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While Thursday afternoon included a number of interesting sessions, two in particular stood out for me because they emphasized the Open Access and Scholarly Publishing movements. . . .
The first came from Eric Larson at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Eric works with the Office of Scholarly Communication & Publishing. He demonstrated some techniques that he is using to harvest/mashup publication data for faculty members with the goal of providing unified views of how/where UM scholars are publishing, and interestingly how many of those articles are available for inclusion in institutional repositories. Eric employed a number of web2.0 style interface features including topic based tag clouds, RSS feeds on recent publications, both scholar and departmental views of the data, and microformats. While this clearly does not solve all of the issues surrounding why institutional repositories are having difficulty realizing their goals, it was an excellent example of how an IR can deliver a service to faculty rather than just collecting their publications and I think demonstrated an interesting approach for positioning an institutional repository.

The last presentation of the day was from Heather Joseph at SPARC. As she covered the SPARC perspective/approach, she mentioned a recently published article in the journal Nature titled PR’s ‘pit bull’ takes on open access. The article recounts the work of a consultant on behalf of certain publishers (who are opposed to open publishing models) and is well worth the read.