ICSTI 2007 GENERAL ASSEMBLY and PUBLIC CONFERENCE,
Nancy, France.
Minutes of the
Technical Activities CoordinatingCommittee Meeting
Saturday 23 June, 2007, 10.45 am – 12.30 am
Venue: Grand Hôtel de la Reine
List of Participants
BernardDUMOUCHEL – ICSTI Vice-President and IPC Chair
HerbertGRUTTEMEIER - INIST-CNRS – TACC Chair
ElliotSIEGEL - NLM – ICSTI General Secretary
Yuri ARSKIY – VINITI
Pam BJORNSON - CISTI-NRC
Markus BRAMMER - TIB
Stefan BUNGARTZ - Scopee-KnowledgeCenter
Raymond DUVAL – INIST-CNRS
Eleanor FRIERSON – National Agricultural Library
Nobuyuki FUKASAWA–JST
Mark FURNEAUX –CSA/ProQuest
Brian HITSON – US DOE/OSTI
Tom LAHR – US Geological Survey
Seon-Hee LEE- KISTI
TonyLLEWELLYN- AJL Consulting
IgorMARKOV- VINITI
Shigeo MORIMOTO–JST
Inga NIKOLSKAYA – VINITI
Brian PARK – KISTI
Antoine RAULIN – BvDIM
Roberta SHAFFER – Library of Congress
Jerry SHEEHAN - NLM
Hiroshi TSUDA - JST
KirsiTUOMINEN - VTT Knowledge Solutions
Walter WARNICK - US DOE/OSTI
WendyWARR(Representing IUPAC) - Wendy Warr & Associates
Byeong-tae YANG - KISTI
Elisabeth MAITRE-ALLAIN – Executive Secretary
CHAIR: Herbert GRUTTEMEIER
Further to the approval of the minutes of the January 20, 2007 TACC meeting, the Chair conducts the debates on the following topics:
Recent developments in Open Access
Feedback of the conference held in Brussels, Belgium, in February 2007 with the theme “Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, dissemination and preservation in the digital age”.
Several INIST staff members, Jerry SHEEHAN of the US NLM (as a speaker), and David BROWN of the British Library attended the conference which main goal was to bring together stakeholders concerned with access, dissemination and preservation issues in connection with scientific publication and data in an effort to provide policy options for scientific publishingunder FP7 and in the European Research Area.
The proceedings of the conference can be found at:
The members have been distributed a communication issued by the European Commission (COM(2007)56 final) on the same subject in which is summarized the agreement between the National Institute of Health and the publisher Elsevier. The US Congress is recommending publication of journal articles in open repositories and has introduced a bill aiming at developing public access policies. According to the NIH, the process is progressing fast with 20-25% of articles already accessible freely in open repositories, although the proper NIH Public Access Policy does still not give the expected results (only about 5% submitted articles for deposit in PubMed Central). For this reason the voluntary policy might become mandatory.
Pam BJORNSON reports on an initiative by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to introduce a policy on access to the CIHR-funded output similar to (but going further than) the current NIH policy.
Nomenclature for nanotechnology
The Chair makes available to the members a message from Karen MORGENROTH, a CISTI expert in terminology, giving the status of the project entitled “Terminology and nomenclature for nanotechnologies – Framework and core terms” she submitted to the Canadian “ISO Technical Committee 229, Nanotechnologies”. Ms MORGENROTH acknowledges with pleasure French public organism INIST’s offer to share experience and participate in the taxonomy project. Indeed, following her call for participation at the ICSTI Winter meeting in London, Roger MOUNET of INIST has become member of the “Nanotechnologies” standardization committee of the French National Standards body AFNOR and is involved in the ISO/TC229 international works in the field of nanotechnologies.
KISTI research project
As part of the initiative, announced by KISTI at the 2006 General Assembly, to propose bilateral research projects with international partners, a report on S&T information policy in France was delivered by INIST to KISTI in February.
Brian PARK confirms that there are ongoing contacts taken by KISTI for similar work with ICSTI members in other countries.
STI Centres
Bernard DUMOUCHEL gives a short report on the National STI Centres Sub-Group meeting of 22 June.
No immediate follow-up actions were decided, the question of future form and objectives of the Sub-Group is related to the strategic orientations that ICSTI will take in the coming months. Herbert GRUTTEMEIER proposes to keep in mind opportunities of organizing common projects and events with the publishers, as raised during the meeting between the two parties in January at the British Library.
The participants of the 22 June meetinghave wished to get profit of Bernard DUMOUCHEL’s experience and asked Bernard to renew his mandate as Chair of the Sub-Group even if he was leaving the Bureau. The TACC meeting participants are pleased to ratify this choice.
Science Portals Forums
Following the presentation of the WorldWideScience.org project given at the ICSTI Public Conference at INIST on June 22, Brian HITSONmakes a further demonstration, in particular tests with different spellings in queries.
Tom LAHR then comes back to the discussion on the Science portals matrix constructed by IIa. It concerns more particularly the points 3 and 4 of the project that were not funded by ICSTI in the proposal document. Step 3 was to develop a longer range plan and step 4 was to mobilize a concept trial for the first “cross science” portal search and retrieval.It is the general opinion that WorldWideScience.org has the potential for recruiting new ICSTI members because some non-member databases are in. A one-year project run in the U.S.could amount $100,000, (a minimalist budget contributed through the U.S. interagency CENDI). The British Library would be willing to provide funds for one year, and also a table of contents database.
Members’ opinion (Eleanor FRIERSON, Brian HITSON) is that a possible contribution depends of the number of other organizations involved. China, India, Russia and other countries need to participate and the project should not be limited to countries (very few) having sciences portals.This should be ICSTI’s responsibility.
In response to Tom LAHR letting know that TheBritish Library and the Department of Energy have agreed for building up a pilot project in 4 weeks, i.e. elaborate terms of reference for a longer-term plan, Markus BRAMMER and Pam BJORNSONexpress the concernthat ICSTI, as an international organization, would not be “bound” by terms elaborated by these two bodies, liaised by a government agreement. We need to maintain the terms of reference at an administrative level in the scope of a technical environment.ICSTI needs to see if the terms of reference can be incorporated in an ICSTI regime.
Decisions taken:
Tom LAHR is willing to continue to chair the science.gov organization for another year with item 3 of the matrix project at no cost for ICSTI.
No ICSTI funding is needed to get the terms of reference done.
The terms will be for a two-year period.
> Action: A financial breakdown of the $100,000 and terms of reference are needed. To be provided to ICSTI in the next few weeks.
Presentation of the TermSciences initiative
Mr. Majid KHAYARI of the INIST’s Department of Databases, gives a detailed presentation of the terminology database of the TermSciences portal.
Run by INIST, this platform merges the terminology resources (dictionaries, vocabularies, thesaurii, etc.)produced by different French public institutions working closely with INIST, such as INRIA, INRA, INSERM, LORIA, ATILF, BDSP, and CEMAGREF.
Based on terminology share, the portal is also based on a collaborative management of the costs.
Continuously evolving, the database is composed of terminological entries corresponding to a concept described by terms clustered by language. The database contains about 180,000 concepts described by about 600,000 terms. The vocabulary is available in French and English, but also in Spanish and German.
A TMF (ISO 16642) compatible content management system allows remote collegial updating and enhancement of the database.
Allowing cross-linguism queries, TermSciences portal terminological content searching is free but it also permits the Google Scholar to formulate their query towards other bibliographic databases and other online information resources.
Besides traditional keyword indexing, INIST is evolving towards automatic web-based concept indexing. INIST is willing other organisms to further contribute to TermSciences.
A discussion on the possible interest of TermSciences in the context of WWS.org follows: query translation, federated search applications for multilingual resources, etc.
Other business
Together with the IPC, the TACC needs a renewed mandate. Brian A. HITSON, US DOE/OSTIrepresentative, is co-opted, thus becoming member of the ICSTI Bureau.
Discussion of follow-up actions related to the 2007 ICSTI public conference themes (point 5 of the agenda) was postponed to a future meeting, due to lack of time.
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