David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

Digital media annotation takes another step forward with Footnote, a buzzword-compliant browsing and annotation tool for images of historical documents.

Footnote original historical document database:

Newly-hatched webapp Footnote offers an impressive database of original historical documents for searching, viewing, annotating and discussing.

See detailed images of historical documents over 100 years old like the Bill of Rights or the Gettysburg address (pictured above) in a modern, dynamic interface. Footnote offers many images for zooming and browsing for free, but you can buy a single image for 2 bucks, or become an “All Access” member for about 10 bucks a month. Great resource for history buffs, students and researchers who need primary sources. See also Wendy’s past feature on finding original documents on the web. — Gina Trapani

Footnote [via Micro Persuasion]

(Via Lifehacker).

The Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) has received an £8.4 million grant from the UK’s Economic & Social Research Council to provide OA to government information. From today’s press release:

The award by the Economic and Social Research Council will renew the services which are free of charge for researchers and students until 2012….

The billions of data items managed by the School of Social Sciences and Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) give researchers access to the census and many national household surveys for free.

They are also a key source for data held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) among others….

The new funding includes:

• £2.01 million for census data.
• £4.39 million for national and international economic and social data.
• £2 million for internet and computer related social science data…

“What makes this significant is that whereas many researchers have paid for this sort of information, our work enables them to access it for free….The data is free at the end point of use and chimes with the Guardian’s free our data campaign….The fact that it is freely available encourages budding researchers to come forward from many countries across the world.”

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It also looks like the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK now plans to adopt an OA mandate.

Main news via Open Access News

This link is straight from the pages of Ofcom. It highlights an assessment of the market impact of the BBC’s proposals for an on demand service.  Many of the BBC’s commercial rivals are weary of the corporation’s plans and are lobbying for Ofcom to take on the role of regulating BBC activity. The link can be found by clicking here.

As part of the SHERPA Plus project SHERPA is holding a series of half day roadshow events across the UK. In this half day session speakers from the SHERPA organisation will explore various key issues surrounding Open Access, institutional repositories, scholarly publication and authors’ rights.

As well as sharing experiences garnered from their various projects and extensive network of partner institutions, there will be an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in the SHERPA suite of supporting websites including OpenDOAR, SHERPA/RoMEO and JULIET. There will be an opportunity to engage in informed debate with the team members presents, as well as to share practical advice with other interested parties in attendance.

The full events programme and booking details are available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/roadshows.html

The closest event to GCU will most likely be at my alma mater St Andrews University, date TBA

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

Full JISC Press Release