I wasn’t able to attend the UKCoRR meeting held in Kingston on Friday, as much as I would have liked to. It sounds like I missed out on a really good day with an excellent programme.
A thorough summary and all the presentations from the day are available from the UKCoRR website:
http://www.ukcorr.org/events/aug2009-event.php
In addition, there is a summary on the UKCoRR blog:
http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/2009/08/after-our-meeting.html
I was particularly interested in Theo Andrews’ presentation on Central Funds for Open Access and ensuing discussion around institutionally designated funds for OA – both Gold and Green routes. I hope UKCoRR don’t mind me reproducing some of the issues discussed here:
1) Concern about the costs: these might escalate, and sometimes amount to “double dipping” (some publishers are paid by authors and subscribers because they charge authors for OA article publication but don’t reduce their subscription fees).
2) Publishers who are aware of funder mandates for OA within 6 months, might introduce 12 month embargoes on post-print availability in OA repositories, in order to force authors to pay for OA publishing of the final version or miss their funder’s mandate. (NB the point here is that funders are paying, as authors can claim such costs from funders. But we’re all struggling to set up mechanisms by which this can be done – see Theo’s presentation for a summary of the issues.)
3) An institutional response might be to set up an OA fund, or it might be to encourage authors to deposit post-prints into the OA repository, rather than paying such publishers’ fees. Some researchers object to the fees being charged.
4) The Wellcome Trust does seem to prefer that the authors pay for OA publication, and indeed it suits authors better than depositing themselves because a part of the Wellcome mandate is for PubMed deposit. By paying, authors can leave the PubMed deposit up to the publishers to do. Is the Wellcome Trust’s mandate skewing the OA landscape in the way publishers have responded to them, whilst other academic disciplines are no way near as well funded?
The inimitable @llordllama has also posted summaries of the day on the UoL Library blog:
http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-1/
http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-2/
On the strength of this I’m certainly looking forward to attending future UKCoRR events – maybe even oop North next time?!
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