Mike’s talks at the Berlin 11 conference | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

"Well, folks, I’m back from Berlin. And what an extraordinary couple of days it was. There were in fact three days of open-access talks, though I was only able to be there for the first two. Day one was the satellite conference, aimed at early-career researchers; days two and three were the much larger main conference, attended mostly by heavy hitters: senior librarians, university administrators, a sprinkling of politicians, and of course some researchers and publishers. It was my privilege to speak at both satellite and main conferences. This post is really just to advertise those talks. Why am I doing this? Because I’m convinced that they’re by far the most important talks I’ve ever given. It’s great fun to talk about Barosaurus at SVPCA, or about intervertebral cartilage in Bonn, but if someone says to me that that work doesn’t really matter in a cosmic sense, I’ll be hard put to find reasons why they’re wrong. But open access has profound and immediate consequences for health, industry, education, third-world development, and more fields than I can list ... First up, at the satellite conference, my subject was: Towards universal Open Access: what we can do about it, and who should do it. My goal here was to help researchers see what practical steps they can take right now towards the open-access goal that we all aspire to. I covered six areas: [1] Publish our own work open access (whether Gold or Green) [2] Review for Open Access journals [3] Edit for Open Access journals [4] Advocate Open Access policies [5] Deprecate journal rank [6] Talk about Open Access ... In the main conference, I used my slot to remind us all that Open Access is about sharing, unity and sanity, not about money. Because I was addressing a more senior audience that necessarily has to think more about practicalities, finances, ways and means, I wanted to take the opportunity to remember that those are not the issues that gave birth to Open Access; rather, it started out as an unabashedly idealistic movement (as reading any of the three great declarations will show you). I don’t want us to walk away from that high-ground and be reduced to thinking only about practicalities, important though they are ... I’d like to finish by thanking my employer, Index Data. As most of you know, I am not a career academic: I work on sauropods in my spare time (and advocate open access in my spare spare time), earning my living as a computer programmer. By the time the invitations to speak at the Berlin conferences came in, I’d already booked up my annual leave allowance, so I had to ask for permission to take unpaid days for the conference. Instead, Index Data gave me two more paid days — because they, like me, believe in the importance of open access.  This is all the more laudable since, if anything, universal open access will harm our business. A significant part of what we build is authentication mechanisms to allow people (legitimate) access to paywalled resources. Once everything is open, no-one will need to pay us to do that. It’s greatly to Index Data’s credit that, despite this, they want to help us push on towards a goal that will benefit society as a whole ..."