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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Towards “Open science”? Scientific publications are undergoing radical changes: now they travel freely over the Internet. The broadly-supported movement towards Open Access nevertheless raises questions concerning peer reviews and divides supporters of the Green and Gold models. This gave rise to a heated debate in 2012. “Scientific information is a public asset that must be available to all.” This recent statement by the French Minister for Higher Education and Research Geneviève Fioraso, which echoes declarations by the European Commission, addresses the issue of free access to research. Peer review is essential to researchers’ work. The dissemination of this work in publications, and its validation or invalidation by peers allows research to move forward. For decades, the editorial process (editing, editorial secretariat, exchange with peers, and publication) has been managed by scientific reviews, which sell these services to university or research libraries via subscriptions whose cost now represents a significant burden for these organizations. “CNRS spends €12 million on subscriptions each year, and that only covers the central purchasing function!” said Serge Bauin, Director of the Scientific and Technical Information Department (DIST). “But the development of the Internet has changed people’s behavior: they now expect free and immediate access. A lot of content is available free of charge, often before it has been published as articles in scientific journals.” Extra benefits The Berlin Declaration of 2003, signed from the outset by CNRS, defines Open Access as the need for free online access to all research results. No financial, legal, technical, or organizational barriers should obstruct this freedom. “From the early 1990s, the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico made space available on its servers for physicians to publish preprints and have them freely accessible,” recalls Serge Bauin. “With ArXiv, Open Access was born.” This new way of disseminating scientific output has multiple advantages: in addition to making authors more visible and bolstering the impact of content, it accelerates the pace of research and enhances its effectiveness. It is based on a simple principle: anything public research has financed and produced should be accessible to all and free of charge. It also brings down geographical and interdisciplinary barriers. Traditionally, an article on pollen would be published in biology reviews only, even if it is mainly of interest to archeologists and geologists. “Free access is also a source of innovation: smallto medium-size enterprises with no financial means to subscribe to scientific reviews – and there are tens of thousands of them – can now access all the literature, and draw from discoveries,” stresses Serge Bauin. “Furthermore, the expanded readership facilitates the emergence of new talent.” Another facet of the Berlin Declaration concerns open access to research information. In order to reproduce an experiment or integrate results in other projects, data must be readily available. This is far from being the case today, except in certain fields such as astronomy, high-energy physics, and genetics. Yet this condition is essential for the holy grail of Open Access to be achieved. There is an important caveat, however: some information is better kept out of the public’s reach for obvious security reasons. 60 A year at CNRS 2012


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