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!