APE 2008 Academic Publishing in Europe, Quality and Publishing

摘要

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I assume I am the last thing that stands between all of you and lunch which is never a happy place to be. So I will try to be short and brief and talk to you about the Automated Content Access Protocol - what it is and what it isn't, because there are a lot of misunderstandings. Before I start I would like to have a quick raise of hands: how many of you have ever heard before today of ACAP or the Automated Content Access Protocol? Is there anybody who has never heard of it before? Okay. That is extremely useful. So I will have to give some basic information as well as more detailed information. I will be talking today about what it is actually, ACAP. More important is also, what it isn't because there are a lot of misunderstandings. Why we are creating this new kind of protocol and put it into the context of all the various standards, movements that we have from ONIX-PL, which we just heard about to International DLI Foundation etc. I will also talk about the next steps and then finally I will ask the publishers here to do some homework and I will give you some homework what I think what you should be doing after you have come home from this conference. Who you should speak to and what you should tell them. So let me start with what is ACAP? It is actually quite simple. It is an open business model neutral standard tool for the expression of permissions and other terms in machine-readable form. I cannot say these words slow enough because they all have a specific meaning and they also say something about what it isn't. When I speak to other people and ask them: "What have you heard about ACAP", they think: "Well, this is all about newspaper publishers, these old dinosaurs and their last attempt to lock away content and to prevent search engines from actually ruining their outdated 19th century business model. That is, of course, not true. First of all, and let me talk about these misconceptions, it is not just about search engine communication. I will be talking about the first use case. The most publicised use case that we have, which is, in fact, improving the communication between websites and search engines. But that is just a first use case. It is a first starting point. It is the place where we started because that is where we have go interest. That is where we got attention and funding to get this project moving. The second use case which is currently under way actually is about communicating between the British Library and UK websites where the British Library has the right to collect data for legal deposit but the law allows it only a very very restricted use of this harvested content and ACAP will make it much easier for British Library to get much broader and more generous use out of the website owners. So that is the second one that is already being worked on and that will be completed hopefully in the next few months. There are further use cases which I will be talking about as well. It is not just about newspapers nor is it just about publishers. At the moment the consortium which governs and runs the ACAP protocol consists of the International Publishers Association, that is me.