CERN Workshop Series on Innovation in Scholarly Communication:

Implementing the benefits of OAI

Mission

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was founded in 2000 to bring the benefits of open archives-compliant software to the research community and launch an international network of institutional repositories. Since OAI's founding, there have been many successful applications of the technology, and a simultaneous, widespread understanding that open archives technology is the foundation for the future of research. In the field of scholarly communication there has also been a remarkable evolution: open access journals have achieved respectability through the activities of BioMed Central and PLoS and the number of such journals is rising; scholarly societies are becoming interested in the open access model, and we have seen some society publishers adopt the open access model. The foremost granting agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. have both issued statements supporting open access.

However, libraries have not yet reaped large benefits from the OAI's success. Through publishers' "big deals," more commercial journal titles than ever before are accessible, and library budgets are tightly bound to them in long-term contracts. Library customers are growing accustomed to the enormous comfort offered by the databases of those publishers and, as a consequence, switching to alternative models for scientific communication has become less and less acceptable. We want to change this. The third CERN workshop will bring together librarians and information specialists, publishers, scientists and university managers who want to bring the benefits of open archives technology and open access publishing to libraries. The conference's action-focused agenda will prioritize initiatives to be undertaken, in order to increase the impact of OAI on the process of scientific publishing.

The Programme

A set of optional morning tutorials are planned on OAI-PMH, using OAI-compliant archive software and taking advantage of existing archives using application software.

The workshop will then move onto discussions, first with a round-up of the present situation regarding the development of the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH), the range of OAI projects, freely-available OAI software and OAI servers. The emphasis will lie on new developments since the previous workshop. Next, participants will discuss the new initiatives that have arisen within the world of publishers regarding business models and the philosophy around scientific communication.

The final part of the programme will be a real "workshop" where the participants will have the opportunity to discuss the role OAI should play in the future of scientific publishing. At the concluding session, we will formulate a series of concrete conclusions on which we can continue to build.