The 7th Berlin Open Access Conference will take place at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris on 2-4 December 2009. As well as taking stock of past activities, the conference will focus on the question of how to get the different communities more actively involved.

The international Berlin 7 Open Access Conference will cover the implementation of various open access policies through best practices and projects within different countries and different areas, ranging from Open Access pioneer areas like physics to the humanities. In several panel discussions, experts will deal with the increasing request for interoperability across disciplines, visibility and usability of data and publications as well as the role of research infrastructures and new publishing models.

The invited speakers represent major research and research related organizations such as the European Commission, the UNESCO, CERN, The Royal Society of London, the National Institute of Health (USA), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Max Planck Society, and scientific publishers. The conference will also comprise a specific session on the open access situation in the French academic environment.
Berlin 7 builds on the tradition that has started with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in 2003 with the major aim to integrate Open Access into scholarly communication in a sustainable manner.

The conference is jointly organized by the Max Planck Society, represented by the Max Planck Digital Library, and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA). The event is hosted at the Paris-Sorbonne University, under the pa­tronage of the Ministry of Higher Education & Research, with the support of representatives of the French Universities & Research Organizations.