[GOAL] Some questions about Heloise the French Romeo Sherpa site (repost)

[Thierry CHANIER]

[some may already have received the first message, but for other  
people it  failed because of format problem - HTML, etc. -, sorry for  
this inconvenience]

We all know the Romeo Sherpa web site ( http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/  
) where academics display the policies of hundreds of international  
publishers on author deposit of articles in open archives at various  
stages of the workflow in the scientific research/publication cycle.  
These criteria have been defined by the academic world and are related  
to the explanation of good practice for making research results  
accessible.

One might have expected that Heloise ( http://heloise.ccsd.cnrs.fr/)  
would be a French version of Romeo Sherpa, but it is decidedly not. As  
recalled by Ghislaine Chartron (see extract hereafter) it is under the  
control of French commercial publishers (FCP).  On a public server  
(see hereafter) FCP develop their own viewpoints. FCP set up their own  
criteria in a way that tends to dictate to researchers how they should  
publish and communicate their results, see for example the policy for  
the journal "Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France" (left menu  
"Auteurs" > "Rechercher une revue")  where they express their view not  
only on Open archives but also on personal websites and even Intranets  
(with a five year embargo) !

A large majority of French commercial publishers have never been  
listed in Romeo Sherpa.

Relying on the usual pretext of French Language or difference,  
convenient when leading an autarchic policy which seeks public funding  
for their commercial business, FCP negotiated the opening of the  
Heloise site with the French Minister of Research. They may have done  
it through the GFII consortium, where private institutions are  
predominant, but also, very surprisingly, a consortium in which one of  
the heads of the CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique ;  
a very large public research institution in France) sits on the  
governing body ( http://www.gfii.fr/fr/legfii/conseil-d-administration  
).

In addition, it should be noted that Heloise web site is hosted by the  
public institution CCSD (http://ccsd.cnrs.fr/, governed by the CNRS)  
which controls and manages HAL ( http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/),  
the main national open archive, upon which many other open archives  
depend.

In order to come back to a situation where the publication /  
dissemination of research results is under the responsibility of  
researchers, we suggest that the design and control of Heloise should  
be entirely in the hands of a scientific committe composed exclusively  
of researchers and academics.

This committee may ask all scientific publishers what their policies  
are on author deposit of articles into open archives according to  
Romeo / Sherpa classification. This information can then be translated  
and incorporated into Romeo. The site should mainly display  
information about good practice for providing open access to research  
results. It may also emphasize the necessity for editorial boards of  
research journals to require publishers to adopt copyright agreements  
(such as http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/ ), i.e. agreements where  
authors keep full rights over their production.

Thierry Chanier Clermont Universite

****** extract of Chartron email on ADBS list  
(adbs-info at listes.adbs.fr) March 2012 ;  diacritics have been removed  
***************

Le groupe du GFII-SNE qui a reuni editeurs et documentalistes connait  
bien l'initiative Sherpa, le projet Heloise a ete concu pour palier  
certaines lacunes de Sherpa:

1. Ce sont les editeurs qui deposent dans Heloise et certifient  
l'information (et non dans Sherpa)

2. Heloise a introduit un ensemble d'options demandees par les  
editeurs et non presentes dans Sherpa

[...]

Ghislaine Chartron

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