CERN today [Sept 16] took another step to advance its OA policy by holding a meeting of authors and key managers within the institution to discuss the different publishing business models. The aim was to consider the alternative systems for the publication of its future results in OA journals. Since nearly 80% of its own results are already available as OA copies in its institutional repository, recent policy at CERN has focused on OA publishing.
The meeting was attended by well over 100 CERN staff who heard the many different viewpoints on the topic from the invited speakers and enthusiastically participated in the following debate. A big concern that was expressed many times was that OA material is electronic and that e-archiving isn't yet sorted out. Matthew Cockerill from BioMedCentral, who had been invited to participate, managed to very clearly and logically point out that OA is actually the best solution to these problems: preserving print is already no longer sufficient to preserve access and once we accept that all publishing is done electronically we can see that OA actually makes it easier to both preserve access and achieve long-term archiving. The auditorium sprang into spontaneous applause after his argument and the focus of discussion moved on.
It is clear that action from CERN alone will have little impact on the publishing system, even just within high energy physics, and so CERN intends to invite different stakeholders from across Europe to a second meeting in December to try to forge collaborations which can help to rapidly move forward on this issue. Today's questions and opinions from the authors will be fed into the planning of the next steps in the institution's strategy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/17/2005 12:11:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
