On the 1st of March I attended a colloquium run by the Institute of Historical Research on the subject The Finch Report, open access and the historical community.

The event was split into three panels trying to give the society, publisher and intermediary views from the historical community. It was attended by a range of people from students and researchers to publishing company VPs and there was a lot of lively discussion. Suffice to say I felt a bit out of my depth.

The main issues that came out of the discussion were:

• In the humanities and social sciences green open access is preferable but it needs to be sustainable and the embargo periods need to be right (not too short)
• Humanities and social sciences are very different from STM subjects and so there can't be a one size fits all gold OA policy
• There are international concerns, mainly that the UK is going out on a limb by leading the way in OA and this could result in it becoming isolated in the global research environment
• There needs to be a diverse publishing environment and that publishing can't just be left to those big companies that can manage APCs as this may end in a monopoly that kills off smaller publications and publishers
• Licenses are still a thorny issue and people are still not sure what CC licenses cover

So as you can see there is still a lot of work to be done by governments, funding bodies and the academic community and publishers to make open access work for everyone. It all seems to boil down to the fact that people still don't understand OA completely. There needs to be more communication to rid people of their misconceptions about OA - and that's across the board including those making the policy and those doing the research.

One area that people seemed most confused about was monographs and where they fit in with recent research council mandates. In fact most people were barely thinking about monographs at all and they were definitely marginalised in this journal-heavy discussion. And why not when an academic can get the same REF score for writing two journal articles as they can for spending months, or even years, writing a monograph. But what these academics don't seem to understand is that if no one rallies for monographs we might lose them altogether.

But not to worry, monographs have a champion in the form of Jisc Collectios' OAPEN - UK scheme. This scheme sees a number of monographs from a range of subjects and publishers being made openly available online via the publisher website and Google Books. Caren Milloy from Jisc was there to make the case for monographs and to make sure they weren't left out of the discussion, and of course to plug the upcoming Jisc Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference in July.

So all in all a really good afternoon that raised a lot of issues, and I got a few business cards too.

I've had a busy week so I thought I would combine everything into one lovely post.

To start with there was day 4 at Jisc Collections. This week I was looking in detail at the results of some workshops Jisc did with publishers and authors. They asked groups of each to identify what parts of the publishing process they were involved with and how long it took them. This was really interesting as it gave me a chance to see all the hidden things that publishers do behind the scenes. When you say publishing most people just think editorial, you know

So a few fellow students interested and I attended an National Union of Journalists debate on Open Access hosted by the Wellcome Trust.The discussion was on the importance of editorial quality in Open Access publishing.



There was a great line up of speakers:

Philip Campbell - Editor-in-Chief, Nature 
Matt Cockerill - BioMed Central and Springer STM Professor
Stephen Curry - Imperial College and open access blogger
Peter Lee - Publishing Director, Cell Press 
Mark Patterson - Managing Executive Editor of open access journal eLife 
Pete Wrobel - NUJ, Magazines and Books

It was a really interesting discussion that raised a lot of questions about how people view Open Access. The main issue that came up was that some people feel that publishers no longer add that much value to articles but others argue that, especially with very technical STM articles, the editors play a vital role in making the content readable for the general reader.

So access isn't just a question of getting hold of the articles but being able to understand them as well and this is where editorial still have an important role.

A lot else was said and some people were voicing very passionate opinions because they felt this was their first chance to have their say (non-academic users of the content mainly). But there isn't space here to go into all the details but don't worry, the whole thing was filmed and posted on YouTube.

The one thing you will miss out by only seeing the video is the boozing and schmoozing at the end. We chatted with some big wigs from the NUJ and got some contact details so the evening was definitely a success, even if we may need to develop our mingling techniques to be a bit less blunt.

So on Tuesday I started at my new work placement with Jisc Collections. They are a government funded organisation that work on behalf of libraries and universities to secure good deals on journals but they also do a lot of research into new forms of access - and that's where I come in.

I am very interested in Open Access and hope to write my dissertation on it so this place really appealed to me. The research they do into not just open access but all new access models available to academics and researchers is so interesting, if you're into that kind of thing. And from what I learnt on my first day I think this placement is going to be really useful.

But day one means taking things slow and getting to grips with the place which is what we did. I arrived with my fellow Brookesian (that's a word right) and we were shown into a meeting room where our supervisor talked us through who Jisc are, what they do, why they do it and how we could help. Then we had an office tour and met everyone else and then it was lunchtime. So not much done yet.

But after lunch we got to work collating the results of a survey done by Humanities researchers about access models and how they feel about them, specifically how they feel about self-publishing as an option for their work. It was so interesting to see the range of responses although what came across the most was that the current academic climate wouldn't recognise self-published work and so many thought it would be a waste of their time to try and do it. Better to leave it to publishers who know what they are doing and would bring a level of prestige to the work.

But at the same time many were dissatisfied with the current service they were getting from publishers and would like to move away from the traditional publishing models if only the culture would let them. So it all comes down to people needing to be better informed about Open Access and self-publishing if they are going to accept it as a legitimate form of publishing.

Not bad for the first day. So I look forward to seeing what else I can learn over the coming weeks.

So i bang on about open access a lot on here and I realise that people may not be interested.... so I'm going to include a video in this post to make it more exciting.

This video was made as part of Open Access Week and explains the principles of open access, that journal content is free to access by anyone not just those who subscribe to the journal, but more importantly, I think, it demonstrates the climate that has made a shift to open access so necessary.

The people narrating the video are clearly scientists who have become frustrated at how hard it has become for them, and others like them, to access scientific material even though it is available online. You can really feel the anger and frustration coming through the cartoons and it is this frustration that led to the Elsevier boycott, the Finch report and the new edicts by research councils that require publishers to offer open access on any research council funded articles/journals by April 2013.

But these guys don't just represent the scientists, they also draw attention to often forgotten issues such as the fact that journal articles are particularly hard to access in developing countries and in some ways this is impeding their educational and academic development.

While informative, this video is still very bias and doesn't go in depth into the reality and sustainability of open access, especially for those in arts and humanities but it is a good introduction into why open access is such a hot topic in journals publishing at the moment. So enjoy!

Even though my supervisor is still away sunning herself, she has left me a lot to be getting on with.

Today I was scouting out submissions for the perspectives (opinion articles) section of one of Wiley's medical journals. This involved familiarising myself with the format and then searching through letters to the editor to see if there was anything that might make a good full-length article. I was completely lost content-wise but I feel I got the hang of the task and could see why this kind of research is important for finding new content, but perhaps more importantly new contributors.

From here I moved on the collating the results of an online survey about open access nursing journals. I chose to sort out the answers to one of the most open ended questions on the survey - which open access journals have you accessed? Answers ranged from the somewhat over-helpful lists of many

So it's finally happened, they finally got me. I ended up fancy photocopying and shelving things - the work experience double.

My supervisor is away sunning herself in Morocco but she left me a task to be getting on with. I had to work my way through a list of journals, searching them on the Wiley Online Library, printing off the editorial board, scanning it and saving the PDF in a special file for the infamous Sheila, whoever Sheila is.

It wasn't the most inspiring of tasks but I did get to play on the super-duper, space age printer that knew who I was and could email me things. Silver-lining hey. And then when I finished my reward was shelving past editions of journals - woo!

But the day wasn't entirely spent printing and filing. Wiley have kindly organised