EUSIDIC Looks at Open Access.

HELSINKI (Finland); FINLAND

This article provides information on the October 2004 meeting of the European Association of Information Services (EUSIDIC) held in Helsinki, Finland. Its session on open access differed considerably from those at the Internet Librarian Forums. One speaker, Jonas Holström, research assistant at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, used the discipline of economics to frame his remarks on open access, contrasting the RePEc institutional repository of economic literature with EconLit, the database produced by the American Economic Association. It is generally accepted that the academic discipline that has been most successful in generating open access to research materials is physics. Interestingly, there are important parallels between research methodologies in economics and physics, particularly when you compare the process of economic working papers with that of physics preprints. The EUSIDIC conference's overall theme was Content Ownership Versus Platform Ownership. Although only one session was overtly titled as dealing with open access, the concept permeated much of the discussions among attendees. The idea of a common platform was attractive, although no one agreed on precisely what that common platform should look like.