biblio-fr - Demission revue Lavoisier - arc | 27 Jan 2004

Google Translate: "From: Moderator BIBLIO-FR <Moderator.biblio-en AT info.unicaen.com>

To: biblio-en <biblio-fr AT cru.fr>

Subject: Resignation review Lavoisier

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 19:38:27 +0100

From: Jean-Michel Salaün <salaun AT enssib.com>

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 18:14:54 +0100

Subject: resignation Lavoisier review

Hello everyone,

Below is a message from D. Boullier on relations with Hermes / Lavoisier that may interest some of you.

A reflection is underway within the RTP-DOC (http://rtp-doc.enssib.fr) to find a satisfactory solution to these problems for many journals in Sciences and Technologies of Information and Communication.

Jean Charlet, researcher in ICST, coordinates the reflection.

Regards,

JMS

 

Message from D. Boullier:

Here is our letter of resignation from Lavoisier / Hermès as a committee Editorial Board of Les Cahiers du Numérique. We insist on that this little text be circulated around you, especially for people concerned by the policies of scientific journals. We renew our proposal for collaboration with all those who want to invent another technical and economic framework for these journals.

cordially

Dominique Boullier

 

Mr. Director of Editions Lavoisier / Hermès,

We will not be able to ensure the continuation of the numbers of Cahiers du Numérique because we no longer wish to spend our energy in a company whose economic model goes against our objectives as researchers. We saw a sharp drop in our sales when Lavoisier took over Hermès and when the number price rose by more than 100%.

This policy has been translated caricatured by a double number entitled "Digital South North" with ombreux southern authors, number sold at 80 Euros, which is never seen for social science journals and is humiliating for our colleagues from the South.

More generally, Lavoisier's policy of high-priced sales, with limited advertising in the catalog, with no real work of webcasting, both for the purchase of articles and for subscriptions, renders illusory any hope of significant dissemination. . As researchers, we live only through diffusion, exchange and the circulation of ideas. That publishers could support businesses economically by also serving our dissemination objectives seemed possible to us, even in the difficult context of scientific publishing. That Lavoisier is more concerned with locking his catalog, including by preventing authors from translating their articles, with stricter contracts than in all other journals, while we do not even ensure a minimum diffusion to our authors, will against our principles.

The editorial board of Cahiers du Numérique therefore resigns as a whole and proposes to relaunch the project under other conditions by combining greater accessibility with lower costs. A partnership with other organizations and journals is under discussion. We are also aware of the need to improve the scientific quality and the legibility of an editorial line that wants to address several communities. But Lavoisier's help on this plan was nonexistent.

This difficulty working with the publisher is not the first since several editorial committees have been led to leave Lavoisier in recent months. The price inflation policy, for both books and magazines, under the pretext of low circulation, of which, moreover, one never ensures the good realization by the Web site in particular, constitutes a stalemate of which all the drafting committees of Lavoisier should seize to change economic model and probably also support. We hope that this call will be heard and that other journals will join our movement for another policy of scientific journals, without the help of publishers if they even fail to really want to make money, which was yet possible.

cordially

The members of the editorial board of Cahiers du Numérique

Dominique Boullier, editor-in-chief

Richard Delmas

Laurent Gille

Françoise Massit-Folléa

Jean-Max Walnut

Stéphane Ubeda"