Le changement dans les publications scientifiques : the open access initiative

Résumé du document

Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including
Cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.
The primary purpose of scientic publication is for communication between researchers: allowing the researcher-reader to find previous work that is relevant to his or her present effort; and allowing the researcher-author to make his or her work available.
Nowadays, there is a world-wide movement advocating open access for scientific information. In this essay, we will firstly define open access, its principles, its benefits, and its costs. Then, we will deal with some examples of open access intiatives, and the open access information technology structure. Finally, attempt to see what the future of open access will be...

Extraits

[...] Institutions or societies may support a journal or site when they need a medium for their own discipline. This, for instance, the International Journal of Integrated Care was published with the support of Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. The launch of this journal was supported by a number of research groups working in this field. Institutions or societies may buy the right for their members to publish in a certain journal or on a site : this is the case with BioMed Central. [...]

[...] Readers don't have to pay to access the information. - Authors own the original copyright in their work. authors can transfer to publishers the right for publishers to post the work freely on the Web, or authors can retain the right to post their own work on institutional or disciplinary servers. Authors, however, retain control over the integrity of their work and have the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Authors don't expect to gain money. - All articles are archived in an open access repository (for example., PubMed Central) - Open access is a cost-effective way to provide information. [...]

[...] Access to scientific research is decreasing due to academic libraries' inability to pay high subscription fees. Open access represents an alternative business model for publishing that holds great potential. An objective to make open access better would be for the scientific community, publishers and librarians to work more closely together to agree an equitable distribution of charges. They can find a way to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of online journals immediately on publication, in a cost-effective way. Anyway, Someone has to pay for the provision of online access to journals. [...]

[...] The authors may pay for publication, as a kind of page charge. If we take the example of The Florida Entomological Society, they let authors pay when they want (in addition to a print article). Authors do profit from this online access because it is shown that the number of citations rises by providing web access. Recently, Oxford University Press has started an experiment with the journal Nucleic Acids Research. This experiment intends a combination of author charges and subscription revenues, with author charges increasing over time, reducing subscription fees at the same time. [...]

[...] It belongs to the creators skills and facilities. For example, the technical infrastructure of Biomed Central is on a par with the leading commercial publishers and uses coding of the papers in XML. Biomed Central gets considerable economies of scale since they publish almost one hundred journals. Publishers plan to finance the operations through author charges, but have invested considerable sums in developing the infrastructure. Subject-specific repositories Like open access journals most subject-specific repositories are the results of individual efforts and the corresponding systems have been made by the academics themselves. [...]