[BOAI] Fwd: [GOAL] Recommendations of the European Commission on Open Access : GFII’s first comments (English version)

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Ruth Marinez at GFII (Groupement Français de l'Industrie
de l’Information), via the GOAL list.  --Peter Suber.]


 *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.martinez at gfii.fr ****

tel 00 33 1 43 72 96 52 ****
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