Open Access Publishing in European Networks Launches Newsletter

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) has launched a newsletter, sending the first issue out as a message on the SPARC-OAForum list.

Here's an excerpt:

First meeting of the Scientific Board

The OAPEN project has installed two external bodies (External stakeholder Group and Scientific Board) to ensure that the needs of scholars, publishers, funders and universities are met by the project's findings and developments. The Scientific Board of OAPEN consists of several international renowned scholars known for their expertise in publishing. Among them are scholars promoting Open Access such as Jean Claude Guédon (University of Montreal) or Gerhard Lauer (University of Göttingen), publishers and editors making electronic publishing come true like Charles Henry (Rice University Press) or Siggi Jöttkandt (Open Humanities Press), but also representatives from funders and university associations like Sarah Porter (JISC) and Sijbolt Noorda (EUA).

The first meeting constituted the Scientific Board as an active part of OAPEN. The board members will serve as a consulting and inspiring body for OAPEN during the funding period and hopefully beyond. Conclusions from the first board meeting were for instance to account for widespread conservative publishing attitudes among HSS scholars and at the same time the need to promote new modes of publishing such as more fluid media forms. The board members emphasised the importance of publisher-organised quality control and Open Access experiments for the mentioned fields and encouraged the project partners to conduct OAPEN as planned

.