Arguments for Open Access | I love open access

"This text was first published on 15 March 2013 in Le Monde by sixty professionals belonging to the community of higher education and research: university presidents, directors of several Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme, publishers, representatives of journals, representatives of university libraries, professors and researchers. The call is open to everyone: engineers, scholars, students, information professionals, librarians, journalists, etc ... 'In July 2012, the European Commission issued a recommendation on Open Access (i.e. free for the readers) publication of the results of publicly funded scientific research. The Commission believes that such a measure is necessary to increase the visibility of European research before 2020, by gradually suppressing the barriers between readers and scientific papers, after a possible embargo period from six to twelve months. Latin America has been benefiting from this approach for ten years after the development of powerful platforms for Open Access journals. Scielo and Redalyc, which together host almost 2000 journals, have considerably increased their visibility thanks to their Open Access policy: the Brazilian portal Scielo now has more traffic than the US-based JSTOR. Such examples show that Open Access changes the balance of power in a world dominated by groups which hold thousands of (mostly English-language) journals: it paves the way to what could be called a real 'bibliodiversity', since it enables the emergence of a plurality of viewpoints, modes of publication, scientific paradigms, and languages. Some French editors of journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have expressed their concern with regard to this recommendation, which they saw as a threat to a vulnerable business model. However, a thorough assessment of the sector would be required to provide a true cost-benefit analysis: one should shed light on its funding sources and modes, both direct and indirect, public and private, and determine the roles the various actors play in this field, pinpointing the added value brought about by each of them. To be afraid of Open Access is, in our eyes, to commit oneself to a narrow – and in fact erroneous – vision of the future. If the HSS were set aside in a specific 'reservation' today, they would become isolated and would ultimately become extinct. On the contrary, we think that the HSS can be at the forefront of this opening movement, precisely because there is an increasing social demand for their research results (we estimate the overall traffic on Cairn, OpenEdition, Erudit and Persée to be around 10 million visits per month!). The fears voiced by our friends and colleagues are largely groundless in this respect. Not only is the share of sales made outside of higher education and research institutions very small in the business models of HSS journals, which remain mostly directly or indirectly funded by public money, but there exist new business models capable of reinforcing the position of publishers without having the authors pay, as is demonstrated by the success of the Freemium programme developed by OpenEdition, a French initiative. Solutions to finance a high-quality open digital publication system are being invented and have started to prove their efficiency, as in the cases of Scielo, the Public Library of Science (PLOS), Redalyc or OpenEdition. It would be a disaster if the HSS were kept aside from this powerful and innovative movement which is bound to reshape our scientific landscape. Far from backing off, they must be among the leading disciplines in this movement, as they are in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. The resistance to this evolution advocated by some of our colleagues seems to be a short-term strategy neglecting the potential benefits for science and education, as well as the democratisation of access to knowledge it will enable ..."