Noted OA Advocate Harold Varmus to lead Obama's science advisory council

Noted OA advocate Harold Varmus - co-founder of Public Library of Science and former director of NIH - will lead Obama's science advisory council. Thanks to Heather Joseph via Gavin Baker on Open Access News.

Please vote! OA proposal for Obama administration now in top 12

Forwarding from Peter Suber on Open Access News. Please register and vote for OA - it only takes a minute!

OA proposal for Obama administration now in top 12

The proposal to require OA for publicly-funded research has climbed to the 12th spot on Obama CTO, the unofficial web site collecting recommendations for the Obama administration, up one rank from last week.

The OA idea was posted to the site on November 15, and broke into the top 25 on December 4.  Keep spreading the word:  ranks are determined by user votes.

PKP Conference Call for Papers: January 15 Deadline Reminder

The Public Knowledge Project would like to remind interested participants that the call for papers deadline of January 15, 2009 for the second international PKP conference to be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is approaching. More information on conference topics and audiences is available on the conference website at:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/schedConf/cfp

Conference registration is also open on the website. The first PKP conference held in 2007 was oversubscribed so registrants are encouraged to register early for the 2009 event. Early bird rates are also available until June 8, 2009.

PKP welcomes inquiries from prospective conference sponsors. We would like to thank those who have already confirmed their sponsorship support for the 2009 conference:

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
Athabasca University
Canadian Library Association Open Access Interest Group
Gibson Library Connections
Simon Fraser University Library
University of British Columbia Library
University of Victoria Libraries

Heather Morrison
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Organizing Committee
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009

SPARC and ACRL Announce Slate for Denver Forum on Open Educational Resources

For immediate release
December 15, 2008

For more information, contact:

Jennifer McLennan
SPARC
(202) 296-2996 ext. 121
jennifer@arl.org

Kara Malenfant
ACRL
(312) 280-2510
kmalenfant@ala.org

SPARC and ACRL Announce Slate for Denver Forum
on Open Educational Resources

Washington, DC & Chicago, IL – December 15, 2008 – Four pioneers from the Open Educational Resources community will offer their insights into “The transformative potential of Open Educational Resources (OER)” at the next SPARC-ACRL Forum, to be held during the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, CO.

The forum, hosted by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), will introduce OER and the philosophy behind them to the wider library community, highlight examples of how different constituencies are currently advancing OER on campuses, and offer suggestions for how libraries can further engage to support OER.

OER are a logical extension of what the library community supports in the Open Access movement, and underscore the need for the larger playing field on which scholarly communication takes place to be made more equitable. OER focus not only on journals, but also on full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques that are critical in the learning environment.

Forum presenters will include:

• Richard Baraniuk, an architect of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org); founder of Connexions, an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web (http://cnx.org); and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University.

• David Wiley, also a leader of the Cape Town Declaration; Chief Openness Officer for Flat World Knowledge, a new approach to college textbooks offering rigorously reviewed textbooks online free of cost to students (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com); and Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University.

• Nicole Allen, leader of the Student PIRGs’ Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, which aims to develop a textbook market with both a vibrant used book market and a plethora of learning content that is priced and sold fairly (http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org).

• Mark Nelson, Digital Content Strategist for the National Association of College Stores, the trade association representing the higher education retail industry. He facilitates NACS three-pronged digital course materials strategy—partnerships, enhanced trade infrastructure, and education and awareness (http://www.nacs.org).

The 18th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4:00 – 5:30 PM on Saturday, January 24, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Centennial D. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will also host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4:00 – 5:30 PM on Sunday, January 25 in room 403 of the Colorado Convention Center.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

##

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

ACRL
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), represents more than 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. It is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access and Happy Holidays from OA Librarian!

An Early Edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available. In brief: while content recruitment for the IR may seem slow, on a global level the growth is phenomenal - more than 24 million publications in Scientific Commons, growing by close to 150,000 publications a week. DOAJ is now at over 3,780 journals, 780 more than last year, a growth rate of 2 titles per day. There are 59 open access mandates, 11 in process, and many more coming. 2009 is predicted to be a year of Walking the Talking, a shift in focus from debate to implementation.

Happy Holidays to everyone from the OA Librarian Team. While some of us may be blogging over the holidays, others will be enjoying a wedding and honeymoon, or just Working Less, resting up for a busy 2009!

Marunouchi winter illumination 2006-01 HAMACHI http://www.flickr.com/photos/mawari/323922061/

SCOAP3 at ALA Midwinter

Going to ALA Midwinter? Check out the SCOAP3 Information session:

Saturday, January 24, 2009
10:30 a.m.–noon
Colorado Convention Center, Room 705

Details are available on the SPARC Open Access Forum.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter December 2008: Peter Suber's Predictions

Peter Suber has just released the December 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlights this month are Peter's predictions for 2009, with a focus on the impact of the Obama administration and the world's economic crisis. There is also a section with a list of open access "cross-over" points - some, such as the majority of TA publishers allowing self-archiving, were crossed some time ago.

Directory of OA Librarian Profiles moves to Open Access Directory

The list of Librarians and Honorary OA Librarians from the OA Librarian Table of Contents is now part of a new list on the Open Access Directory, Interviews and Profiles.

Along with links to posts celebrating OA Librarian heroes, this new OAD list begins with links to Richard Poynder's celebrated interviews of various leaders of the open access movement, and links from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) website, such as the SPARC Innovators series.

Please join us in building this list, and in so doing building or helping to build the possibility for writing the fascinating story of the open access movement. If you're researching on Open Access News and come across a link to an interesting story about an open access hero, please add it to the Open Access Directory. Or, do you know of open access hero about whom nothing has been written? If so, please consider writing something, even if it just a brief paragraph or two.

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers
Rethinking Electronic Publishing : Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

10 - 12 June 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.elpub.net

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of
mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- New publishing models, tools, services and roles
- New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
- Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
- Mobile distribution of e-contents, e-books
- M2M publishing services
- Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
- Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
- Content search, analysis and retrieval
- Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
- Personalization technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS)
- Semantic web, metadata, information granularity, digital objects
- Data mining, text harvesting, dynamic formatting
- Knowledge linking, discovery, presentation
- User generated contents
- Usage and citation impact
- Security, privacy and copyright issues
- Digital preservation, content authentication
- Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines
Contributions are invited for the following categories:
- Single paper (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maxximum of 1,500 words)
- Tutorial (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
- Workshop (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)
See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net.
Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the Conference and present their work.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening date for submission of abstracts.
January 15th 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories).
February 23rd, 2009: Notification of acceptance of submitted proposals.
April 6th, 2009: Deadline for submission of final papers.

All submissions are subject to peer review (double-blind) and accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference. Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at: http://elpub.scix.net and indexed by the major
indexing agents.

ABOUT ELPUB
The ELPUB 2009 conference will keep the tradition of the previous international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005),
Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.

Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical issues; and a condensed procedure of
submission, revision and publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent work. ELPUB 2009 will offer a variety of activities, such as workshops, tutorials, panel debates, poster presentations and demonstrations. Social events and sight-seeing tours will also be available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Milan, Italy. Milan is the largest metropolitan area in Italy, one of the largest in Europe: 7,4 million population. It is the Italian capital of industry and business and well renowned as one of the world capitals of fashion and design. Milan is one of the oldest artistic
centres in Northern Italy and its surroundings include the beautiful Alps and the famous Garda, Maggiore and Como lakes. All this makes Milan a perfect place for sight-seeing, cultural visits and exciting shopping, not to mention enjoying Italian food and wines.

Conference Host: The State University of Milan is the third largest university in Italy after Rome and Naples. The venue is the main building, in the centre of Milan, 3 minutes on foot from the Cathedral. It was madein 1450 under Duke Francesco Sforza, who also built the famous Castle.
ELPUB 2009 is organized by CILEA, a consortium of Italian Universities founded in 1974 to promote the use of advanced ICT in academic and research environments, to support technological transfer and to manage ICT services, facilities and infrastructures. Within CILEA, the AePIC team deals with
innovative e-publishing technologies and models, promoting Open Access to knowledge through sustainable online publishing.

General Chair:
Susanna Mornati, CILEA - Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT, Segrate, Italy
mornati@cilea.it

Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki,
Finland
turid.hedlund@hanken.fi

Conference information: elpub2009@elpub.net
Conference web site: http://www.elpub.net

Join the "ELPUB Electronic Publishing Conference" group on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3D36376184362

ELPUB 2009 and OAI 6 are just 3 days in time and 400 km in space (4 hours by train, 50 minutes by plane) away from each other: take this unique chance to participate in both, enjoying two exciting scientific events in electronic publishing and scholarly communication and visiting Italy and
Switzerland.

Should OA be a priority for Obama? Please vote!

Urgent action item, from Peter Suber on Open Access News. Registering and voting only takes about a minute!

PS:  Last week I sent my An open letter to the next President of the United States to Change.gov.  And it's not too late to vote for the OA proposal at Obama CTO.  It's been up for less than 10 days and it's already the 26th most popular proposal (out of 630+) on the site.  If we could rise to 25th or above, we'd appear on the front page and get a lot more attention.  Spread the word.

E-LIS: New Server, and E-Prints 3.0!

E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies, is now available once more, on a new server and the latest version of E-Prints, 3.0.

As posted by Imma Subirats on Facebook:

E-LIS has finally moved to a new server and to E-prints 3.0. The objectives of this change is to improve our service and to implement new features. You will also notice some changes that will make the submission process easier. However, the service e-mail alerts has not been migrated. It was practically impossible to do so, therefore we contact you for apologizing and suggesting to create once again the e-mail alerts according to your preferences.

Volunteer Opportunities at Open Access Directory

The Open Access Directory has just posted a list of Volunteer Opportunities. Please consider joining this thriving OA community - the work of keeping track of OA is easier for all of us if we just pitch in a little every now and then and contribute what we know!

• Keep the Wikipedia articles about OA accurate and up to date. Many people get their first impression of OA from those articles.
  • Make sure that Wikipedia includes articles about all major OA projects, in all disciplines and countries.
  • Make sure that Wikipedia includes biographies for all major leaders of the OA movement. Women leaders are currently under-represented.
  • Add links to OAD lists from appropriate articles in Wikipedia and other wikis.

• Systematically go through the archive of Open Access News (OAN), and add articles about OA to the OAD Bibliography of open access.
  • These additions are needed much more for works published in the spring of 2005, and after, than for works published earlier. Charles W. Bailey, Jr. published the first edition of the bibliography in March 2005.
  • This is a big job. If you need a public workspace to coordinate efforts, consider using an entry on the OAD page of Research in progress. If you use a different system, such as another wiki or a Google Doc, indicate what it is on the Research in progress page.

• Systematically go through the numbers on the OAD page of OA by the numbers and update them. Each number is accompanied by a link to make the job easier.
  • Because we had to start the OAD list with an old version of the file, most of the numbers have not been updated since 2006. Once it's up to date, it should be the place to go for the latest figures on the state of OA and its growth. It will then attract readers, to consult it, and contributors, to keep it up to date.
  • Of course the list could also be improved with relevant new numbers not already listed.
  • Use Dapper to make RSS feeds for the useful subsets of the numbers.

• Volunteer to gently take care of a list on the OAD. As we grow in size it would help us if subject specialists would take watch out for content for that would be appropriate for specific lists. As an all volunteer organization, the OAD does count on good folks to step up and look out for the quality of our content.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the alert.

E-LIS Server Upgrade / downtime

E-LIS is moving to a new server, and to E-prints 3.0! The change will mean better service and new features. This E-LIS server will be down from Nov. 17th - 21st. E-LIS will be operational at 9:00 a.m. (Italy time) on the 21st. Statistics will be available before the end of this year.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience, and thank you to all of our authors and readers.

Heather Morrison
E-LIS Governance Team

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE REGISTRATION NOW OPEN / CALL FOR PAPERS / PRECONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

Quick link to 2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Website:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN / CALL FOR PAPERS / PRECONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the second international PKP conference, July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Session proposals will be accepted until January 15, 2009.

Preconference Workshops on July 8 include:
Networkshop - Editors/Publishers: John Willinsky, Rowly Lorimer
Networkshop - Software Developers/Technical Experts: PKP Team Developers
Networkshop - Librarians/Information Specialists: Brian Owen, Kevin Stranack
OJS in an Afternoon: Kevin Stranack, James MacGregor
L8X in an Afternoon: MJ Suhonos
PKP Software Plug-in Workshop: Alec Smecher
CLA Open Access Interest Group: Lynn Copeland, Heather Morrison, Leah Vanderjagt, Andrew Waller

Postconference Workshop July 11:
Workshop on Creating Open Access Journals: David Solomon, Caroline Sutton

The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will appeal not just to members of the PKP community, but to anyone interested in trends and developments for scholarly publishing and communication. There will be a wide range of topical sessions on new reading and publishing technologies; open access initiatives; alternative publishing and funding models; national and international collaborative projects; new roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers and others; and sustainability for open access publishing and open source software. Prospective and first time users of OJS and other PKP software will be able to learn more about the systems and establish contacts with the PKP community. Experienced implementers, developers, and system administrators will have an opportunity to participate in technical sessions and exchange information.

The conference will commence with an opening keynote session on the evening of July 8 convened by John Willinsky, the founder of the Public Knowledge Project. There will be several pre-conference workshops on July 8, and the main conference program will present a combination of concurrent and single track sessions during on July 9 and 10. The conference will conclude with three special symposia on community and network building intended for each of the core PKP constituents: journal editors and publishers; librarians; and software developers.

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.

For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and current conferences. The PKP software suite is comprised of three modules in production: Open Archives Harvester, Open Journal Systems, and Open Conference Systems, and two in development: Lemon8-XML and Open Monograph Press.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will consist of a mixture of plenary talks and parallel conference streams intended for the following groups:

- journal editors and publishers
- researchers in scholarly publishing
- librarians and information specialists
- open source software developers and system administrators

Papers and presentation proposals that address one or more of the following topics are especially encouraged:

- New reading and publishing technologies, e.g. integration of Web 2.0 features;
- Open access initiatives;
- Alternative publishing and funding models;
- National and international collaborative projects;
- New roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers, and others;
- Sustainability for open access publishing and open source software.

Parallel sessions will each be up to 1 hour in length. They may consist of a workshop, a case study, a research report, a set of 3 presentations on a single theme, a panel discussion as well as other options.

Proposals for papers or presentations should be submitted by January 15, 2009, using the submission guidelines and form available at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing. The research and publishing activities of the project have been reviewed and cited in Inside Higher Ed, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, The Scientist and others.

Heather Morrison
PKP Conference Committee

Open Access Day 2009

Following on the success of OA Day 2008 (October 14), a call for interest in OA Day 2009. Please check out http://openaccessday.org/contact/.

Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries Open Access Publishing Round Table Minutes

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) has posted their August 2008 Open Access Publishing Round Table Minutes. Looks like an interesting meeting!

CARL has a new open access journal in formation, called Collaborative Librarianship.

Open Access Open Letter to Next President of the U.S.

Peter Suber's November SPARC Open Access Newsletter features an open letter by Peter to McCain and Obama, reminding both of support already expressed for OA, and giving plenty of good reasons to move OA forward, regardless of who wins!

Happy Birthday, Open Access Directory!

The Open Access Directory is now 6 months old - Happy Birthday, OAD!

As noted on the OAD website, We have grown from six lists to thirty-four, which shows the strength and passion of the OA community.

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

For immediate release
October 28, 2008

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer@arl.org

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED
AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

Last Chance to Register and Book Hotel at Reduced Rates

Washington, DC – Oct. 28, 2008 – At the upcoming SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, branding strategist Nicole Colovos will lead a module dedicated to addressing one of the most compelling questions of digital repository management: How do we grow our content? The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 will be held November 17-18 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, USA.

This “Marketing Practicum” will introduce key marketing principles and strategies for the academic context. Participants will have a hands-on opportunity to apply these in an exercise aimed at engaging campus constituencies and demonstrating the importance of digital repositories. They will examine the research and publishing process from a variety of perspectives and be challenged to introduce repositories in ways that clearly communicate their benefits and opportunities to wide-ranging constituencies.

Colovos is the Vice President of Strategic Development for Bremmer & Goris Communications, the Alexandria-based marketing and design firm whose clients have included Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University at Buffalo, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. The firm has been instrumental in developing recent SPARC educational campaigns, including “The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to research” and the Sparky video awards.

The Marketing Practicum will be on Tuesday, Nov. 18, following the luncheon keynote address by Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, who will offer his unique insights on targeted message development. One-day registration rates are available.

Advance registration fees for the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 expire Oct. 31, after which higher on-site rates apply. Hotel reservations must be made by Nov. 1 to obtain the discounted conference rate. To register and for more details, visit the meeting Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting is supported by major contributions from Microsoft (Conference Sponsor); Berkeley Electronic Press, BioMed Central, DC Lab, and EPrints, (breakfast and luncheon Sponsors); and by additional contributions from seventeen coffee break and supporting sponsors.

#

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting program has been developed by the members of the 2008 Program Committee: Jun Adachi (SPARC Japan), Raym Crow (SPARC), Richard Fyffe (Grinnell College), Susan Gibbons (University of Rochester), Melissa Hagemann (Open Society Institute), Karla Hahn (Association of Research Libraries), Bill Hubbard (SHERPA), Rick Johnson (SPARC), Michelle Kimpton (DSpace Foundation), Norbert Lossau (Goettingen State and University Library and DRIVER), Joyce Ogburn (University of Utah), Terry Owen (University of Maryland, College Park), Kathleen Shearer (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd.), Sean Thomas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Susan Veldsman (eIFL), and Charles Watkinson (The American School of Classical Studies at Athens).



Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers
Rethinking Electronic Publishing : Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

10 - 12 June 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.elpub.net

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- New publishing models, tools, services and roles
- New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
- Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
- Mobile distribution of e-contents, e-books
- M2M publishing services
- Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
- Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
- Content search, analysis and retrieval
- Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
- Personalization technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS)
- Semantic web, metadata, information granularity, digital objects
- Data mining, text harvesting, dynamic formatting
- Knowledge linking, discovery, presentation
- User generated contents
- Usage and citation impact
- Security, privacy and copyright issues
- Digital preservation, content authentication
- Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines

Contributions are invited for the following categories:
– Single paper (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1,500 words)
– Tutorial (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Workshop (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
– Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening of submission of abstracts.
January 15th 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories).
February 23rd, 2009: Notification of acceptance of submitted proposals.
April 6th, 2009: Deadline for submission of final papers.

All submissions are subject to peer review (double-blind) and accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference. Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at: http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB
The ELPUB 2009 conference will keep the tradition of the previous international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.
Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent work.
ELPUB 2009 will offer a variety of activities, such as workshops, tutorials, panel debates, poster presentations and demonstrations. Social events and sight-seeing tours will also be available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Milan, Italy. Milan is the largest metropolitan area in Italy, one of the largest in Europe: 7,4 million population. It is the Italian capital of industry and business and well renowned as one of the world capitals of fashion and design. Milan is one of the oldest artistic centres in Northern Italy and its surroundings include the beautiful Alps and the famous Garda, Maggiore and Como lakes. All this makes Milan a perfect place for sight-seeing, cultural visits and exciting shopping, not to mention enjoying Italian food and wines.

Conference Host: The State University of Milan is the third largest university in Italy after Rome and Naples. The venue is the main building, in the centre of Milan, 3 minutes on foot from the Cathedral. It was made in 1450 under Duke Francesco Sforza, who also built the famous Castle. ELPUB 2009 is organized by CILEA, a consortium of Italian Universities founded in 1974 to promote the use of advanced ICT in academic and research environments, to support technological transfer and to manage ICT services, facilities and infrastructures. Within CILEA, the AePIC team deals with innovative e-publishing technologies and models, promoting Open Access to knowledge through sustainable online publishing.

General Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA – Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT, Segrate, Italy - mornati@cilea.it

Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland - turid.hedlund@hanken.fi

Conference information: elpub2009@elpub.net

Conference web site: http://www.elpub.net

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Heather Morrison
ELPUB Programme Committee