From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:57:43 +0000
Recommendations of the European Commission on Open Access : GFII’s
first comments
11 January 2013
On July 17, 2012, the European Commission issued a recommendation
encouraging the Member States to make necessary arrangements to
disseminate publicly funded research through open access publication,
as soon as possible, preferably immediately and in any case within 6
or 12 months after the date of publication, depending on the
discipline.
The French government should soon take a stand on this issue. In this
context, the professional Group GFII, bringing together public and
private stakeholders involved in the information and knowledge
industry, would like to inform the government on the preliminary
findings of its Working Group on Open Access. The text below has been
discussed by the GFII Board of Directors and was approved with just
one vote against (CNRS).
The GFII shares the conviction that publications, which are
researchers output, must be disseminated as open as possible and as
soon as possible to the benefit of their authors, their institutions,
readers and the whole of society. But the Group recalls that editing
scientific texts, either in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS)
or in the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishing, is not
only publishing it, particularly in the digital environment. Indeed,
editing scientific texts involves different stages including
selecting, enhancing and validating information through exchanges with
authors on a regular basis, correcting proofs, formatting it, printing
these manuscripts or posting it online and ensuring sustainable
indexing on valuable platforms, enhancing it by adding metadata,
developing tools to facilitate information retrieval through
databases, communicating/promoting authors and their research, etc. So
many activities and services are needed to the scientific community
and they have a cost that requires to be paid. Open Access needs
therefore to find a balance between ensuring the widest dissemination
of research publications and business models allowing a real editorial
and promotional work of scientific texts for their potential readers.
In absence of balance between these different objectives, the
scientific information sector will be deeply destabilized.
The balance is even more difficult to find since the situation is
actually different depending on the discipline, the linguistic area or
the type of works published. There are differences, for example, in
scholarly publishing in the STM compared with the HSS, as the former
is largely globalized whereas the latter is highly dependent on
specificities of each linguistic area. And within these fields of
disciplines, there are major differences of communication practices
between each discipline. For the GFII, it is only through consultation
between the scientific communities, publishers and distributors of
scientific publications that such complex issues can be really
addressed and that a balanced outcome can be achieved. It is convinced
that this consultation is an essential step before any decision is
made on the subject.
To avoid counterproductive effects, particularly in areas where public
and private national publishing houses or publishing structures are
involved, the GFII strongly recommends an independent impact study
seeking to address the following questions :
- What is, for each discipline, the adequate embargo period
needed for rewarding fairly scholarly publishing actors ?
- If adequate embargo periods for each discipline were not
obtained, which other business models could be implemented to ensure
quality, diversity, sustainability and independence of scientific
publications (“Author pays” model, freemium model, etc.) ? What would
be the cost of it ? How to bear this cost ?
- In accordance to the measures currently specified by the
European Commission for the Horizon 2020 program, what should the
French government do to provide a mechanism for an immediate posting
of scholarly articles through pre-financing of publication costs ?
What would be the case for the Humanities and Social Sciences in
particular ?
- What would be the impact of science dissemination using open
access on other publishing sectors such as the professional publishing
and/or other knowledge publishing sectors ?
We believe also that the Government should take account of the
following points :
- Which type of publications should not be subject to the
regulatory measures being considered ? Regarding self-archiving,
should recommendations only be applied on journal articles or also on
collective books and even research monographs ?
- How should a “publicly funded” research be clearly defined ?
For example, should we consider that all the writings of an author
that has been paid from public funds, in some way, must be made freely
available (after the embargo period) ? Should knowledge transfer
publications and scientific publications be concerned by the proposed
measures once their authors are “paid from public funds” through their
salaries for example ?
The Commission Communication was also on other subjects which are the
main focus of GFII’s work, including Open research data. The Working
group on Open Access will shortly prepare an analytical and conceptual
paper and what appeared to constitute the strengths and weaknesses of
the scientific and technical information ecosystem in France will be
discussed.
GFII stands ready to provide any clarification or assistance on these
issues to the French government and in case it would consider that
such a study is required before making any decisions on the
transposition of the European Recommendation.
About the GFII
The GFII (Groupement Français de l’Industrie de l’Information)
includes representatives from the information and knowledge market :
information producers, publishers, servers, intermediaries,
information providers, service providers, software developers,
libraries and subscription agencies.
The GFII hosts working groups allowing members of the information
industry to meet, discuss and exchange points of view on the legal,
technical and economic aspects of the sector. With a membership from
the private and public sectors, the GFII is a valuable forum for
helping stakeholders to get to know one another and to exchange about
their jobs, their goals and their constraints. The GFII has been
assisting all the stakeholders in the development of the digital
information market and is running an e-books working group.
About GFII’s Working Group on Open Access
Created in September 2007 and including representatives from the main
economic stakeholders involved in Open Access: research institutes,
publishers, aggregators, internet services, subscription agents,
academic libraries, the GFII’s Working Group on Open Access aims to
analyze this movement and its demands and also to advance it at the
national level through a constructive and reasonable approach. As a
result of the Group’s work, a series of recommendations has been
published in June 2010 and is available online at
http://www.gfii.fr/fr/groupe/open-access. One of these recommendations
was on setting up and operating “a shared, standardized and
transparent information site to display each publisher’s policy with
regard to Open Access repositories”. To this end, publishers within
the SNE (Syndicat National de l’Edition) and the SPCS (Syndicat de la
Presse Culturelle et Scientifique) have been meeting the CNRS in order
to collaborate in the creation of the Héloise platform developed by
the CCSD-CNRS. The platform is today online and hosted by the
publishers (http://heloise.ccsd.cnrs.fr/).
The working group which has been relaunched in early 2012 is chaired
by Ghislaine Chartron who is professor of Information and
Communication Sciences and Chair of Document Engineering in the CNAM
(Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers).
Contact :
Ruth Martinez, General Delegate, GFII
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tel 00 33 1 43 72 96 52
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