RE: 2nd Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication .agendas/Watkinson

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Wasn't there once a time when, UKSG and ALPSP meetings apart (in the UK at
least), senior publishers kept their own counsel and got on with running
the business quietly and efficiently out of public view?

Now the opposite seems to be the case, and it's a lot to do with open
access. Of course, publishers have a major role in OA, and this makes the
current debate more interesting. But there is also the case at the moment
for the academic community to focus on some aspects of open access - e.g.  
institutional archives, funding, assessment - without the constant
distraction of other concerns. We recently held a meeting at Southampton

National Policies on Open Access (OA) Provision for University Research
Output http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html

where the programme didn't include publishers for this reason, and was
successful because it was focussed, or to use Colin Steele's term
'holistic', and therefore somewhat different (Colin was one of the main
instigators and speakers, btw). That did not prevent a range of views
being expressed, and clearly the outcomes will need to take account of the
wider OA picture, for which I'm pleased to note there are currently many
forums.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

At 22:15 04/03/04 -0500, Colin Steele wrote:
> As the first invited speaker in Lund I am certainly not aware of any
> hidden/special agenda. In an 'holistic' approach to scholarly
> communication many of the issues are debates that need to be addressed
> within the scholarly community themselves and this has arguably happened
> only in fragmented fashion to date.I am certainly aware of academic
> practices in relation to commercial publishing and, as Anthony knows,
> Michael Mabe of Elsevier forcefully put the Elsevier view via their author
> study at the Fiesole conference in Oxford last July! Anthony should come
> to Lund to discuss perceived imbalances?  Regards Colin
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Colin Steele. Emeritus Fellow
> Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au