I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Kurtz, Project Scientist for the Astrophysics Data System during the Force 2017 conference in Berlin. We had an interesting conversation:
Is this your first meeting?
No, I have been here from the beginning; I even spoke at the first PDF meeting. These are very interesting meetings: they combine the four forces that are driving the change in scholarship communication – libraries, scientists, funders and publishers – and the data systems.
What is the benefit of a meeting such as this?
The primary benefit is that I learn things. State of the art in a broad spectrum. The policy and large scale integration is at FORCE 11 and the smaller scale, algorithm, type can be found at other places. Here I get a broader sense as to what’s going on.
What is one thing you learnt while at this event?
About the open access DOI tool, which we will almost certainly implement to link to open access versions of papers in institutional repositories.
How have things changed since the first meeting?
It’s gotten much more practical, in terms of large scale agreements like collaboration with Open Aire, but less practical in terms of technical discussions, which is an advantage because it’s not the right place for this discussion.
