EPI participated at the Open Repositories Conference (OR08), University of Southampton, 1-4 April 2008. http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.

The event was organized by Les Carr, well known Open Access advocate. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/

Plenary sessions. Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) is seen in the foreground.

The “minute madness” of posters
Both the quantity (more than 60) and quality of the posters submitted to the OR08 conference were surprising.
All had been briefly presented by their authors at a Minute Madness session, a space within the plenary session with all attendees present. This proved to be an effective way to integrate the posters into the conference itself -posters often go unnoticed- and also to break the ice and encourage participation. Each speaker had one minute, timed exactly, to describe their work, while the poster was projected on a large screen. Everybody got an idea of the ongoing projects and was able to choose which posters they wanted to visit following the plenary, while hors d’oeuvres were served.

Among those closest to us, we would highlight the following: Remedios Melero (IATA-CSIC) [with Alicia López-Medina (Spanish Open University, Univ. Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED) and Jordi Prats (Univ. Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC)], which reflected the status of open access in Spain (”Landscape of open access institutional repositories in Spain”); and Zeno Tajoli (Cilea, Italy), which recounted the migration of version 2 to version 3 of the E-Prints software, used in E-LIS (E-prints in Library and Information Science, http://eprints.rclis.org).

For our part, Fernanda Peset and Antonia Ferrer (Univ. Politécnica de Valencia) and Tomas Baiget (Statistical Institute of Catalonia) presented “Impact of OAI protocol in Spain, Portugal and Latin America”, which described and applied two indicators, “Efficiency Index” and “Development Index”, allowing a comparison of the status of open access in these three geographic areas.

Imma Subirats (FAO, Italy) and Alicia Lopez Medina (UNED) each presented a case study.

On day 4, two open meetings were held:
The first, chaired by Bernard Rentier (Rector of the University of Liege, at right in the adjacent photo) outlined the progress of EurOpenScholar (EOS), a project launched in 2007 by Rentier himself to promote the mandate of depositing research works in the university repositories. Participants included John Smith (European University Association, in the centre of the photo) and Alma Swan (Key Perspectives).

The second described OAI-ORE (Object re-use and exchange), the flagship of OpenArchives.org, which develops specifications for the description of digital objects related to each other (from the pages of one document containing images or versions of a given scientific report), led by Van de Sompel.

Here is the link to a video sampler of OR08 Conference
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/podcasts/video.php?id=125

And here is the link to the EurOpenScholar session
http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/euro.html