Professional Development

Day 2 of SPARC began with a discussion of Open Access polices. Presenters included representatives from Europe, Japan, and the US and in all 3 cases demonstrated that this is still a developing area. In conversations with attendees I have heard two themes emerge relating to OA - first, that OA is a tangential concept to institutional repositories that can often cloud the issue if you are trying to build faculty and institutional interest in a repository and second, that OA requires support at the institutional, governmental, funding agency, and faculty body level in order to be successful.

The discussion around OA was not nearly as focused as the ideas for generating interest and garnering support for IRs and it seemed that while everyone at the conference values OA that there is not yet a clear cut plan. The presentation by Bonnie Klein regarding the requirement of OA for federally supported projects demonstrated how variable these requirements are even for federally funded projects. She discussed issues of policy, priority, and infrastructure as being influential in driving OA requirements from federal agencies. Data sets were cited as being a complicating factor for OA. Few organizations/agencies have the infrastructure in place to handle the archiving and distribution of this information.

During Q&A the interest in the implications on publishing and concerns about what OA means for publishers was a recurring theme. Common concerns included the impact of a changing publishing model has on sustainability/profit and the impact on peer-review and scholarship. The lack of peer review in OA was seen as a disruptive that has implication for faculty/tenure, ongoing scholarship, and institutional support for OA publications. Oxford UP was cited as an example of a publisher working to add value to publications and to change their subscription models for publications that went OA.

Today saw some interesting presentations. In the morning I went to a panel on institutional repositories which included a presentation by Tabatha Becker on the University of Colorado’s work in publishing an Undergraduate Research Journal using an open source platform. As we talk about libraries re-examining their roles it is interesting to see someone taking on the elements of review and editorship in order to produce and preserve undergraduate research.

The last session of the day for me included a presentation on the Chronopolis, a grid-based digital object preservation system. The presenter, Robert McDonald, talked also more generally about the role that grid services and cloud computing can play in library services during the question and answer section. Chronopolis is a good example of the type of service that libraries really cannot implement on their own and it made me wonder about the impact of cloud based services on leveling the playing field for libraries. On the heels of a presentation about managing IT departments which clearly demonstrated how large and complex technology is getting in libraries, it made me wonder about the impact that cloud/grid based services would have on closing the gap between the technology services that libraries need and the capacity they have to manage them.

The sunday morning poster sessions included a common theme on ‘library 2.0′ and ‘web 2.0′ concepts. Perhaps most interesting of the posters was a discussion by Bobby Goff at Mississippi State University about the beginning of the library’s work in releasing open source software.