History of ECSP

The conference series European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine (ECSP) was originated at the Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Sweden and was launched for the first time in Lund in 2006. The idea, however, began already in 2002, when a group of researchers and librarians at the faculty started to discuss open access-related issues. Why another conference series on publishing issues? The continued debate often exposed the perspectives of publishers, librarians and technicians, and seldom the perspective on what implications the new publishing environment would have on the research community. Thus, a conference created by scientists for scientists, debating new emerging publishing models was more than ever timely and highly relevant.

The first conference, headed by Yvonne Hultman Özek, focused therefore on recent merging Open Access publishing models. To this end, experts in the field such as Dr. E. Garfield (founder of the Science Citation Index™ and the Impact Factor™), Dr. Stevan Harnad (self-archiving & institutional repositories) and representatives from the Public Library of Science, BioMedCentral and TheScientificWorld, among others, gave a number of excellent talks followed by interesting and constructive discussions. The conference was accomplished by offering workshops such as peer-reviewing training and database information retrieval searches, which were very much appreciated by the participants. The first conference event was supported by the Swedish Research Council.

During the first conference the advisory board was extended and now comprised Graham V Lees (TheScientificWorld, Finland), Yvonne Hultman Özek and Heiko Herwald (both Lund University, Sweden), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom), Foppe van Mil (Pharmacy practice consultant, The Netherlands), Tomas Nold (S. Karger AG - Medical and Scientific Publishers, Switzerland), Vanessa Proudman (Nereus Programme Manager, The Netherlands), Henrike Hartmann (Volkswagwen Foundation, Germany), and a discussion concerning a forthcoming conference was initiated; it is to be chaired by Graham V. Lees and will be held in Oslo in September 2008. The mission to be relevant to researchers and important for publishers has been retained. ESCP provides a forum for researcher directed and led debate on this important issue.