Bielefeld Conference 2009

I attended the 2009 Bielefeld Conference this week, which (no surprise) took place in the city of Bielefeld in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

From Michael in Berlin

I went in part because Library Hi Tech will publish the proceedings, partly because I was asked to moderate a panel, but mainly because the conference has a history of high quality presentations and good discussion.

Open Access was a major theme this time. Generally speakers favored making scholarly works available to everyone on the Internet free of charge. There was also a broad recognition that open access had not fundamentally changed the way scholars published, as had long been hoped. In part perhaps these changes simply take more time. In part the slow pace of change comes about because authors have more interest in publishing in highly rated journals than in open access ones. ISI now indexes some open access journals, mainly in the natural sciences. Nonetheless commercial journals seem unworried about their business model going away soon.

Herbert van de Sompel suggested that we should concentrate on keeping the primary data behind articles open access, while this data is still generally not included as a component of commercial publication. He noted that North American libraries and repositories tend increasingly to agree with this, while their European counterparts remain focused on "established" literature. It is certainly true that many of our students see libraries as fundamentally text-oriented, and many German library leaders feel they lack the resources and expertise for storing primary data. The resource shortage is doubtless real, but the attitude almost guarantees that libraries will loose significance -- or perhaps will be reborn as the historic section of expanded data centers.