19. December 2018 Andreas Vogler

Building Bibliodiversity

BUILDING BIBLIODIVERSITY
WITH MULTIPLE APPROACHES
Joint Statement of the French Open Science Committee, Promoters of the Jussieu Call, and the Open Access 2020 Initiative

During the 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, 3-4 December 2018, the joint statement below was drafted by the French Open Science Committee and the Open Access 2020 Initiative to underscore the importance of collaboration among open access initiatives, resisting the «divide and conquer» tactics that serve only to slow our collective progress, and highlight the alignment in the shared goals of these two initiatives: complete and immediate open access to research results. Joint efforts will be initiated in 2019 to ensure the implementation of the common perspectives.

The common objective of OA2020 and the Jussieu Call for open science and bibliodiversity is the widest possible dissemination of the results of research by using all the resources offered by new technologies in line with the practices and preferences of authors-researchers.

OA2020 focuses in the first place on methods to achieve this goal and promotes the repurposing of funds currently spent on subscriptions to read scientific production in journals to finance the production and open access dissemination of scholarly articles. This strategy is accompanied by the pursuit of a fair and transparent assessment of the costs of these publishing and dissemination services with the aim of achieving savings that can be used to support new and improved forms of open access publishing in accordance with author-researcher practice and preference.

The Jussieu Call is mainly concerned with the principles to be implemented to achieve this open science, with particular emphasis on the notion of bibliodiversity covering both editorial processes and the economic models that should support them. The Call also points to the source of the current problems of inflation in the number and decreasing quality of scientific publications related to the corrupted mode of evaluation of research and researchers. The fundamental conviction of the Call is that there is no single solution to these problems but that it is through a combination of diverse and complementary solutions that we will be able to progress towards an open science.

In this spirit and taking into account the current situation of scientific publishing and the prospects opened up by the publication of Plan S, it would seem reasonable to us to propose, in a medium-term approach, formal and financial support for the co-existence of three modes of publication in roughly equal parts:

  1. the dissemination of scientific writings, as soon as they are published, in open access in an open archive that is permanent and recognized by the various scientific communities (“green mode”);
  2.  the promotion and financial support of publishing and publication methods where neither the author nor the reader pays (“Diamond” mode);
  3. open access publishing based on fair, transparent, and economically sustainable business models (“gold mode”).

Joint efforts will be initiated in 2019 between the entities responsible for OA2020 and the French Open Science Committee, to ensure the implementation of these perspectives, align the criteria for support to open science journals, platforms and infrastructures and coordinate, at a strategic level, the investments to be made.

 

View this statement on the French Open Science Committee website :

https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/building-bibliodiversity-with-multiple-approaches-joint-statement-of-the-french-open-science-committee-promotors-of-the-jussieu-call-and-the-open-access-2020-initiative/