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

Use the link to access the full text document forwarded from the SPARC OA Forum.  "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 ..."