Brian Owen
Associate Dean of Libraries & PKP Managing Director
Simon Fraser University & Public Knowledge Project (PKP)
Debra Hanken Kurtz
CEO
DuraSpace
Mark Jordan
Head of Systems & Chair, Islandora Board of Directors
Simon Fraser University & Islandora Foundation
Kathleen Shearer
Executive Director
COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories)
The Elsevier acquisition of bepress has served as a wake-up call for the “open” scholarly communication community and is forcing us to rethink the balance of commercial and community players in the current system. This session brings together two key components in the academic community’s pursuit of open scholarly communication, namely repository and publishing systems. The questions posed will be concerned with the current state of this infrastructure in terms of what the academic community has already developed, the extent to which these developments are open, and the need for developing additional parts and a much greater degree of interoperability among existing and potential parts. Those parts include repositories, journal and monograph publishing platforms, research information management systems, researcher bios, bibliographic systems, and so on. Using the audience-response software Poll Everywhere, the audience will be invited to comment on how greater coordination can be achieved in terms of (a) developing a coordinating body; (b) building plug-in capacities for interoperability and resource hand-off; (c) resolving differences in metadata standards across systems; and (d) demonstration integration projects.
John Willinsky of the Public Knowledge Project and Stanford University contributed significantly to the proposal of this project briefing.