Announcement [crossposted]

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication:
"Implementing the benefits of OAI"
3rd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI3)

LIBER, SPARC and SPARC-Europe, and the CERN Library are organising the
third OAI workshop at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland) on 12-14 February 2004.

Please see further details and book online at
http://info.web.cern.ch/info/OAIP/

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was founded in 2000 to bring the
benefits of open archives-compliant software to the research community and
launch an international network of institutional repositories.

Since OAI's founding, there have been many successful applications of the
technology, and a simultaneous, widespread understanding that open archives
technology is the foundation for the future of research. In the field of
scholarly communication there has also been a remarkable evolution: open
access journals have achieved respectability through the activities of
BioMed Central and PLoS and the number of such journals is rising;
scholarly societies are becoming interested in the open access model, and
we have seen some society publishers adopt the open access model. The
foremost granting agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. have both issued
statements supporting open access.

However, libraries have not yet reaped large benefits from the OAI's success.

Through publishers' "big deals," more commercial journal titles than ever
before are accessible, and library budgets are tightly bound to them in
long-term contracts. Library customers are growing accustomed to the
enormous comfort offered by the databases of those publishers and, as a
consequence, switching to alternative models for scientific communication
has become less and less acceptable. We want to change this.

The third CERN workshop will bring together librarians and information
specialists, publishers, scientists and university managers who want to
bring the benefits of open archives technology and open access publishing
to libraries. The conference's action-focused agenda will prioritize
initiatives to be undertaken, in order to increase the impact of OAI on the
process of scientific publishing.

[sent on behalf of the OAI3 Organising Committee]
http://info.web.cern.ch/info/OAIP/Committee.htm