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.

So here are the talks.

Satellite meeting talk

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

Along the way, we talked about the open-access citation advantage, the (mostly non-) problem of article processing charges, the complete non-problem of “predatory open-access publishers”, the acceptable length of Green-OA embargoes (zero), the SV-POW! decision tree, publishers’ lack of control over what you do before you sign the copyright transfer, the inability of impact factor to predict citation count (post to come), the childishness of evaluating individuals by journal rank, and the knotty problem of who should take responsibility for fixing our current broken system.

Here are a few tweets that went out as I was giving this talk: “a blistering, fantastic presentation“, “Can we get a twitter round of applause … Absolutely BRILLIANT presentation“, “TOTALLY BRILLIANT“, “This is why we HAVE to record these conferences. Not recording that presentation would be a crime“, “It was AWESOME!“, and finally my favourites: “making you not just know #openaccess , but feel it” and “Mike’s talks at the #Berlin11 conference was 1of the most emotional 1’s I have ever seen!”

I actually don’t know whether it’s going to be possible for people who missed the live stream to watch this talk. That was the plan, but I heard a rumour that the recording went wrong. If a video does becomes available, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, you can at least get the slides [PowerPoint or exported PDF]. They are CC By.

Main meeting talk

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.

Publishers and their associates often say — rightly, as far as they go — that “Scientific and technical publishing is a business“. But no-one goes into it because of they money they can make. Everyone involved in doing or publishing research surely got into that business because their eyes were on a higher prize. So the burden of my talk was that publishing research is a mission; that far from “getting rid of the idealists“, we should cherish them; and that we should encourage rather than curb our own idealistic tendencies.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of the whole conference was giving this talk — you might almost call it a preach — and watching the nodding agreement spread across the audience. Folks, we’re about a great work. Let’s not forget that. Let’s not sell ourselves short.

The main session was unfortunately not livecast, and to the best of my knowledge, there were never any plans to record it. But as with my satellite talk, you can at least get the slides [PowerPoint or exported PDF]. They are CC By.

Where next?

Since I made the slides available for download immediately after the talks (three days ago for the satellite meeting, two days ago for the main meeting), I’ve been surprised and delighted to see the download numbers — currently standing at 641 for the satallite talk and 939 for the main talk. The tweet announcing the main talk has also been retweeted 34 times and favourited 26 times. I hope that shows that I struck a chord.

I have an informal invitation to deliver the main-session talk next year to an Italian university, which I’ll be pleased to do once we’re able to sort out the details. I’m not sure whether more invitations are likely to be forthcoming, but I’ll mention them here if they do materialise.

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.

References

• Taylor, Michael P. Monday 18 November 2013. Towards universal Open Access: what we can do about it, and who should do it. Berlin 11 Satellite Conference for students and early-career researchers. [Slides PPT] [Slides PDF]
• Taylor, Michael P. Tuesday 19 November 2013. Open Access is about sharing, unity and sanity, not about money. Berlin 11 Open Access Conference: 10th Anniversary of the Berlin Declaration. [Slides PPT] [Slides PDF]