The federal structures
underlying the MGP's system of 78 largely
independent institutes poses real challenges for
information management. The current strategy is
made up of two pillars: Digital Library Services
and Open Access Development, with an emphasis on
the second, with its eDoc-Server. On the basis of
its signature to the Berlin Declaration, the MPG
has installed a Steering Committee at its highest
level and also an Open Access Policy Coordinator
(Botz) who is in charge of developing an
institutional publishing policy. Internal and
external Open Access advocacy is another focal
point of the MPG's upcoming activities.

The issues to be addressed by the Round Table
were: acceptance of Open Access, quality
assessment, future forms of institutional
cooperation, the role of publishers, the role of
funding bodies, Third World access to the
literature, Self-archiving etc.

With thanks to Ingeborg Zimmermann (Deputy
Director of the Main Library University of
Zurich) for open access to a computer behind the
scenes :-)

report to be continued (Round Table in the
afternoon) PermaLink
--- claudia.koltzenburg@rrz.uni-hamburg.de wrote:

> To: "SPARC Open Access Forum"
> <SPARC-OAForum@arl.org>
> Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 17:03:35 +0200
> From: claudia.koltzenburg@rrz.uni-hamburg.de
> Subject: [SOAF] Zurich Open Access Symposium
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> for the first part of the report of today's
> symposium in Zurich see
> 
> Open Scientific Publishing Forum
> http://www.openspf.de
> 
> with commenting function ;-)
> 
> best and better, 
> Claudia Koltzenburg
> 
> ==========
> 
> This message is sent to you because you are
> subscribed to
>   The SPARC Open Access Forum.
> To post, send your message to
> <SPARC-OAForum@arl.org>.
> To unsubscribe, email to
> <SPARC-OAForum-off@arl.org>.
> To switch to digest mode, email to
> <SPARC-OAForum-digest@arl.org>.
> To switch to index mode, email to
> <SPARC-OAForum-index@arl.org>.
> Send administrative queries to
> <SPARC-OAForum-request@arl.org>.

=====
Vorwärts!

Zapopan Martín Muela Meza
PhD student Information Studies
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/phd.html
http://www.geocities.com/zapopanmuela/index.html


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com