Category Archives: Conference

Attending LIBER and REDUX 2020 Conferences Online

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In our continuous shift towards digital culture, and of course during the pandemic, conferences have been adapting their programmes to online formats. This is no mean feat, particularly as even the best laid plans can have technical issues. But at least online you can fix yourself a cup of tea or stretch your legs while the hosts sort issues out, rather than sitting awkwardly in the audience. 

I attended two big conferences online that I usually would have attended in person: LIBER (Europe’s largest association of research libraries) 2020 and the 2020 University Press Redux Conference. The former took place over one week while the latter had five webinars spread out over four months. Both conferences had plenty of sessions that revolved around open access and, as open access is very much my area (I run the open access journals hosting service), I was excited to dive in and attend as many as I could. I’ve popped a few of my highlights below and hope you find them useful! 

LIBER 

With an excellent keynote on marketing (by Christine Koontz) two panels, ten sessions, six workshops, and paper presentations, LIBER 2020 was a packed week.

Open Access Insights

Denis Bourguet (UMR CBGP, INRAE, Montpellier) made the case for preprints and argued they are important as a tool of accessibility, as they are free for authors and readers and offer immediate access for researchers. However, as there is no peer review all types of research will be hosted, including the “not so good stuff”.  Denis works on the Peer Community In (PCI) project (Winner of the LIBER Award for Library Innovation!) which aims to add peer review into the mix. Meanwhile, in Finland, Malin Sofia Fredriksson (The Donner Institute for Research in Religion and Culture) reported that one of the major funders in Finland requires open access publishing now and that humanities have the smallest proportion of peer-reviewed journals but has the largest share of monographs and edited works. Their biggest hurdle is challenging the idea that open access means lower quality and less visibility. Leo Waaijers (QOAM, The Netherlands) introduced Quality Open Access Market (QUAM) which is an online instrument that helps authors share their publishing experience with colleagues by completing a four-question scorecard about the peer review, editorial board, the value and ‘recommendability’ of the journal they were publishing in. The journal is then given a Quality of Service indicator, alongside information about publication fees. Sounds handy! 

Libraries as Open Innovators and Leaders

The next session, and one I was really looking forward to given my role. Dr. Markku Roinila, Kimmo Koskinen and Kati Syvälahti (Helsinki University Library, Finland) spoke about their use of the Open Journals System (OJS) to host academic–led journals, at no cost to the editors and with maintenance and technical support provided by the library (exactly like us at Edinburgh!). Helsinki University Library empowered the journal managers to become “teachers”, so they could teach the use of OJS and of academic workflows to students. They gathered great feedback about the pilot, realised the importance of technical support from the library and are now looking into launching some student-led journals. Next, Shane Collins and Siobhán Dunne (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) spoke of open scholarship (instead of open science, so that they are inclusive of AHSS) and how they created a taskforce of staff who look at Plan S and Trinity’s strategic open access targets. They ran events and podcasts with inclusivity at the forefront and found high levels of collaboration between departments. They also said that “bringing the melting pot of people together for culture change requires this type of grass-roots approach”. Finally, Dr. Coen Wilders and Martine Pronk (Utrecht University Library, The Netherlands) see the library as experts on making scientific information fair in a world that is increasingly more open and digital. They spoke of how libraries support the entire research process and said they choose to focus on metadata and repositories (instead of catalogues) as this is in line with their internal target audience. 

Tools for Transparency and Open Access

First up, Sarah Ames (National Library of Scotland, Scotland) spoke about NLS’s Digital Scholarship Service, which encourages, enables and supports use of computational research methods with their collections, among other aspects. They focused on internal and external engagement and worked hard to communicate transparency, including utilising social media, which was highly engaged with. Next, Maurits van der Graaf (Pleiade Management & Consultancy, The Netherlands) looked at a library toolkit for open access and pointed out that institutional repositories are a vital form of green open access. There are currently 5,367 repositories and 82% of publishers allow self-archiving. Maurits concluded by stating the importance of green and gold routes in the move to open access and highlighted the need for more Read and Publish deals as well as more library support for APC-free publishing. Finally, Nicole Krüger and Dr. Tamara Pianos (ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) spoke of the importance of considering open educational resources (OER) before designing learning materials. They used H5P as it was mobile-friendly and allowed for interactive content. Although content hosted via this route isn’t indexed by search engines, it can be downloaded and adapted for other sites, such as WordPress. Overall, they found H5P very user-friendly.  

REDUX 

Monographs, open access and public policy: UKRI OA consultation 2020

Helen Snaith (the Senior Policy Adviser at Research England) said that monographs should not try to replicate journal open access models and that they need to ensure that policy doesn’t create accessibility issues. Richard Fisher (Vice Chair of Yale University Press) said that removing the financial barrier is only one aspect of open access, and that money needs to be spent on marketing in order to make the book successful. Overall, it was agreed that publishing open access shouldn’t affect the quality of the content. 

Open Access: Sales – Open Access business models for books and journals

Martin Paul Eve (Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London) pointed out that books are much more expensive to produce than journals, and this can be an issue for the humanities and social sciences in particular as there is generally less funding. He said that it isn’t as simple as a library switching the book purchasing budget to the book processing charge (BPC) budget, as the former wouldn’t sufficiently cover the latter, and that COVID19 has shown the inaccessibility of books online compared to journals. Similarly to Richard Fisher, Martin said that gold open access may not be the way to go for books. Emily Farrell (Library Sales Executive, The MIT Press) said they rely on a hybrid approach to funding their open access activities, including article processing charges (APCs) and crowdfunding approaches for books, such as Knowledge Unlatched. She acknowledged that they see a lot more usage when books are open and they aim to roll out a library–centred collective model by 2021. Lastly, Vivian Berghahn (Manging Director, Berghahn Books) spoke about the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model, where subscribers get discounted access to the content and, if enough subscribers participate, the content is made open access.  Vivian said they have 305 participants to date and the model is working particularly well for their anthropology journal. 

Conclusion 

Having the conferences online, in my opinion, worked well. More people could attend due to the lack of a financial barrier (no travel, no accommodation, no delegate fee). And the less air travel the better, of course. Without these barriers, knowledge can be shared more widely too. The main downside is the lack of organised networking and ability to have in-depth discussions with your colleagues and peers. Perhaps a solution is on the horizon for conference organisers. 

It was brilliant to see so much conversation about open access, including accessibility, be given through open and accessible platforms with no financial restrictions. Open access policy is still developing, and it’s important that conferences continue to highlight and discuss the impact of this.  

A final positive of hosting an online conference is the ability to record and share online for those who can’t make it or to have the information to hand. Speaking of which, you can access all the LIBER sessions here and the REDUX ones here. I thoroughly recommend checking out both. Happy watching! 

EU copyright, quo vadis?

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This month our copyright expert Eugen attended a one day conference in Brussels to keep up to date with the latest developments in Intellectual Property law. “EU copyright, quo vadis? From the EU copyright package to the challenges of Artificial Intelligence” was a one-day conference held at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels on 25th May 2018. It was organised by the European Copyright Society, which is a platform for critical and independent scholarly thinking on European Copyright Law and policy.

There were over 100 participants from almost every European country and almost every area where Intellectual Property has an important contribution: many academics and researchers, practitioners from law firms such as Allen & Overy, consultants from Deloitte, media companies such as Channel 4 Television, ARD or Google, collective societies as ZAiKS Poland and from law courts such as the Ghent Court of Appeal.

The morning session was focused on the ongoing reform of the EU Copyright, the directive proposal that will be debated in the EU Parliament on 21 June 2018. There were presentations (text & data mining, education & libraries, the newly created right for press publishers) by academics highlighting the improvements brought by this proposal and its numerous shortcomings followed by interesting debates between the audience and a group of officials from the European Commission (Copyright Unit I.2, DG CNECT) invited to explain their vision and defend their point of view. Despite this, the general opinion in the room was that the copyright landscape will be polarised between rights-holders, who’s position will be greatly strengthened and enhanced, and a strictly regulated ‘small island of free access’ limited to libraries and universities and not much in between. Some participants were so critical of this proposed directive that they label it as ‘not fit for purpose’.

In the afternoon, the speakers discussed about the looming challenges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to various key notions of copyright therefore the debates were both dry and technical. One particularly interesting debate was about the (proposed) ownership of copyright in machine generated data. Some participants commented that from the point of view of the European car-manufacturers this will balance out the GDPR (which prevents them to use data generated by increasingly sophisticated automobiles) while also preventing overseas competitors to use this data when designing autonomous cars.

There was also a book launch – P.B. Hugenholtz (ed.), Copyright Reconstructed, 2018 (with contributions of five members of the European Copyright Society).

It was extremely interesting to hear the strengths and weaknesses of the forthcoming EU copyright directive and to have a fairly clear idea of what is to come. The conference being organised in Brussels (this year) ensured a wide participation which vigorously (and belatedly) tested the EU officials. It will definitely help if academics and organisations like European Copyright Society, as a part of the civil society, will be more involved in the EU legislative process.

OAI9

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Last week I attended the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9) in Geneva, a workshop looking at developments in scholarly communication, it was a diverse programme and attracted people from all sectors of scholarly communication,  here are some of my highlights from each day;

Day One – Beginning the first day were a choice of tutorials,  I elected  the institution as publisher: getting started presented by UCL who are the first fully Open Access University Press in the UK. This offers a real alternative to commercial publishers, at the moment the majority of UCL Press authors are internal, external authors are liable to pay an APC.

The Keynote by Michael Nielsen, Beyond Open Access, looked at how open access policies should be crafted so they don’t inhibit innovation by constraining experimentation, new media forms and different types of publication. Following this was the session Looking at Barriers and Impact, Erin McKiernan, who is an early career researcher talked about her own experience and barriers she has faced in accessing research, she has made a pledge to be open, her opinion was early career researchers are in a position to be game changers in terms of making their research open. Finally Joseph McArthur, talked about the Open Access button  helping readers find open access versions of research outputs, this is a tool created by young people who frequently faced barriers to accessing research.

Day Two – The second day of the workshop was held at the Campus Biotech

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The first session looked at Open Science Workflows, CHORUS and SHARE, Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer from Utrecht gave a really interesting presentation on the changing workflow of research – they had three goals for science and scholarship – Open, Efficient, Good. We should be supporting open science instead of just open access leading to diminishing traditional journals. This was highlighted using a diagram they created – 101 innovations in scholarly communication, highlighting the patterns and processes of innovation in this field.  This is an ongoing survey of scholarly communication tool usage – part of an ongoing effort to chart the changing landscape of scholarly communication.

Following this session was Quality Assurance, focusing on researchers and reforming the peer review process. Janne-Tuomas Seppanen from Peerage of Science  stated that some peer reviews are excellent – some are not, Peerage of Science tries to address this by the scoring of peer reviews, the idea being that peer reviewers are themselves peer reviewed increasing and quantifying the quality of peer review. This service is free for academics and publishers pay. Andrew Preston from Publons is looking at speeding up science by making peer review faster, more efficient, and more effective. The incentive for reviewers? Making peer review a measurable research output.

I also attended the break out session on Copyright in Data and Text Mining which gave an overview of the legal framework and an introduction to The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age launched in May this year which ‘aims to foster agreement about how to best enable access to facts, data and ideas for knowledge discovery in the Digital Age. By removing barriers to accessing and analysing the wealth of data produced by society, we can find answers to great challenges such as climate change, depleting natural resources and globalisation.’

The second day of the workshop ended in style at the Ariana,  the Swiss museum of glass and ceramics which opened its doors especially for attendees of OAI9.

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Day Three – The focus of the first session was the Institution as Publisher, a new theme for OAI. Catriona Maccallum from PLOS focused on the need for transparency, publishing is a cycle, not just about content provision. The services an institution can offer include; Open Access, Open Access Presses, transparency, assessment, rewards and incentives, she went on to say the institution should be driving changes. Rupert Gatti, Open Book Publisher talked about bringing publishing to a research centre level, open access allows direct dissemination to a different audience and would allow authors to disseminate not just books and articles but other types of scholarly output.The Final speaker in this session, Victoria Tsoukala from National Documentation Centre, National Hellenic Research Foundation talked specifically about open access publishing in the Humanities and gave an overview of University led publishing within her institution looking at the various challenges (funding, outputs being perceived as poorer quality) and the opportunities (ability to regain control, innovation, transparency and fairness and assuming new roles for libraries).

If you’re interested in finding out more, all the presentations are available online by clicking through the programme.