EVENT: COASP 2015 OPEN PROCEEDINGS
Last week OASPA held the 7th annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, COASP, in Amsterdam, writes Claire Redhead
T
he conference kicked off with a keynote from Kaitlin Thaney, director of Mozilla Science Lab, on getting open practices to stick with researchers. Mozilla have many ways to encourage open practices by researchers, from empowering them to do more open, collaborative research on the web, to increasing transparency, such as giving more credit to researchers for their work. A session on innovation in scholarly communication followed. Kaveh Bazargan spoke first, representing a publisher collaboration driving towards standardisation in XML tagging to enhance reusability: the JATS4R project. Jonathan Gray of Open Knowledge asked delegates to consider what constitutes scholarly research in the digital age and advocated a more holistic approach to scholarly communications. Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef described the DOI Event Tracking Project, or DET, which some OASPA members have played a key role in and has the potential to become a substantial source of article-level data.
Day 2 started with CERN’s Salvatore Mele, talking about the SCOAP3 project and how it is helping to convert high-energy physics literature to open access. CERN is an intergovernmental organisation and SCOAP3 builds on CERN’s experience, by linking publishers, libraries, funders and researchers in the spirit of international collaboration.
Mele was followed by a discussion on business models to support the transition to open access. We heard from Steve Hall of IOP Publishing on its offsetting pilot; Juliane Ritt spoke about Springer Compact; Liam Earney of Jisc Collections presented its work negotiating offsetting agreements with publishers; and Stephen Pinfield of the University of Sheffield presented the findings in a report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group.
Historian Aileen Fyfe of the University of St. Andrews considered what lessons we might learn about the future of scholarly communications from a historical perspective. She described how peer-review
Amsterdam’s Kloveniersburgwal was the setting for the conference
is a relatively recent addition to the process of scholarly communication, introduced originally for a different purpose from that which it now tries to serve. Ron Dekker, director of the Institutes
NOW and Project Leader for open access, provided an update on the Netherlands national approach to OA and the potential impact of the Dutch leadership of the EU in 2016.
A panel discussion examined progressive roads to open access, beginning with Jan Erik Frantsvåg of UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, who spoke about
‘Open access to content is just a stepping stone’
how Norwegian academic institutions have come together to create a nationwide approach to funding open access publishing. The Gates Foundation’s Jennifer Hansen set out the motivations for their unilateral requirements for open access publishing. Finally, Pierre Mounier of OpenEdition described OPERAS, a new infrastructure for monograph publication. We invited proposals to present projects or novel ideas from the open access community. We heard from BioMedCentral’s Daniel Shanahan on the launch of a publication which involves patients – as editors, reviewers and readers – and how an open approach is critical to this; Bryan Vickery presented Cogent OA’s pay-what-you-
20 Research Information OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015
want Freedom APC model and it will be interesting to hear more about the results from the approach they are trialling; Rupert Gatti described Open Book Publishers’ freemium model for OA book publishing; Patrick Martinent showcased ResearchPad and the progress made thus far in presenting open-access content in a mobile friendly format; Jenna Makowski of Alexander Street Press explained how an open, community approach is critical to the Open Anthropology Library and how OA is central to this; and Margo Bargheer described the DFG’s approach to sustaining funds for open access publishing.
Finally we heard from Lars Bjørnshauge, representing a group of organisations that includes OASPA, that are launching the ‘Think. Check. Submit’ campaign to provide some guidance for researchers when deciding which journal to publish in.
On the third day we heard from Stephen Curry of University College London about the current situation of research and evaluation, then from Derek Groen (UCL) and Moqi Xu (LSE), both early career researchers. Andrew Preston described how Publons enables researchers to get credit for the peer-review they carry out and Marcus Munafo of the University of Bristol showed how the pressure to publish positive, statistically significant findings as part of the researcher evaluation process is undermining the integrity and reliability of science. To close the conference we ended on a positive note with an inspiring speech from Ryan Merkley, the CEO of Creative Commons. In Ryan’s presentation, but also across the conference as a whole, there was a real sense more than ever this year of how open access to content is just a stepping stone as we move towards an open research culture.
All of the recordings and slides will be made available as soon as possible on the OASPA website as in previous years. Visit
www.oaspa.org/conference or follow us on twitter @OASPA.
Claire Redhead is membership and communications manager at OASPA
@researchinfo
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