Institut des sciences de la communication du CNRS

Presentation

With the development of electronic networks, science publishing has been undergoing profound change. Though constantly nourished by the Internet, researchers balk when it comes to publication; academic institutions, as guarantors of the public good, tend to standardise, question and experiment. The change is profound and has repercussions not only on the circulation of knowledge, but also on intellectual property and the notion of authorship, as well as on the publication process itself. In just a few years, knowledge dissemination on the Internet (especially when access is free) has entirely changed the terms of the debate.

Scientific publishing used to be a well-policed and localised world; today, it has turned into a global market and a theatre of economic warfare. There are more and more researchers, more and more scientific journals, budgets are going through the roof and “publish or perish” is the order of the day. Meanwhile, commercial knowledge intermediaries like Cairn or Science Direct are boosting their resources and seeking the most effective economic and cognitive models. Researchers are faced with the dilemma of either publishing in journals that are increasingly normalised and ranked in order of prestige but owned and charged for by private companies, or publishing their work on line to ensure that it is broadly disseminated as quickly as possible, but with no charge for access.

This issue of Hermès offers a resolutely multidisciplinary perspective on the different questions raised by the “open science” issue and the many different ways in which knowledge produced by scientists is made available: from free-access journals, publications posted on line by institutions and the self-publishing model paid for by the author, through to free access archives and open-access digital libraries.

Contents

Joëlle Farchy, Pascal Froissart and Cécile Méadel
Introduction

Dominique Wolton
Abundance and free access: for what purpose and to what extent? (interview with the editorial board)

I. NETWORKED SCIENCE AND THE PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Pierre Mounier
Open Access: an Ideal or a Necessity?

Enoch Peserico
With information technology, science cannot be anything but open (interview with Francesca Musiani)

Dominique Vinck
When Science Turns Digital

Christian Zimmermann
Disseminating Research in Economics: the « Working Papers »

Samuel Alizon
Free access to biology on a daily basis (box)

Guylaine Beaudry
Direct Scientific Communication: a New Publishing Field

Stephan Foldes
Mathematics: open archives in a closed community (box)

Lorna Heaton, Florence Millerand and Serge Proulx
"Tela Botanica": Cross-Fertilisation between Amateurs and Specialists

Lionel Barbe
Wikipedia Meddling with Scientific Publication

II. THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE

Florence Audier
Open Publishing: Cooperation or Competition?

Bernard Lang
When the Cobbler Goes Unshod: Computer Scientists and Open Access (interview with the editorial board)

Marie Cornu
Scientific Creativity and Authorship

Valérie-Laure Benabou
Scientific Publication: Must we Choose Between Free Access and Freedom for Research?

Bernard Rentier
"Papers please!" Researchers and compulsory legal deposit (box)

Bruno Granier
Les Carnets de Géologie (Geology notebooks) (box)

Cécile Méadel
Laymen’s Knowledge and Web Intelligence

Pascal Froissart
The main platforms for science journals (chart)

III. THE SCIENCE MARKET

Ghislaine Chartron
Future Scenarios for Science Publishing

Laurent Romary
Scientific Communication: PEER Pressure and the Scientific Publishing Market

Joëlle Farchy and Pascal Froissart
The Scientific Publishing Market, from « Proprietary » to « Open » Access

Geneviève Piétu
The "Human Genome" project and Open Source (box)

Danièle Bourcier
Science Commons: New Rules and New Practices

Salvatore Mele
The SCOAP3 project, a revolution in high-energy physics (box)

Morgan Meyer
Knowledge Brokers as the New Science Mediators

Groupe des éditeurs universitaires du SNE
The point of view of the National Publishers Union (box)

VARIA

Charline Leblanc-Barriac and Paul Rasse
University Professors in a Changing Documentary Environment

Michel Wieviorka
Sociopedia

TRIBUTE

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
(by Thierry Paquot)

Claire Blanche-Benveniste (1935-2010)
(by Henri-José Deulofeu)

RECOMMENDED READING

Aurélie AUBERT, La Société civile et ses médias. Quand le public prend la parole, éd. Le Bord de l’Eau / INA, 2009
(by Régine Chaniac)

Claude ALBAGLI, Les Sept Scénarios du nouveau monde, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009
(by Anne-Marie Laulan)

Jean-Paul LAFRANCE, La Télévision à l’ère d’Internet, Québec, éd. du Septentrion, 2009
(by Anne-Marie Laulan)

ABSTRACTS

AUTHORS

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Abstracts

Pierre MOUNIER
Open Access: an Ideal or a Necessity?

Much of the current debate on the open access issue has been akin to ideological warfare, using militant language registers around the concept of public common goods. The high level of visibility of the debate masks two important points that could change perceptions on its real impact. Our analysis of the development of open access initiatives shows that the political dimension of the issue is by no means predominant in all disciplines and varies considerably among different communities. Furthermore, the profound changes in scientific communication practices brought about by the expansion of digital networks could lessen the relevance of the militant approach to open access. The proliferation of documents, the relative blurring of boundaries between different forms of publishing and the fact that barriers to access to publications are being lowered are lessening the perceived influence of systems that artificially manufacture rarity, and the scientific communication system is gradually being forced to conform to the attention economics. This makes it possible to anticipate changes in scientific publishing comparable to those in the press and music publishing sectors.

Keywords: scientific publishing, publishing, attention economics, scientific communication.

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Dominique VINCK
When Science Turns Digital

In delving into the issues that arise from the digitisation of scientific output, circulation and access, this article first makes a brief detour into the history of practices in the exchange of research data and applications. It then explores contemporary practice in acquiring and updating knowledge, which is now dependent on computer networks and a vast range of calculation and visualisation tools, data capture networks, databases, computer assisted publication software, computer supported collaborative work, and so on. Communication practices have evolved over time and vary among disciplines. This article attempts to characterise the situation today, including in the open access field.

Keywords: scientific work, writing, publication, journal, communication, open access, digital.

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Christian ZIMMERMANN
Disseminating Research in Economics: the « Working Papers »

Publishing articles on the economics involves long time frames of up to several years, from submission to publication. Consequently, journal contents tend to lag behind what is happening on the research frontier. The most usual sources of information on frontier research are conferences and « working papers », which are photocopied documents that circulate among certain scientists. This practice is fostering the emergence of exclusive small groups and prevents third parties from participating in pioneering research. The Internet has radically changed possibilities for access to working papers, but Internet access still needs to be organised and to allow others to read one’s work. This article describes the RePEc initiative, which effectively places all economists on the same footing and has become an essential instrument in its field. Similar initiatives in other fields are also investigated.

Keywords: economics, publication, research, working papers.

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Guylaine BEAUDRY
Direct Scientific Communication: a New Publishing Field

New digital potential is profoundly changing the authorship function, especially in direct scientific communication, although authorship of a scientific discourse nevertheless obeys the same criteria in the digital world as in print. What has mainly changed are the methods used to express and disseminate research results, because of the appearance of infrastructures and scientific practice of a new type. In particular, posting data to researcher-approved information systems is increasingly recognised as a legitimate form of publication. This implies that models for evaluation and recognition are being brought into question and new models are being proposed. The digital revolution is transforming the role structure of a scientific communication system where the overall picture, at present, is fragmentary.

Keywords: scientific communication system, direct scientific communication, scientific authorship function, digital revolution.

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Lorna HEATON, Florence MILLERAND and Serge PROULX
"Tela Botanica": Cross-Fertilisation between Amateurs and Specialists

This article illustrates how the Tela Botanica project is simultaneously transforming botanical knowledge and breathing new life into the field of botany. We discuss three characteristics in particular: the ready availability and free circulation of the most up-to-date botanical data, new links between the scientific work of amateur and professional botanists and the appearance of a hybrid organisational form that combines features from the non-profit model and from private enterprise. We examine these three characteristics in turn, with examples and theoretical discussions in each case.

Keywords: botanical knowledge, free circulation of scientific knowledge, accessibility, amateurs and professionals, expertise, hybrid organisational forms.

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Lionel BARBE
Wikipedia Meddling with Scientific Publication

In the space of just a few years, Wikipedia has become one of the foremost tools for disseminating scientific information, used by pupils, teachers and researchers alike (of the latter, one out of ten say they contribute). Despite a relatively complex publication system, the popularity of the « knowledge wiki » is increasing (15 million articles, 270 languages, 100 000 unpaid contributors). We are learning more on how it functions: the factual error rate is fairly similar to that for the fee-paying Encyclopaedia Britannica; the majority of articles are written by a small number of contributors (5 % of contributors are responsible for 90 % of the content); a series of « administrators » act as fire-fighters or policemen, sometimes attracting the wrath of contributors; community dynamics and a common identity are the two main reasons for contributing; scientific sources are cited as much and more in Wikipedia as in scientific circles (which is involuntarily reproducing the « impact factor »). In comparison with its competitors, Citizendium and Knol, this contributory encyclopaedia stands out for its outrageously rapid growth, but a possible levelling out in the number of articles (of which there are signs today) suggests that in future, contributors may focus more closely on the quality of articles.

Keywords: open encyclopaedia, collaborative work, laymen’s knowledge.

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Florence AUDIER
Open Publishing: Cooperation or Competition?

What should be the role of « open » publishing at a time when publishing standards are becoming more rigid and weighing more and more heavily on the way research institutions, research teams and researchers themselves are ranked and assessed? Under what conditions can open publishing improve dissemination of the most interesting or original research results? Does it foster exchanges and cooperation or, paradoxically, does it contribute to a spirit of all-out competitiveness? This is one of the issues that research, especially in the human and social sciences, is faced with today.

Keywords: open publishing, scientific work.

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Bernard LANG
When the Cobbler Goes Unshod: Computer Scientists and Open Access

Computer scientists, who were the first to work on open access design, have not necessarily been its most fervent users in their own scientific publication practice, since they have long given preference to interpersonal exchanges. Concerning their output, the question of open access arises in different terms, depending on whether the context is software design, text publishing, industrial public research, patentable sectors, or open or restricted access data.

Keywords: computer science, patentability, user community, scientific practice, data products.

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Marie CORNU
Scientific Creativity and Authorship

The production and dissemination of scientific results raise a number of legal questions. Scientific activity is in fact, and largely, a creative activity that produces « works » as defined in the Intellectual Property Code. Researchers are often also authors in the performance of their tasks. In France, as in a number of other countries, research is essentially a public sector activity employing staff who are usually civil servants and whose output needs to reconcile the freedom to perform creative research with the public interest. The recognition of researchers’ rights in creative scientific work comes up against a number of difficulties, many of which have to do with paternity issues. The collective nature of creative scientific work makes authorship all the harder to determine. The new methods of knowledge production through the Internet do not fit easily into the various provisions covering collective creation. What description can be given to a work initiated by one person, deliberately handed over into the public sphere for discussion, then continued and transformed by other people? In this context, the question of creative authorship is closely tied to the issue of science dissemination.

Keywords: creative scientific work, public research, scientific paternity.

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Valérie-Laure BENABOU
Scientific Publication: Must we Choose Between Free Access and Freedom for Research?

The incipient clash between open access and intellectual property need not come to a head as long as the exercise of authorship rights does not contradict free access for end users. The existence of strong moral prerogatives offers the very guarantees that the scientific community is pressing for: identification of sources and traceability of the original version of a publication. The picture is not so well-tempered in the case of the Public Access movement, which has little concern for authorship and is entirely geared to knowledge dissemination as compensation for the taxpayers’ money spent on research. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would deny the very existence of authorship rights for researchers, who would lose all control over the dissemination of their work. However, the alternative solution proposed may not necessarily produce the desired results, since researchers need to have a certain amount of freedom in their work and in their communication to motivate high-quality output. Short-circuiting their intellectual control over the fate of their research is more likely to inhibit them than otherwise. But the clash between these two aspirations may yet be resolved: achieving free access does not necessarily mean destroying freedom for research.

Keywords: authorship rights, free-access publication, authorship agreements.

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Cécile MÉADEL
Laymen’s Knowledge and Web Intelligence

Laymen’s knowledge is becoming increasingly visible and influential, especially in environment and health fields. The Internet provides laymen with new resources that go well beyond downloading content or digitising scientific texts, as they also open up new possibilities for information and cognition. Laymen’s knowledge, which is built up from open-access resources, owes its effectiveness to collective participation and the auditing methods in place. And yet, despite the considerable amount of comparative and verification work performed by these groups of « people who know », laymen’s knowledge rarely achieves the status of stable and reputable information.

Keywords: laymen’s knowledge, environment, health, communities, Internet.

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Ghislaine CHARTRON
Future Scenarios for Science Publishing

This article investigates the scientific publishing market and how it is being transformed by the Internet and the development of open-access services. We illustrate the diversity of the market in terms of scientific fields, and especially in the types of publishers and readerships concerned, and of the associated economics. In view of the sweeping criticisms of dysfunctional practices illustrated in the article, we alert readers as to the need for discernment among these markets. The article points to a number of contrasting effects of digital publishing that are leading to various paradoxical reconfigurations. Finally, this forward-looking study of the publishing market’s future emphasises the multiple forms of the onward march towards open access and the influence exerted by the political dimension and the research evaluation process. Public-private partnerships are the preferred option to cater for the central values of independence, quality, accessibility and the enduring nature of scientific publications.

Keywords: scientific publishing market, scientific publisher, scientific discipline, open access, publishing value, forward study.

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Laurent ROMARY
Scientific Communication: PEER Pressure and the Scientific Publishing Market

The PEER project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) launched in 2007 aims to achieve a better understanding of current developments in the field of rapidly proliferating institutional scientific archives. The project involves collaboration from scientific publishers and from research and higher education organisations. It focuses in particular the effects of systematic copyrighting of scientific output on the dissemination of publications, on the viability of scientific journals and on research output itself.

Keywords: institutional archives, scientific publishing market, scientific publisher, impact of free-access publications.

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Joëlle FARCHY and Pascal FROISSART
The Scientific Publishing Market, from « Proprietary » to « Open » Access

A number of practical aspects as well as ethical and political considerations have contributed to the advent of open-source applications in pioneering software, and subsequently to an extension of the openness principle to culture and research fields. This article explores the genealogy of open-source scientific publishing, emphasising the other variable of economic market dysfunction to show that although this has been an important factor in the development of open access, the problem has by no means been entirely resolved by this new form of science dissemination.

Keywords: open publishing, two-sided market, free access.

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Danièle BOURCIER
Science Commons: New Rules and New Practices

Rapid advances in the digital technologies have profoundly changed and improved the way in which data, information and tools can be disseminated, managed, used and re-used in research, and have created new opportunities to speed up progress in science and innovation. These developments are mainly due to an emerging broader movement in support of formal and informal « peer production » and global dissemination of information drawing on the cooperation of distributed science and knowledge communities working in open networked environments. Initiatives like the Science Commons rely on an economic model where science evolves in a digital environment, and more specifically on sharing and exchanges between peer communities as a basis for production. Many other initiatives of this kind are under way (e.g. ATLAS at the CERN in Geneva). We have chosen the Science Commons, whose objective, over and above scientific communication, is to speed up the translation of data into discovery by removing all barriers, including legal obstacles, that prevent society from enjoying the benefits of scientific results as quickly as possible. The philosophy and practical tools of the Science Commons are described as making up a resolutely open approach to scientific knowledge, as recommended by the Berlin Declaration (2003).

Keywords: open access, Science Commons, public domain, intellectual property, Creative Commons licences.

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Morgan MEYER
Knowledge Brokers as the New Science Mediators

Knowledge brokers may be described as people moving between the two different worlds of knowledge producers and knowledge users. However, they do more than merely shuttle knowledge between the two worlds. Their task is threefold: they bring knowledge into circulation, translate it and give it solid substance. To do so, they establish very specific, transitory, temporary and flexible connections. This article describes their operations to show that knowledge brokering is ushering in a new world whose boundaries are not only uncertain but also unpredictable.

Keywords: scientific and technical information, science popularisation, applied science, knowledge broker.

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Charline LEBLANC-BARRIAC and Paul RASSE
University Professors in a Changing Documentary Environment

The university environment, where scholars and professors work, is faced with an imperative need to appropriate the new information technologies, but it has also inherited the epistemological habits of centuries. This article raises the question of current and emerging practices in the scientific documentation process. It seeks on the one hand to observe the failings exposed by researchers regarding access to information, and on the other hand to draw out the contours of a whole system of social representations relating to a specific information culture that necessarily influences practice.
Based on a qualitative analysis, we show the need for researchers in any discipline to maintain « print » relationships with information media. This traditional relationship helps to gain a better grasp of technical innovation and to cope with the potential of new ways of accessing information. We also show that the very definition of the research profession, as well as researchers’ attitudes to information processing, depend on their disciplinary culture and whether they belong to the humanities and social sciences or to the « hard sciences ».

Keywords: scientific documentation, disciplinary culture, scholars and professors, information.