Arlington, VA: Enago’s report on the 8th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP), which was held for the first time in the US this year in September, was recently published in the November edition of Science Editor. The report, authored by Kuntan Dhanoya, Vice President, Business Development, Enago, is available in the Early Online section of Science Editor, the official print-and-online publication of CSE. Science Editor serves as a medium for the exchange of information and ideas among professionals in the scholarly publishing industry. The report will also be present in the print version of the journal, which is published on a quarterly basis.
This year’s conference, held at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel, VA, USA, was organized by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) whose mission is “to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines.” It was attended by many professionals from the STM industry as well as by OA advocates and had numerous sessions and talks on technology, innovations, open data, and reproducibility to name a few.
The crux of the conference was the need for a cultural change in the academic community to sustain the momentum of the OA movement and this message was highlighted in a powerful talk titled “It’s Not Easy Being Open,” which was presented by Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. The conference included “show-and-tell” sessions as well as “lightning talks,” in which speakers presented posters on various topics related to OA publishing.
There were also discussions on different aspects related to OA, one of them being a talk by Alberto Pepe, Co-founder and CEO of Authorea, a collaborative online editing platform, which allows open and transparent dissemination of research results. There was also another interesting session by Dario Taraborelli, Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation, which focused on the need for open citation data and highlighted its positive impact in reproducibility studies.
Another notable keynote speaker was Hilda Bastian, Chief Editor at PubMed Health/PubMed Commons who shared the benefits of open peer review and demonstrated its impact in exposing reviewer’s conflict of interest as well as journal bias. She also pointed out the need to enhance scientific communications by making it more collaborative and open.
Through this conference, the organizers ensured that the key issues facing the OA publishing community are shared in an open forum. This year’s conference served as a great platform to discuss current events while showcasing new ideas and collaborations. Through the report in Science Editor, Enago is glad to continue sharing the latest updates in academic publishing with the academic community. We look forward to sharing more such updates in the coming months!
