Ulrich Herb has written a review of the conference on Open Access to Grey Resources (Nancy, December 5-6, 2005). It appeared in The Grey Journal, Spring 2006. Excerpt:
Defining Grey Literature as...“Information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body” OA to grey literature is – due to the absence of publishing houses – less affected by licence arrangements than OA to white literature....
Dr. Laurent Romary’s inaugural address explicated the OA strategy of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS. He presented a central multidisciplinary OA repository based on the system HAL (hyper article en ligne) and emphasized the advantages of the standardization a centralized model offers: simplified investigation of bibliometric data, implementation of citation counting and linking techniques, homogenous usage statistics and metadata, easy application of preservation technologies and other aspects as uniform interfaces. Daniela Luzi summarized the status quo of Italian OA efforts. Joachim Schöpfel’s lecture “MetaGrey Europe, A Proposal in the Aftermath of EAGLESIGLE” focused on networking, meta search techniques and the transmutation of the grey literature database SIGLE to an Open Archive variant as OpenSIGLE. Keith G. Jeffery and Anne Asserson informed about approaches to compound the genesis of scientific information with its description and indexation by refining metadata incrementally during the process of editing the information and obtaining its lifecycle. Stefania Biagioni reported on the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL) which will be migrated to the software OpenDLIB. Through their explanation of the existential necessity of OA to public health information, June Crowe and Gail Hodge emphasized the importance of basal, technical OA from an apolitical point of view - far from copyright issues. Repositories might relieve some problems but other still remain virulent: funding, policy development and sustainability. Mohammad Reza Ghane presented a survey about the OA acceptance of Iranian scientists while Hyekyong Hwang talked about research output and its distribution in Korea. Marcus A. Banks summarized the history of OA reconsidering a possible amalgamation of grey and white literature by OA activities.
A focal point of [the meeting] was devoted to concrete projects. Mitsutoshi Wada informed about JStage, a publication platform for ejournals offering interfaces for databases and other ejournals. It provides COUNTER-compatible usage statistics and uses several linking techniques. Toby Green from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported on a vast project in which 1000 working papers were republished. In his presentation the value of pure accessibility took center stage. He gave insight into this project’s challenges: Collection and sorting of information, the development of a metadata model, quality control, workflow and database development, implementation of interfaces and (partially) the digitalization of print objects. Moreover the author of this review gave a lecture about the disciplinary psychological repository PsyDok focusing on its integration into retrieval systems, long term preservation, quality control, the forthcoming implementation of a print on demand service, the usage of Creative Commons licenses, the intended use of new quality measurement techniques and other enhancements. Christiane Stock informed about LARA, the nationwide, multidisciplinary repository for grey literature at INIST-CNRS. Before LARA starts the holders of copyrights must be elicited (and arrangements concerning copyright must be made), “born digital” information must be indexed retrospectively, printed material must be digitalized, a workflow and publication model must be developed and the software DSpace must be customized. GL7 demanded to adopt a longsighted view: Firstly because the importance of an essential (and global) OA approach – a long way off all license and publishing houses versus OA advocates debates - became evident, secondly because it specified which obstacles will have to be overcome when these debates might have vanished.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/03/2006 08:48:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
