The European Commission had issued a recommendation encouraging the Member States to make necessary arrangements to disseminate publicly funded research through open access (OA) 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, on July 17, 2012.
The French government should soon take a stand on this issue, according to profession group Groupement Français de l’Industrie de l’Information (GFII). The 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 destabilised.
“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 globalised 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.
“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.”
