Yesterday, I particpated in the Open Acces Days here in Berlin. It was a very inspiring conference with over 250 participants, up sharply from around 70 last year (in Konstanz). Before the whole thing started, we printed one of the new JoVE posters and placed it on what we thought was a prominent spot. To our great amusement, as you can see in the second picture below, the exhibitions accompanying the conference were opened right in front of it so that everybody had to see it



At the conference itself, we learned a lot about the open access movement here in Germany starting from how the German copyright laws concern open access, to successful high-quality open access publishing.
The day was concluded with a panel discussion. There were some interesting points raised with regards to publshers, funders and scientist. I was not surprised that none of the panelists really had anything sensible to say to my suggestion to get rid of all journals and just publish in a single database (or at least have a top level entry point for a complete set of fully cross-referenced set of scientific publications). The highlight of the discussion was a comment by the head of our very own library here (in the picture below, it's the third guy from the right who looks exactly like a retired army general), Ulrich Naumann, in which he urged all scientists to unite and declare open war on the Impact Factor! Imagine the cheers and applaud that broke loose



Unfortunately, by the time I registered for the conference, the workshops were alrady filled up and I couldn't attend any of them today, so I only have yesterday to report about.