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 ruth.marti...@gfii.fr<mailto:ruth.marti...@gfii.fr> tel 00 33 1 43 72 96 52
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