Event Announcement - Advocacy & Cultural Change

The next SUETr event – Advocacy & Cultural Change - will be on 22nd January 2009. York St John University will be hosting the event. At the start of the SUETr project, the first task was to talk to people working on the various Start Up & Enhancement - SUE - projects and find out the areas they wanted covered in the SUETr programme of events. In part, this was done via a questionnaire, and at the same time we collected names of projects who would be willing to host an event. York St John University volunteered then, and we took them up on the offer.

The event is designed to give IR managers some different perspectives on how the institutional repository and also the concept of open access to scholarly works is impacting on other sectors in related fields. To this end, we will be having presentations from a publisher, a researcher/author and a funder.

Another aspect of the day will be to to encourage good communications with these sectors in changing times, and to aid in building good relationships in a fast-changing environment. I am delighted that Fred Friend, the Honorary Director of Scholarly Communications at UCL will be the opening speaker for this event. Fred has much experience in this field and throughout his many changing roles in the UK HE sector, he has championed advocacy and good communications both within the sector and between HEIs and the wider world. There is a speaker profile of Fred available on the event wiki -

I will be announcing the specific publisher, author and funder shortly here on the blog, and also updating the event wiki. Check the wiki for more information and updates. You can register to be notified by email when the event wiki is updated.

Due to a slight holdup, the booking form is not yet available, but with Christmas fast approaching, I wanted to give people notice of the event as soon as possible. The arrival of the form is imminent, and I will update the event wiki and post here as soon as it is available. In the meantime, if you are interested please check back or email me to register your interest and I’ll drop you a personal mail when the form is available. Mail me at s.taylor (at) ukoln.ac.uk

The event will be advertised today via email lists, web sites and of course here, and the next two events in the programme will be advertised later this week. I hope you find the event of interest.