Palace of the Academies, Brussels,
September 20 - 21. 2004

CRIS + Open Access = The Route to Research Knowledge

Information exchange through institutional archives and the European research Area (ERA)

 
Building on the success of Transforming Research Information into Knowledge (pdf), our seminar held in Brussels, September 2003, we want to invite you to participate again as a strategic partner in the second seminar in this series. We have received positive feedback on the report we generated from the September 2003 seminar; we hope you enjoyed reading it and found it useful to distribute to your key contacts within and outside your organisation.

For our next seminar in September 2004, we have tentatively decided on a theme CRIS + Open Access = The Route to Research Knowledge - Information exchange through institutional archives and the European Research Area (ERA)

The rationale behind this theme is as follows: open access and archives, now economically and technically possible thanks to advances in technology, provide an opportunity and a set of challenges;

(a) will open access publishing be acceptable to researchers as a vehicle to make their work and themselves known, and to encourage scholarly dialogue
(b) will open access publishing be acceptable to research evaluators forming ‘league tables’ of research organisations,
(c) will the open access archives be personal (self-archiving), institutional (knowledge of an organisation) or maintained by a scientific community whether a learned society or a publisher acting for the community;
(d) will the open access material be available toll-free or charged;
(e) is there a conventional publishing business anymore;
(f) will reviewing be continued as now using panels of reviewers or will reviewing become spontaneous annotations attached to a publication;
(g) is there anymore a distinction between ‘white’ and ‘grey’ literature;
(h) will access be through web search and harvesting or through controlled metadata with thesauri;

Several EuroCRIS members have demonstrated integration of metadata representing publications (in some cases leading electronically to the original material) as an extension within the CERIF data model framework.

In this topic we believe there is interest at least as follows:
(1) ESF: publication quality of scholarly work in Europe;
(2) EARMA: evaluation of research, league tables, bibliometrics and scientometrics;
(3) ICSU/CODATA: publishing metadata standards and the interfacing to original scientific datasets;
(4) ALLEA: publishing through and for learned societies;
(5) ERCIM: IT to support the process, intersection with the DELOS network and associated projects
 

May 3, 2004 AA