N°11 - Open access and open science – a debate - July 2017

"Since the early 90s, scientific communication is under constant transformation in a digital context closely associated with a world increasingly open: open repositories for researchers, electronic journals without access barriers, progressive conversion of publishing offers. At that time, challenged by inflationary costs of STM journals, libraries played a major role for the development of scientific communication. The open access movement was consolidated by fundamental political statements in the early 2000s1. From 2012 on, this movement meets the economic and financial crisis; therefore, open access to research results from public funding is now strongly associated with innovation. Governments and funders come to consider open access as a way to control their investment in research (Chartron 2016)2. At the same time, the major publishers adjust their strategy with new business models including open access.

• 3 Europe, 27 May 2016, http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9526-2016-INIT/fr/pdf
• 4 Royal Society, 2012. Science as an open enterprise. Available at http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFi (...)
• 5 Ibekwe-Sanjuan, F., Paquienseguy, F. 2015. Open, Big, Collaboration: Trois utopies de l'innovation (...)
• 6 Schöpfel, J., 2015. Open access – the rise and fall of a community-driven model of scientific commu (...)

Today, the change seems irreversible. The challenge is to transform the academic publishing system to an open system without access barriers (Council of the European Union 2016) 3. This objective concerns also research data and the possibility of reuse. More generally, today the concept of open science (Royal Society 2012)4 appears to be the best response to societal challenges and international competitiveness. This political vision brings together libertarian open movements with liberal positions (Ibekwe & Paquienseguy 2015)5. Confronted with open science, learned societies, academic publishers, university presses and libraries have to “reinvent” their model. However, in spite of much enthusiasm, new business models are still uncertain, especially for smaller publishers. In the age of the new digital economy, some issues call for attention, such as the low survival rate of many start-ups, the rapid devaluation of a company such as Yahoo, or the omnipresence of Google... Even if it seems hard not to adhere to open science, it is time to take some critical stance and to ask if all these transformations are possible and desirable (Schöpfel 2015)6.