Conference abstracts
Dr Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives, UK:
The present repository landscape and what might be
over the horizon
The number of repositories is increasing and infrastructure and services are consolidating around them. This presentation will undertake a quick reconnoitre of the present position and an even quicker gallop into the middle distance to see what is gathering on the horizon. The overall picture will help to inform the future actions of repository managers.
Dr David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe, UK:
Repositories and research publications: policies and politics
Scholarly communications are increasingly being influenced by public policy issues. The desire of Governments world-wide to develop 'knowledge economies', ensure value for money, enrich education, and promote e-research all impact on scholarly communications and explain the interest at a political level in open access and institutional repositories. This presentation will explore some of the public policy drivers and describe the most significant of the open access policies, both in development and in place.
Frank Scholze, Stuttgart University, Germany:
Infrastructure for collecting and aggregating usage data
Although recording of usage data is common in many scholarly information services, digital libraries or institutional repositories, its exploitation for the creation of valueadded services remains limited due to concerns regarding, among others, user privacy, data validity, and the lack of accepted standards for the representation, sharing and aggregation of usage data. This talk presents an infrastructure for overcoming this limitations which is based on webserver as well as linkresolver log-files and uses OAI-PMH and OpenURL ContextObjects. The talk is based on work carried out within a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and also builds on the work done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team.
Dr Astrid Wissenburg, Economic and Social Research Council, UK:
RCUK's position on scholarly publishing
Available soon
Nick Evans, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP):
Institutional Repositories and Open Access - a threat to society publishers or an opportunity?
As scholarly publishing continues to change with the impact of new technology, society publishers are responding to perceived threats to their traditional sources of journal subscriptions in a variety of ways. Many are already experimenting with business models that involve a 'hybrid' OA supply-side business models, others are looking to sub-contract their publishing to larger commercial publishers to protect their existing revenues, while some are still biding their time in the hope that the situation will become clearer. Nearly all are looking to develop their journal "brand" to increase its value.
But the increasing free availability of content through institutional repositories makes the present landscape for society publishers all the more uncertain. Will a future reduction in subscription revenues lead to the demise of journals? Can embargoes on deposit of the final version really protect the journal in a world where excellent search engines and linked repositories make it ever easier to find 'good enough' content? How can they adapt and change to provide the services their members expect? In this talk Nick Evans attempts to thread a path through the difficult terrain of OA and IRs, and looks for some possible ways that society publishers in particular might learn to cope.
The Conference will be chaired by Professor Nicholas Mann, Dean of the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Booking: CLOSED