APE – the Academic Publishers in Europe Conference 2017 – took place in the dynamic city of Berlin on 17/18 January. It was extremely well attended with about 250 publishers and librarians from all over Europe, enjoying a series of excellent sessions and networking events.
The focus of this year’s conference was “Publishing Ethics: Doing the Right Thing and Doing Things Right”. Speakers included Dr Ralph Schimmer from the Max Planck Digital Library, Dr. Mirjam Curno, Council Member and Trustee of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and Dr. Dagmar Meyer, Policy Advisor, European Research Council Executive Agency.
Much of the program on the first afternoon focused on open access and whether Horizon 2020 – the idea which aims for swift transformation from subscription to open access publishing by the end of the 21st century’s second decade – is an achievable reality.
The closing presentation was given by Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, who made the point that open access could not be considered truly open unless content was accessible to both the public as well as academics. This may mean producing lay abstract of scholarly articles and promoting the concept of open access outside the wider scholarly community; at the moment OA is little understood along the general public or even among those working professionally in education.
Full program for the conference is available here: http://www.ape2017.eu/literature/APE%202017%20Final%20Program.pdf
A recent status report on Open Access is here:
http://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SE_OpenAccess_SurveyReport.pdf