Open Access Publishing: Funding Mechanisms and Institutional Collaboration  

Increasingly, grant funding agencies are stipulating, as a condition of award, that the results of research sponsored by them should be made freely available online or via an institutional archive. Moreover, these agencies are prepared to fund the costs of such publications as part of the grant.  How should institutional research managers and administrators respond to these new developments in academic publishing?  Is it desirable to set up central university funds in order to cover the costs of publishing in open access journals, and how might this be done?   The Association for Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) is offering a valuable opportunity to discuss these issues at a workshop preceding their upcoming annual conference.

BioMed Central will be presenting at the workshop: Open Access Publishing: Funding Mechanisms and Institutional Collaboration, in Cardiff, UK.  The workshop will bring together publishers (both commercial and non-commercial), universities, grant funding bodies and other agencies, to discuss the issues surrounding open access publishing. This is taking place at a time when the deluge of open access policies are coming into force from all major UK biomedical funders, see https://ukpmc.ac.uk/ppmc-localhtml/funders.html for more details.  It will be invaluable for those wishing to bring themselves quickly up to date on the main issues, and explore the way in which new publishing models have influenced the way in which we think about, and carry out, scholarly research. The ARMA workshop will be held on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 from 2.00-5.00pm, visit their website for more details.