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Some reflections on the Berlin 11 conference, Berlin November 2013.

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The following are some things I particularly noticed at the Berlin 11 open access conference, which I attended earlier this week, with apologies for any misunderstandings, misattributions or mis-categorisations.
Vision
The research and education enterprise is in need of urgent transformation (Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University)
The epistemic web: a universal and traceable web of knowledge. (Ulrich Poschl, Max Planck)
There can’t be insiders and outsiders in scientific knowledge (David Willets, UK Government)
Aim for ZEN: Zero Embargo Now (Glyn Moody)
Students at the heart of the open access movement (Nick Shockey, Right to Research Coalition)
Disruption
Open access: disruption is a feature, not a bug. (Mike Taylor, University of Bristol)
We need disruption to ensure that we don’t carry unhelpful practices into a new scholarly communications arrangements (Cameron Neylon, PLOS)
While cultural change takes time, we need to watch that we don’t set in stone things that we know not to be right (Cameron Neylon, PLOS)
The status of scientific communication
Researchers should control the organisation of scientific knowledge, and bottom-up standardisation ensures acceptance (Robert Stogl, MPG)
Scientific knowledge is a public good, and top-down policies ensure action to ensure it remains so (Cameron Neylon, PLOS)
Clay Shirky says that publishing is not a job or an industry, it’s a button. The publishing services we need are analogous to Red Hat services for Linux software (Glyn Moody)
We need to recognise that public research and education is paid in advance, and the IPR created is in a distinct class of its own (John Willinsky, PKP and Stanford)
Scientific diversity
All disciplines can move to OA, in different ways (Gunter Stock, ALLEA)
Scientific knowledge is diverse; we need biblio-diversity, beyond the Web of Science monoculture. (Marin Dacos, OpenEdition)
The social sciences and humanities need their own subject repositories (Nicholas Canny, ERC)
Some of the concerns about OA from the social sciences and humanities are legitimate, and some are not (Nicholas Canny, ERC)
Policies
We are balancing cost-effectiveness, openness, fast access and effective quality review (Roger Genet, Directorate General for Research and Innovation, France)
Will the US OSTP Directive be codified into law and, if so, will it be stronger, weaker or about the same? (Heather Joseph, SPARC)
Incentives
Researchers don’t write to communicate, but to be seen and counted; if communication is important, then it needs to be incentivised. (Cameron Neylon, PLOS)
Most scientists don’t directly benefit from OA (Robert Schlogl, Max Planck)
Unless their publication is in the repository, then it doesn’t exist (Bernard Rentier, University of Liege)
Making the transition to OA
Subscription funds must be moved to pay for Gold OA (Peter Gruss, MPG)
Take international coordinated action to cut subscription budgets by 30% and reallocate the money for APCs (Ulrich Poschl, Max Plank)
Authors might refuse to submit papers to hybrid journals that are seen to be “double dipping”. (David Willets, UK Government)
We expect publishers to take action on transparent and competitive pricing to show that the UK was right to support the hybrid model (David Willets, UK Government)
A UK Minister of State cannot advise independent universities on their promotion practices, for example to encourage OA, but the Royal Society might (David Willets, UK Government)
As students, we use music, art, poetry and even free medical examinations to interest people in OA (Daniel Mutonga, Medical Student Association of Kenya)
The core competences in a digital age are navigation, authentication, integration and innovation (Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University)
Trust us (David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, students and inventors of the OA button, see below)
Coordination
A new kind of library, the DPLA, has been launched by bringing together coalitions of libraries and of funders (Robert Darnton, Harvard University)
There needs to be greater coordination between research funders, and the French Academy has agreed to support a biannual funders meeting between Berlin conferences. (Peter Gruss, MPG)
The Berlin conferences will from now on be biannual (Peter Gruss, MPG)
We need every research organisation to have a committee reporting directly to the head of the organisation, to monitor progress, experiments, requirements and infrastructure (Robert Schlogl, Max Planck)
Standards and interoperability are key: we need a new standards body for open access and open data (Robert Schlogl, Max Planck)
Progress
Linux, arXiv and the Web all started in a single week in August 1991 (Glyn Moody)
With Scielo, tailored versions of OJS and DSpace, Brazil and Latin America are leading OA (Sely Costa, University of Brasilia)
China and India have heard concerns from the west that they are not opening their research as quickly as the west. Now, some 34% of Chinese papers are OA (Xiaolin Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
The lack of OA journals is limiting Gold OA growth (Ulrich Poschl, Max Planck)
Monitoring
We need to instrument the research process (Cameron Neylon, PLOS)
We need to agree which data are useful to us in monitoring progress toward OA (Robert Schlogl, Max Planck)
We need evidence on both the costs and wider benefits of shorter embargo periods (Heather Joseph, SPARC)
The open access button will make visible the occasions where people hit a paywall (David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, students)
Research, scholarship and the wider economy and society
Germany invests 2.9% GDP on R+D, and is revising copyright law to help innovation (Georg Schutte, Feneral Ministry of Education and Research, Germany)
Chinese spending on R+D is rising at 15% – 20% p.a. Citations and collaborations in Chinese papers are increasing (Xiaoling Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Of the 1m unique users of PubMedCentral a day, two-thirds come from outside the academic domain (Heather Joseph, SPARC)
Who needs access outside research institutions? whoneedsaccess.org (Mike Taylor, University of Bristol)
The fragments (documents, photographs, etc) that are of little importance to someone, might be of immense value to someone else as a piece of their history, and together they create stories for the future (Haim Gertner, Yad Vashem)
The DPLA is a distributed and democratic model; we have “scanabego” vehicles going to local communities to digitise content that is important to them (Robert Danton, Harvard University)
Software
Why is software not included in the Berlin Declaration (Glyn Moody)
Researchers might see software as their core intellectual property, and might not want to share it openly. The Royal Society will consider this. (David Willetts, UK Government)
Data
Only two of the top 20 big data companies are European, public-private partnerships might improve this for Europe (Carl-Christian Buhl, EC)
The scholarly record is challenged by a separation between idea (publication) and evidence (data), and more concretely by link rot. (David Willetts, UK Government)
Research communities need to take the lead on data: the Royal Society Open Data Forum will consider the issues of standards and skills (David Willetts, UK Government)


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