DRIVER is proud to announce the validator tool, developed by the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. The validator checks your repository on OAI-PMH compliance, DRIVER-DC compliance and DRIVER guidelines. The DRIVER guidelines are an interoperability tool that act as a a 'Bible' for European repository managers. They also embody the vision of DRIVER for a common, standardized, European Information Space. Validate (test) your repository (e.g. specific sets, and preferably only 20-50% of these records) and tell us about it!
Feedback welcome!
OA news
The OA mandate for 20% of the FP7 research outputs is very (!) welcome news for the European OA movement, which asked for a general OA mandate in February 2007. More info, FAQs and details are to be found at the Commission's Press Release Page.
Nevertheless, it remains necessary to be heard in terms of influencing new copyright laws. Peter Suber alerted us on the EC Green paper, which is open for comments and has a great impact on digital libraries, publishing and intellectual property right. You can reply/comment to one or more questions, so don't hold yourself back. It is important for the future of digital libraries to make sure we are being heard by the EC when it comes to these matters.
October 14th is Worldwide Open Access Day. This has been defined by SPARC, PLOS, Students for OA and some other large organizations. Check the blog and infosite here. Our favorite awareness 'guerrilla' action is the 'Overpriced' tagging of the most expensive journals in the library. It's a fun activity (check the 'double priced' tags for journals in which an author has also paid publication costs), and makes the message to readers very clear.
There's a new edition (°73) of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography by Charles W. Bailey Jr. This selective bibliography presents over 3,350 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
The SHERPA site now offers efficient lists of publishers via their website, such as 'recently added publishers', 'updated policies' and 'publishers that allow PDF self-archiving'. Check out the new features.
Technical News
On August 22nd, the workshop 'Search&Find' took place at Ghent University Library , with speakers such as Herbert Vande Sompel (LANL) and Ivan Herman (W3C). This meeting had the Semantic Web and ORE as its focus. Slides and presentations can be found here.
The 2008 TICER course ' Digital Libraries à la carte', with course director dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem, was a great success. DRIVER validator demos and hands-on sessions were organized, you can find the slides (all are interesting, but mostly recommended: W. Horstmann, Manghi & Vanderfeesten, and Vande Sompel) here.
Events
OAI Berlin 6:
"Five years ago, researchers from a wide range of disciplines came together to draft the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which stressed the significance of unrestricted access to research results via the Internet for the future of academic publishing.
The fifth follow-up conference to this event, which takes place 11-13 November 2008 in Düsseldorf (Germany), will assess the global state of Open Access in 2008: its successes as a model for making scientific information more broadly available and the challenges it creates for established models of disseminating research results."
The 2008 SPARC Institutional Repositories Meeting. Baltimore, November 17-18, 2008.
"Coming on the heels of two groundbreaking U.S. developments—a recent vote by Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling the university to offer access to their articles in an institutional repository and implementation of a new National Institutes of Health public access policy—as well as unprecedented advancement in the international sphere over the past year, the meeting will enable stakeholders to explore next steps for the burgeoning open archiving movement.
Librarians, researchers, funders, administrators, government officials, publishers, and technologists from around the world will share their experiences and best practices in building and supporting institutional and disciplinary digital repositories. The focus will be on effective engagement with scholars and scientists to expand the sharing of research outputs via open repositories."