On Library Lovers’ Day I attended Open Access Collections at Customs House in Brisbane. This was an APSR event held in association with QULOC and the University of Queensland.

I found the presentations very stimulating, especially Peter Murray-Rust’s in which he talked about open data and highlighted some useful sites to investigate further. It was particularly interesting to hear about scholarly publishing and accessibility from the point of view of a chemist. Later in the day we also heard from other academics in civil engineering and inorganic materials research about their experience with repositories at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. These
tied in nicely with Danny Kingsley’s discussion of her research into the institutional/disciplinary barriers affecting take up rates of repositories by researchers.

We also heard from Leanne Harvey (formerly DEST, not sure whereabouts in the Ministries she will be in future) about the Australian Government’s accessibility framework and that there is no news yet about what will replace the RQF, and from Anne Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm about the OAK Law project and the legal relationships between authors, repositories, publishers and users.

The panel session with repository managers was informative, but I missed the very last presentation by Kevin Stranack on the Public Knowledge Project. Colleagues tell me I would have enjoyed it. I’m hoping that one will be available as a video from the APSR site in the near future. The presentations are available already.
Danny Kingsley’s paper is also available in full from the VALA 08 program.

200210 customs house image by superciliousness. Used under a Creative Commons licence. Some rights reserved.