Day 2 of the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference

As the second day of the conference is winding down, I’m happy that I have this blog to document the great presentations I’ve seen today. Michael Geist is answering questions right now - someone has brought up the Rufus Pollock paper on “optimal copyright duration” and Michael has pointed out how immensely long copyright periods are and how strange that is, for example in regards to software.

Before Michael, I heard a very interesting talk by Gregg Gordon of the Social Science Research Network. Gregg addressed many of the issues I’m also interested in, namely how the landscape of knowledge dissemination is changing in the long term, how trust and reputation are essential in (digital) publishing and how scarcity as a paradigm in scholarly publishing is being replaced by abundance (or even overabundance, some might argue).

Earlier this morning Anita Palepu presented Open Medicine, an open access medical journal that was initiated partly as a reaction to the interference with editorial freedom that Anita had previously witnessed. Highlighting that point - that Open Access is not just about bringing down subscription costs for libraries or a convenient way to increase your impact as a scholar, but that it’s the ideal way to prevent conflicts of interest that are virtually everywhere in a $500 million advertising market was an extremely relevant contribution.

People are filing out of Harbour Centre and soon most of us will be back at our desks, working on projects that will hopefully contribute to furthering access to knowledge for everyone, to bringing down the barriers. I really liked something that John Willinsky said in that context. We all have the right - the human right - to know.

Making that possible is definitely something worth working on.

Note that I’ll write a more complete summary of my messy conference notes in the course of the next few days.