Science Online '09 is less than a week away, and I'm going to be co-moderating an unconference session with Björn Brembs, the theme of which is "Open Access publishing: present and future".

Björn has already put some notes up on the wiki, and there's an interesting contribution from Antony Williams of Chemspider. As both Björn's and Antony's notes make clear, we think the future of Open Access (indeed, all scholarly) publishing will feature prominently the long-overdue death of the Impact Factor. In fact, audience willing, we plan to use some of this session as a sort of preface for Björn's Sunday session with Peter Binfield, which is titled "Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor".

It's difficult to overstate the extent to which that single figure has come to dominate scholarly and administrative decision making: where to publish, who to fund or promote, which candidate to hire, and so on. It's also difficult to overstate how bad an idea it is to put so much weight on a single journal-level metric derived by undislosed calculations and decisions from a proprietary database.

But that's the future of publishing, about which much more from Björn and Peter. Regarding the past, I thought I would do a five-minute definition-plus-potted-history, cribbed almost entirely from my earlier talk and Peter Suber's timeline.

That leaves us with the present, and in the spirit of an unconference about science online, I thought I'd simply ask the audience: what do you want to know about Open Access?

There are two things I must clarify. Firstly, by audience I mean both online and on the day: if you're there, you can ask in person, but if you're not going to the meatspace conference you are welcome to ask your question here, on the conference wiki, or by email to me, at any time. Secondly, I'm not claiming I'll have the answer ready to hand -- but OA and related Open ideas are pretty much an obession with me my hobby these days, and if you have a question I can't answer I'll be sure to find out and get back to you. (In addition, the conference will be packed with OA experts and I have no hesitation in bothering them for answers!)

So: what do you want to know about Open Access?