SCURL 2004

Nick Moore of City University famously divided Europe into three groups when it came to developing electronic information services: The Nimble North; the Messy Middle and the Sleepy South. The Nimble North consisted of small countries with resources limited by size which used their size to leverage limited resources through sharing- the Nordic countries being the best example; the messy middle, including the UK, have rich resources but use a blunderbuss approach hoping that if you scattered enough resource something would happen albeit in planned and not cost-effective ways, while the sleepy south wrung their hands, declared how difficult it all was and had siestas.

Well, when Scotland gained its devolved parliament the clear hope was that we would move from the messy middle to the nimble north. Instead we seem to be in a self-satisfied slide towards the hand-wringing sleepy south, but without the benefit of siestas. A quick tour of Europe today shows not just Scandinavia moving ahead of us, but the Baltic States, the Accession States, the Balkans and further afield even Malawi the world’s second poorest nation pulling ahead of Scotland in terms of consortial arrangements for the consortial acquisition of knowledge.

Nor is this failure to make progress a simple consequence of not having enough money. We are ill prepared to deal with either Open Access or self-archiving. There is a Budapest Declaration, a Berlin Manifesto, a Bethesda Declaration. We haven’t had a declaration in Scotland since Arbroath in 1314. Even in England, the bastion of the messy middle we have a Parliamentary Enquiry on Scientific Information and a Wellcome Trust Statement on Open Access, while even the Research Councils have stated that they are considering their position and begun a consultation exercise. Here in Scotland we have a deafening silence, whether from the Scottish Executive, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Carnegie Trust, SHEFC, SLIC and Universities Scotland. The green route and the gold route are not well understood concepts in our communities and appear to lead nowhere simply petering out at Hadrian’s Wall.

For a country currently obsessed with Knowledge Transfer we remain not only pure dead ignorant, but blissfully unaware of the fact. We boast of our research output but are unequipped to learn from the experience and research of others. As the nineteenth century Scots historian Sir James Mackintosh elegantly put it when describing a different group of official institutions “Faithful to their system, they remained in a wise and masterly inactivity”.

So today we hope to address that with a glittering cast of speakers. All are well known, their biographies are in your packs and so I will not repeat them. Lets hope that by the end of the day we can see a way to move from masterly inactivity to moving as far ahead as Lithuania. Even Berti Vogts has managed that.

So let us begin with Cate Newton….