Trip Report: Open Access Days 2009

Event: Open Access Days 7 and 8 October 2009 in Konstanz Participants MPDL: Ralf, Christoph, Nicole, Juliane =Summary=
 * Programme
 * Open Access Projects and Offerings presented at the Exhibition

The third Open Access Days took place in the three-country triangle Germany-Austria-Switzerland at the University of Konstanz. They focused on OA-related activities in the German-speaking regions. Programme topics included the legal situation in the three countries (D-A-CH), business and financing models, Open Data (free access to research data), open-access journals, software and hosting solutions for repositories, the collection of statistical data on OA publications, the establishment of OA in universities and non-university research institutions as well as events during the international Open Access Week which will also be taking place this autumn. The MPDL staff contributed the following talks to the conference: Furthermore we visited various sessions and had vivid and interesting conversations to business partners. This trip report is only highlighting selected experiences.
 * PubMan (Nicoel Kondic & Juliane Müller)
 * Open Access in Licences and Consortia (Dr. Ralf Schimmer)
 * Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) (Dr. Christoph Bruch)

=Highlights=

Alexandria
In 2004, the University of St. Gallen developed its research platform Alexandria. The functionality of the research platform goes beyond that of a repository. The three core areas - "persons", "publications" and "projects" - are interlinked, thereby providing a comprehensive overview of research activities at the University of St. Gallen.

PubMan
The Repository Software PubMan was presented by a live demonstration of special functionalities (e.g. Easy & Full Submission, CoNE, Search&Export, reuse possibilities). A particular focus was set on the rights handling scenario. The file upload as well as the possibilities to give rights information (rights statement, copyright date and cc license) were demonstrated exemplary. Especially the possibility to reuse PubMan data for Blogs quickened a lot of interests.

DiPP as a Fedora-based Publishing Platform
The Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) system provided by the North Rhine Westphalian Library Service Centre in Cologne is one of the few German publishing platforms on which scientists and scholars can set up and operate their own electronic journals. The platform is based on Fedora repository software and the CMS system Plone.

The Leibniz Association's Repository Infrastructure
A distributed repository infrastructure is currently being built by the Association's resource centers and libraries in cooperation with the Saarland University and State Library (SULB). The joint overview of the Association's Open Access publications presented on the Leibniz website will be based on the individual perspectives of the participating subject-based repositories.

Green Road 2.0? Self-Archiving as an integrated Social Networking Service Function
We got the possibility to hear a convincing talk by Lambert Heller (TIB Hannover) about the two small European start-up companies Mendeley and ResearchGATE. Both systems are trying to bring together a self-archiving and social networking software. Mendeley is comparable with "Napster" for scientific publications. With Mendeley you are able to organize, share and discover research papers. ResearchGATE is like "facebook for researchers"; it's the leading professional network for scientists. There you are able to socialize with research partners and administer your own publication list.

Podium discussion: Financial aspects of Open Access
The podium discussion focused especially on the financial aspects of Open Access viewed from various perspectives (research funder, publisher, research institute, science sector, library, university). The role of publishers as guarantor for peer review was intensely discussed. It's not uncommon that publishers are payed for peer review but essentially this service will not be fulfilled by them. So there are growing demands for more transparency in the contracts with publishers. On the other hand the authors themselves are responsible for quality assurance of their research papers. Another topic which was discussed was the excessive cost amount for Open Access Publishing in terms of the golden road. Neither the research institutes nor the universities (and libraries) have the budget to pay for new license contracts with OA Journals. Additional funds are necessary and new funding concepts have to be developed to be able to support OA Publishing. Lower priced alternatives are OA Repositories.

Session 11: DINI Workshop on Subject-based Repositories
Two subject-based repositories were presented in that session. EconStor, the digital archive for economics and business studies, is based on DSpace. The content acquisition of EconStor relies on the import of existent data out of the professional database ZBW (Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften). There furthermore exist a various range of interfaces to harvest data from other systems (e.g. RePEc, SSRN, Economists Online, NEEO etc.). The ZBW is able to provide a broad service (clarification of copyright; adjustment of formats etc.) with the consequence that the content of EconStore is growing fast. GEO-LEO edocs is a subject-based repository in the field of earth and space science. It is based on DSpace. By a live demonstration we got an impression of the main GEO-LEO functionalities. For example due to DDC GEO-LEO is able to provide a thematic search. Furthermore the user is able to save her/his search history as well as her/his own basket beyond the single session.