Open Oz

The last three days have seen the Open Access and Research 2008 conference take place in Brisbane, Australia. Over a year in the planning, the meeting was oversubscribed, busy, buzzy, expectant and excited. Excited because recent national developments in Australia have meant that the conference was particularly auspiciously timed.

Though the organisers at Queensland University of Technology didn't know, a year ago when they conceived the idea of the meeting and settled on a date, that date could not have been more perfect. Australia's new government has been busy since it was elected at the end of last year and earlier this month published the final report from the Review of the National Innovation System. The report, VenturousAustralia (the 'Cutler Report'), makes a large number of recommendations, many particularly pertinent to Open Access, including (but  not only) the following:

• Recommendation 7.10: A specific strategy for ensuring the scientific knowledge produced in Australia is placed in machine searchable repositories be developed and implemented using public funding agencies and universities as drivers.
• Recommendation 7.14: To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments, including national collections, should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons. This should be done whilst the Australian Government encourages other countries to reciprocate by making their own contributions to the global digital commons...

Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, addressed the meeting via a pre-recorded video, re-emphasising the sentiments expressed in these recommendations. His words set the tone for the rest of the conference, pervading the event with a rather special spirit of optimism and confidence.

There were many lively, impressive and entertaining presentations in an excellent programme that was put together to provide plenty of opportunities for additional invited commentaries after each session and for general discussion. The presentations were all recorded and the recordings and presentation files will be added to the conference website in due course.

We heard about lots of open things - open access of course, but also open knowledge, open innovation, open patents and open data. We heard about the infrastructure needed to support e-research and the new ways of measuring and assessing research as an open access corpus builds. We heard about copyright - and here, particularly interestingly, about Australian developments in the deployment of Creative Commons licences. And we heard about the evolving open access policies of the Australian federal government and research funding bodies. There were also three popular and busy half-day workshops on:

• Open Access - Making it Happen
  
• Managing the Legal Issues and Research
  
• Access and Innovation.

It was a full and thought-provoking programme delivered to a participative and positive audience. It will anyway have its place as a landmark event in the history of open access, but it is also to lay down a more tangible marker of having happened. For, focused - as ever - on outcomes, Arthur Sale bounced into action to draft a 'Brisbane Declaration' - well we WERE in a city beginning with B, after all - and that will be published shortly. 

I am immensely proud of Australia and delighted to have been part of this event. As well as reuniting happily with old OA-Warrior (as Peter Suber calls us) friends, it was a wonderful opportunity to make many new ones and I thank the organisers for including me. The leadership of Tom Cochrane (Deputy Vice-Chancellor at QUT and the first person in the world to implement a mandatory university open access policy) and Brian Fitzgerald (QUT and the OAK Law project), plus the organisational abilities - and seemingly endless energy - of Scott Kiel-Chisholm (OAK Law project manager), Amy Piekkala-Fletcher (QUT's events manager) and the rest of the organising team made this an outstanding conference. It will influence open access developments, not just in Australasia but around the world.