The French research community is veering toward open access publishing under flagship of HAL web depository. Research institute INRIA has joined the move. Its scientific production is now available on this server, featuring archives, fresh papers, conference proceedings and so forth.
Last October, ten major French scientific organizations, among which INRIA, signed an agreement whereby, each will contribute to a common on-line and open access scientific publication platform. The French universities are also expected to climb on board soon. Rather than starting from scratch, it will build upon HAL (Hyper Article en Ligne), a web database initiated by CNRS-run CCSD....Illustrating its institutional commitment to the open archives, INRIA has contributed its entire collection. In addition, researchers are invited to deposit their scientific output. Self-archiving on HAL is already a habit for roughly one third of them. The institute’s goal is to reach 100% within a 5-year period....
The open access groundswell came as a response to [a] longing for reappropriation, with pro bono goal of providing freely accessible repositories of intellectual material. It accounts for a paltry 20% the world output, but in some domains like theoretical physics, figures nudge 90%....With 1,200 texts added monthly, [HAL] receives an average 15% of the national scientific output.
Operated on volunteer-only basis, HAL doesn’t require researchers to deposit their work in any mandatory fashion ...yet. But that may change in the future as DRGI, a department of French ministry of Research, considers “the option” of making compulsory the publication for results of research that have been financed through ANR, the French national research agency.
The same idea is being tossed around in Brussels. In a recent report, EURAB, the European Research Advisory Board recommended that “the Commission should consider mandating all researchers funded under FP7 to lodge their publications resulting from EC-funded research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication, to be made openly accessible within 6 months at the latest....” ...
The report follows a January 2006 survey in favour of “a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research....” Fearing a barrage by editors lobby, open archives advocates have started a petition urging the Commission “to endorse the recommendations in full.” ....
Further along in the pipe is the long-run goal of meshing together the scattered depositories of all member states, into a broader and fully standardized European knowledge base. Roadmap to this ambition is DRIVER: Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European. 10 universities, so far, have joined this partnership in which EU sees a content-oriented complementary counterpart to Géant2, the much appraised infrastructure for computing resources and data transport....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/02/2007 03:34:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
