OAI6

Well OAI6 was really interesting and hot! Due to the increase in numbers the event was moved to the University of Geneva in the city centre rather than at CERN. Overall I think the move was a good one with greater availability of accommodation and better transport links. The only drawback was the main reception area of the building had a glass roof so we all baked in the summer sun of Geneva. Have a look at all the shiny red faces in the conference photos if you don't believe me :-) http://www.medecine.unige.ch/organisation/bfm/oai6/photos/

There was a real mixture of people at the conference which led to some interesting discussions. I particularly enjoyed the breakout session run by David Prosser of SPARC Europe on "Speculations on the future of Open Access and Scientific Publications". With representatives from Nature publishing and Elsevier in the audience as well as many repository managers it was a great opportunity to ask questions and exchange ideas. One of the issues of concern to publishers was that the peer-reviewers are struggling to keep up with the volume of material they are being asked to review. I asked if peer-reviewers ever express an interest in whether the journal they review for is OA or allows deposit in a repository. According to the two publishers there the main thing reviewers consider is the prestige of the journal.

I did wonder if in our advocacy to researchers, particularly those keen on OA, if we should suggest they consider also the policy of the journal with regard to OA when deciding if they will review for it?

The DRIVER Tutorial, NECOBELAC and EM-Loader posters were all well received. In particular the EM-Loader project received a lot of interest due to its use of SWORD and by many repository managers interested in seeing if they could implement something similar and so enhance the service they offer their users. If you are interested in this have a look at the project website www.publicationslist.org/em-loader. The poster and online demos of the service and contact details for the team are all available there.

There were so many great presentations and sessions at the event I can't go into them here but all are available from the conference website if you are interested .
Mary

P.S. Easyjet squashed my bag on the flight back, boo hiss.
P.S. Update: Easyjet sent me a cheque to cover the damage to the bag, yepee!

Attending OAI6

I'm off to OAI6 in Geneva next week. It should be a really interesting event and I'll be talking about the DRIVER Mentor Service (http://www.driver-support.eu/mentor.html) in the DRIVER Tutorial on the 17th June.

The idea for the Mentor Service came about from our experiences here in the UK and seeing how groups such as UKCoRR and the SHERPA partnership can really help to support repository managers. Many of our international colleagues are very interested in the role of UKCoRR and how something similar could help in other countries. I'll let you know how I get on.

After that I'll be giving two posters (hopefully with help) one on NECOBELAC (www.necobelac.eu) and one on the EM-Loader project (http://publicationslist.org/em-loader/) which is co-authored by another UKCoRR member Theo Andrew of the University of Edinburgh, and Ian Stuart (Edina) and Fred Howell (Textensor Ltd.), and uses an installation of SWORD to automate the deposit of articles into the Depot repository from Publicationslist.org.

Second Committee meeting

Last Friday we held our second UKCoRR committee meeting, after the end of the RSP event on mandates.

The RSP event was very useful as a way to network with other repository managers as well as those from the publishing industry, from research funders and from projects relating to scholarly communications more generally.

Our committee meeting focused on how we will respond to the results of our recent survey of UKCoRR members, and on planning the next members' meeting. Essentially, we're feeding back survey results through our members' discussion list and we're hoping to arrange a meeting before the end of this summer.

(The agenda and minutes of our committee meetings are available on the UKCoRR website.)

Useful slides

At the joint RSP and RIN event “Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice” last week in London (for more event details and news see the RSP website) Bill Hubbard used a sequence of diagrams in his presentation to illustrate the decisions and information a researcher needs to know to be able to decide where to put their research to ensure it complies with their funder’s mandates.

Several people have commented on how useful the diagrams were so Bill has added those particular slides to the SHERPA website as a resource for others in the community to use.