Day 2 of SPARC began with a discussion of Open Access polices. Presenters included representatives from Europe, Japan, and the US and in all 3 cases demonstrated that this is still a developing area. In conversations with attendees I have heard two themes emerge relating to OA – first, that OA is a tangential concept to institutional repositories that can often cloud the issue if you are trying to build faculty and institutional interest in a repository and second, that OA requires support at the institutional, governmental, funding agency, and faculty body level in order to be successful.
The discussion around OA was not nearly as focused as the ideas for generating interest and garnering support for IRs and it seemed that while everyone at the conference values OA that there is not yet a clear cut plan. The presentation by Bonnie Klein regarding the requirement of OA for federally supported projects demonstrated how variable these requirements are even for federally funded projects. She discussed issues of policy, priority, and infrastructure as being influential in driving OA requirements from federal agencies. Data sets were cited as being a complicating factor for OA. Few organizations/agencies have the infrastructure in place to handle the archiving and distribution of this information.
During Q&A the interest in the implications on publishing and concerns about what OA means for publishers was a recurring theme. Common concerns included the impact of a changing publishing model has on sustainability/profit and the impact on peer-review and scholarship. The lack of peer review in OA was seen as a disruptive that has implication for faculty/tenure, ongoing scholarship, and institutional support for OA publications. Oxford UP was cited as an example of a publisher working to add value to publications and to change their subscription models for publications that went OA.