[LINK] National Scholarly Communications Forum 2007

[Tom Worthington]

Greeting from National Scholarly Communications Forum 2007 'Improving 
Access to Australian Publicly Funded Research - Advancing Knowledge 
and the Knowledge Economy' at The Shine Dome in Canberra: 
<http://www.humanities.org.au/Events/nscf/nscf2007/NSCF2007Programme.htm>. 
This is a one day event sponsored by DEST held each year. The one 
last year was on "Open Access, Open Archives and Open Source": 
<http://www.humanities.org.au/Events/nscf/NSCFRT19/NSCFRT19.htm>.

The program, with comments (I will update this on my blog, questions 
for the speakers welcome 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/national-scholarly-communications-forum.html>):

9.10 - 9.15     Welcome: Colin Steele, Conveor NSCF, Emeritus Fellow, 
ANU. Colin point out that a third of the conference were still stuck 
on aircraft held up by fog at Canberra airport. Perhaps they should 
have attended electronically. ;-)

9.15 - 10.00    The Global Information Commons, Paul Uhlir, Director 
of the Office of International Scientific and Technical Information 
Programs, National Academies, Washington. Paul gave the rationale for 
access to research results and its relationship to e-publishing. The 
reasoning is similar to that for access to the web by the disabled: 
electronic documents are cheap to distribute, this makes it hard to 
argue why they should not be available to all.

The scholarly and professional societies got a mention in this. The 
ACS is doing its part by publishing research free online 
<http://dl.acs.org.au/>. One risk Paul sees is that some research by 
universities is contracted by outside bodies, who may want to keep 
the results. The ACS sponsors some research by Professor John 
Houghton, but this is provided free online.

Providing scholarly information online will require new skills from 
scholars.  Mr. Uhlir commented that the conference video screen was 
difficult to read. One table in his presentation was unreadable on 
screen and so was provided on paper to each delegate. Unfortunately 
the printed version was also unreadable. The problem was not with the 
display technology, but with the design of the table, which was 
unsuitable for use in any media. Authors can't simply produce stuff 
and leave the problem of making it readable to others.

I asked Mr. Uhlir if young scholars would expect a Web 2.0 ("My 
Space") looking system for papers and data, rather than something 
which looked like traditional scholarly publications he agreed with this.

10.00 - 10.30   Research Communication in Australia: Emerging 
Opportunities and Benefits, Prof. John Houghton, Victoria University. 
Professor Houghton produced a report on new research infrastructure 
for DEST, He provided a systematic overview of the research as an 
industry, with its costs and benefits.

11.00 - 11.30   Public Support for Science and Innovation, Monika 
Binder, Director, Productivity Commission
11.30 - 12.15   Digital Humanities: The ACLS Report on 
Cyberinfrastructure for the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Prof. 
John Unsworth, University of Illinois
1.15 - 1.45     Open Access to Knowledge (OAKL): Intellectual 
Property, Copyright and Licensing Issues, Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, QUT
1.45 - 2.15     Biological open Source Developments - A Case Study 
for Science, Dr Richard Jefferson, CEO Cambia
2.15 - 2.40     Finding Gold in Europe: JISC, Research Councils and 
CERN, Frederick Friend, UK JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
3.00 - 3.30     Australia's Research Quality Framework and Research 
Accessibility, Dr Evan Arthur, Group Manager, Innovation and Research 
Systems Group, DEST
3.30 - 4.15     Overviews and Outcomes, Panel Discussion: Dr Mike 
Sargent, Prof. Warwick Anderson, Paul Uhlir and Dr Rhys Francis
---

Unlike the China New Media conference, I felt like I knew almost 
everyone in the room. You will see many of the people and topics I 
have written about previously.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml