Thursday, 28 July 2011

RSP Event: RoMEO for Publishers





The Repositories Support Project (http://www.rsp.ac.uk/) recently held an event to explore how RoMEO http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ can help both repository staff and publishers. This event had representative speakers from RoMEO, repositories and publishers. Here’s a quick recap from the day;
The opening speaker was Bill Hubbard - Centre for Research Communication
http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/ . In his presentation he promoted the opportunities of OA; including the archival benefits of institutional repositories and how OA can actually help to prevent plagiarism. OA was also presented as an inevitable change in publishing and academic dissemination. With many researchers sharing files informally online and on their own websites the need for formal engagement with OA is needed to protect copyright and academic standards - Bill’s message to the publishers’ sitting in the room, “repositories are your friend”.
Azhar Hussain then gave a brief over view of the history of SHERPA RoMEO and its significance for publishers. Plans for the future include developing a more interactive community of users with real-time knowledge base for anwering copyright queries and developing more links with Web of Science. Mark Simon from Maney publishing
http://www.maney.co.uk/ then outlined why they have chosen to be a “green publisher”. The morning finished with Marie Cairney who is the Team Leader for Enlighten, the University of Glasgow’s Institutional repository http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/. Due to a mandate since 2008 their repository seems to be a much bigger operation with more staff involved. This includes members of the library’s cataloguing team and also proxy depositors in departments whom they give training on RoMEO to. Glasgow has decided to have a dedicated person who will be responsible for sending information to RoMEO.
The afternoon session saw further presentations by staff from RoMEO, including a demo of the site’s new launch next month which includes a new Policy Generation Tool for publishers:
http://www.romeo.ac.uk/publishers/policytool.php A presentation from Emerald Publishing http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ explained why they have not chosen the “gold” route at the moment – but have not ruled it out altogether.
The final part of the day consisted of breakout sessions where people were asked to consider how RoMEO can help publishers and how publishers can help RoMEO.
This was a very useful event where ideas were shared between repository staff and publishers, and where the publishers present seemed to want to engage and work with OA and repository staff.






Anthea Tucker & Gemma Storr


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