WORKSHOP ON The Open Archives initiative (OAI)
and Peer Review journals in Europe

This call for a European contribution to the "Open Archives initiative" originates from the Access Division of LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Récherche). The proposed workshop will take place in agreement with the activities of the OAI steering committee; an application for support is pending with the European Science Foundation and the Academia Europea. Technical support from CERN is gratefully acknowledged.

Organising committee: Raf Dekeyser (LIBER, Access Division; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Herbert Van de Sompel (OAI Executive; Cornell University) and Corrado Pettenati (CERN, Library).

The purpose of this call is to mobilise a group of European scientists and librarians who want to play an active role in organising a self-managed system for electronic scholarly communication as a means to address the serials crisis. Such a system should be compliant to the technical standards proposed by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) (see http://www.openarchives.org. In order to prepare for and promote the launch of Open Archives centres, we organise a workshop, to be held at CERN in Geneva from 22 till 24 March 2001.

The meeting has both a concrete and an exploratory objective:

The concrete objective is to actually assemble a group that wants to take immediate collaborative action leading to the deployment of OAI compatible preprint repositories that must become nodes in the envisioned electronic scholarly communication system. Issues to be addressed in the light of this objective include:

• Should archives be organised on an institutional or on a discipline-oriented basis?
• Who should be the parties taking the responsibility of launching, managing and ensuring a long-term archival function for the archives? Are these parties the universities, the scholarly societies, the international research centres, the publishers?
• Which parties are willing to deploy prototype archives?

The exploratory objective of the meeting relates to the certification of writings submitted to archives. Since there is broad consensus that certification of scientific writings is an essential function that must be provided by any acceptable system for scholarly communication, the question of how it can be implemented in a novel infrastructure cannot remain unanswered.

Therefore, the exploratory objective of the workshop is to try and identify and discuss the crucial properties required to augment Open Archives of non-peer-reviewed material into true building blocks of a novel scientific communication mechanism addressing the needs of science, the scientific community and the public in general.

This objective inevitably leads to considering whether the current mechanism of certification of scientific writings – the peer-review process – is an artefact of the established journal system or not. It forces considering the feasibility of novel certification mechanisms and – if such mechanism can indeed be envisioned -- attempting to identify its characteristics. Whatever the outcomes of such considerations are, the implementation of a certification mechanism building on material in e-print archives remains to be addressed. Issues to be included in the discussion resorting under this objective include:

• Is the often-proposed model of building on the concept of a-posteriori certification -- i.e. certification as an add-on to a non-peer-reviewed writing – actually feasible or is a-priori certification required/preferred?
• How does the mechanism guarantee scientific quality?
• Who initiates the certification process?
• How does the submission of a non-peer-reviewed writing relate to the certification mechanism?
• How does the certification mechanism relate to promotion and tenure evaluations?
• Who should be the parties organising, co-ordinating and overlooking the certification process?
• Which economical model(s) is/are feasible to implement the system in a sustainable manner?
• How can archives of non peer-reviewed material be technically integrated with a certification system?
• Are the answers to the above questions discipline-dependent?

The program will be composed of short topical introductions and working sessions with group discussions. The following topics should be covered:

• General introduction to the technical framework of the OAI
• The role of peer review in scholarly communication
• Technical implementation and management of a preprint archive
• Presentation of existing archives that implemented the OAI framework
• Technical implementation and management of peer review systems
• The role of certification in scholarly communication
• Envisioning new implementations of the certification function;
• Technical implementation and management of certification systems
• Integrating an e-print archive network with certification systems
• Sustainable economical models.
• Prototyping

The meeting will be held at CERN, the European research centre for nuclear and high-energy physics at Geneva, which over the past years acquired a considerable expertise with respect to preprint archives.

The program will start on Thursday 22 march 2001, and continue till Saturday 24 at noon. A limited number of rooms will be available on site for overnight stay (see CERN housing service).

The number of participants will be limited. Applications for participation should be submitted by means of the attached form before December 1, 2000 and should include a short motivation for your interest in the subject. Accepted participants will be notified before January 8, 2001. No conference fee will be charged but at arrival, a sum of 40 Swiss Francs will be asked from each participant in order to cover the expenses of the coffee breaks. Furthermore, participants are supposed to take care of their own travel and subsistence expenses.

This Web page is dedicated to the workshop. Pointers will be added to the agenda and other logistic information. More detailed information about the programme will be posted as soon as available.

You can also return this form before 1 December 2000 to

Raf Dekeyser
Universiteitsbibliotheek
Mgr. Ladeuzeplein 21
B-3000 LEUVEN (Belgium)