June 28, 2019 Presentation Open Access

Building and Funding Bibliodiversity: 1 Year After the Launch of the French Open Science Plan

Lutz, Jean-François; Lafait, Jacques

From October 2017 to July 2018, a series of declarations and decisions profoundly changed the French open science landscape. The launch of the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity was followed by the establishment in spring 2018 of a French Committee for Open Science (CoSO) bringing together researchers, public publishers and librarians. Finally, at the LIBER congress in Lille, on July 4th, 2018, HER Minister Frédérique Vidal presented the French National Plan for Open Science.

One year later, the contribution aims at presenting a progress report on achievements in strengthening bibliodiversity and setting up a National Open Science Fund, two of the objectives of the Plan.

At the national level, the reflection was carried out between September 2018 and June 2019 within the CoSO by a working group of 40 people including 20 researchers. Five complementary aspects were taken into account:

• the establishment of exemplary criteria to assess infrastructures and platforms in terms of governance, ethics, openness and sustainability.
• the identification of initiatives to be supported and funded, whether national or international infrastructures.
• support for the investment strategy of the National Open Science Fund which is subsidized by savings made on the research libraries expenses during negotiations with publishers
• the drafting of recommendations for the implementation of Plan S by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) which is member of cOAlition S. These recommendations are intended to take advantage of Plan S to encourage the development of bibliodiversity.
• information exchange and coordination with other initiatives: joint statement between the Jussieu Call and OA2020 in December 2018; discussions with SCOSS and OA2020-DE in January-February 2019, interactions with Scholarly Commons.

At the institutional level, several initiatives have made it possible to initiate greater financial support for open science initiatives. Libraries have very often played a key role in this.

The presentation will be based on the final state of work and reflections of the CoSO working group as well as on several case studies of institutional engagement. In particular, it will address the following three points:

• first, an overview of the work carried out, the documents published and the investment priorities of the National Open Science Fund
• then, some initial indications on how French HER institutions are positioning themselves on the issue of funding bibliodiversity. Four case studies will be briefly presented: the launch of an open science fund by the 18 French major research universities (Curif), the establishment of a network of open access journals incubators run by 12 institutions, the support of research libraries for the first campaign aiming at funding open access monographs in French (Open Edition Select in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched) and finally the reallocation of a part of the savings due to the cancellation of the Springer journals package by the universities of Lorraine and Rennes-1.
• finally, a forward-looking approach emphasizing the need for national and international coordination in order to optimize the financial flows and investment of research libraries towards open science.