This is just a brief (and partial) summary of the conference sponsored by the French Ministry of Research on "Open Access to Scientific and Technical Information: State of the Art and Future Trends" in Paris 23-24 January 2003 http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/programme.php The powerpoints of the presentations should be available on the above site soon. Other participants' summaries are invited (for completeness, and impartiality!).
The meeting was quite international, although the most heavily represented country was the host, France. A first pass at summarizing the trends came in a position paper written by Jack Franklin prior to the conference http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/etat_art.php but this was substantially updated, extended (and corrected) by the participants during the course of the conference itself. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was given a masterly presentation by Jean-Claude Guedon. Both of its components -- BOAI-1 (self-archiving) and BOAI-2 (open-access journals -- were also presented (by me and by BioMed Central's Jan Velterop, respectively). In addition, there were reports by a number of recent successful specific BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 implementations (i.e., OA Archives and OA journals), both in France and worldwide. There was a very large session devoted to the access and impact problems of researchers in developing countries, including some talks (by Barbara Kirsop, Secretary, Electronic Publishing Trust For Development and Barbara Aronson, WHO) touching on points that have been raised in this Forum: "Access-Denial, Impact-Denial and the Developing and Developed World" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2171.html Journal subsidies for the developing world (by publishers as well as Foundations such as the BOAI's parent organization, George Soros's Open Society Institute) were described. There was (blessedly) little acrimony with publishers (represented, among other's, by Elsevier's Pieter Bolman) as the open access movement matures and comes to a realization that the solution to the problem of open access will not come from blaming publishers -- indeed the solution is not even in publishers' hands, but in the hands of researchers, their institutions, and their research funders. There was also the usual sample of misunderstandings and misprepresentations of what open access is about, but I will pass over those in silence. Fortunately, their number is shrinking, as understanding of the open access movement, its ends and its means, spreads. In particular, in France it seems at last to be spreading to the heads of the distributed national research institutes (which are unique to France, and perhaps more important in all this than the universities themselves). The Directors General of CNRS as well as of INSERM gave closing talks that illustrated that they have been listening to their researchers on the problem of open access, and that substantive movement may well be underway now in France. Stevan Harnad
