• https://eu.boell.org/en/about-us
      C’est « moi » qui.paye. La fondation Heinrich Böll est une de crs non-fondations politiques qui donnent aux chefs des partis politiques la piossibilité de se créer une cour de personnes anoblies par le titre de « Doktor » dont la fonction est de vendre l’idéologie à la base du parti. On aime bien abuser des noms de penseurs défunts pour habiller l’entreprise. Rosa pour Die Linke, Konrad pour le CDU, l’autre Konrad pour les libéraux et Friedrich pour le SPD. Lui au moins a été membre du parti qui l’a choisi comme saint auquel on a emprunté le nom. Pauvre pacifiste d’Henri ;-)

      The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung is a German political foundation affiliated with the German Green Party (Alliance 90/The Greens). Its primary task is political education and advocacy in Germany and abroad. Our main tenets are ecology and sustainability, democracy and human rights, non-violence and justice. In our work, we place particular emphasis on gender democracy, equal rights for minorities and the political and social participation of migrants.

    • About us | Heinrich Böll Stiftung | Brussels office - European Union
      https://eu.boell.org/en/about-us

      The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung is a German political foundation affiliated with the German Green Party (Alliance 90/The Greens). Its primary task is political education and advocacy in Germany and abroad. Our main tenets are ecology and sustainability, democracy and human rights, non-violence and justice. In our work, we place particular emphasis on gender democracy, equal rights for minorities and the political and social participation of migrants.

      Our namesake, the writer and Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll, personifies the fundamental principles we stand for: defence of freedom and human dignity, civic courage, open debate and the acknowledgement of art and culture as independent spheres of thought and action. As a think tank for green visions and ideas, we are part of an international network with 34 offices worldwide and with partner projects in more than 60 countries.

      The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union represents the foundation vis-à-vis European and international institutions, associations, non-governmental organisations and media based in Brussels. The office is a main point of contact for individuals, groups and organisations from around the world interested in EU politics and policies. The future of the European project and the role of the European Union in the world are at the centre of our activities and efforts.

      sur cette même page, le bilan annuel 2022 avec (pp. 28-29) un rapide bilan financier : plus de 67% des ressources proviennent de subventions du gouvernement allemand (c’est Klaus qui paie) et de l’Union européenne (nous payons tous)

  • Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that | Peer review and scientific publishing | The Guardian
    https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/academic-journal-publishers-universities-price-s

    Cet article est très bien car il fait un résumé de la situation actuelle de l’édition de revues scientifiques.
    Le problème est que j’ai écrit grosso modo la même chose il y a plus de 20 ans, qu’avant moi Stevan Harnad, Jean-Claude Guédon ou Peter Suber ont écrit déjà la même chose.
    Et si peu change en ce domaine...
    Il y a un paragraphe dans cet article qui dit peut être le pourquoi. Je le remets ici. Mais ça vaut le coup de lire tout l’article.

    academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivised to stick with the status quo. Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.

    On en est là :
    Restriction des crédits à l’embauche = déversement des crédits à des entreprises prédatrices de la recherche.
    Insécurité des chercheurs et chercheuses = moindre innovation scientifique.

    Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google’s. So we decided to start our own

    Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus professor of political science at McGill University, Canada

    Tue 16 Jul 2024 08.00 EDT

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    If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.

    The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

    Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

    The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.
    Is it the beginning of the end for scientific publishing? – podcast

    We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?

    To answer this, we have to go back a few decades, when commercial publishers began buying up journals from university presses. Exploiting their monopoly position, they then sharply raised prices. Today, a library subscription to a single journal in the humanities or social sciences typically costs more than £1,000 a year. Worse still, publishers often “bundle” journals together, forcing libraries to buy ones they don’t want in order to have access to ones they do. Between 2010 and 2019, UK universities paid more than £1bn in journal subscriptions and other publishing charges. More than 90% of these fees went to the big five commercial publishers (UCL and Manchester shelled out over £4m each). It’s worth remembering that the universities funded this research, paid the salaries of the academics who produced it and then had to pay millions of pounds to commercial publishers in order to access the end product.

    Even more astonishing is the fact these publishers often charge authors for the privilege of publishing in their journals. In recent years, large publishers have begun offering so-called “open access” articles that are free to read. On the surface, this might sound like a welcome improvement. But for-profit publishers provide open access to readers only by charging authors, often thousands of pounds, to publish their own articles. Who ends up paying these substantial author fees? Once again, universities. In 2022 alone, UK institutions of higher education paid more than £112m to the big five to secure open-access publication for their authors.

    This trend is having an insidious impact on knowledge production. Commercial publishers are incentivised to try to publish as many articles and journals as possible, because each additional article brings in more profit. This has led to a proliferation of junk journals that publish fake research, and has increased the pressure on rigorous journals to weaken their quality controls. It’s never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims of scholarly inquiry.

    There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?
    ‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

    The reason is that such journals require alternative funding sources, and even if such funding were in place, academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivised to stick with the status quo. Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.

    This is why, as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free of charge. This isn’t just an academic problem. A revolution in the publishing landscape could also help stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. Such an alternative is available, but it’s hard to get there. We want to change that.

    Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Canada

    #Open_access #Revues_scientifiques #Edition_scientifique #Accès_libre #Communs_connaissance

  • Large Language Publishing, par Jeff Pooley
    https://doi.org/10.54900/zg929-e9595

    Analyse très intéressante sur l’Open access dans la science, ses limites notamment en termes de licence et de droit d’utilisation et de l’usage des articles scientifiques pour entrainer l’intelligence artificielle (#AI) avec la question de la captation des profits associés alors que les éditeurs scientifiques ne rémunèrent jamais, quant à eux, les producteurs de connaissance scientifique et au contraire, exploitent les universités et leurs financements publics sous forme d’abonnements des bibliothèques aux revues ou de APC (charges payées par les scientifiques pour être publiés en #open_access). Le texte soulève d’intéressants paradoxes sur ces enjeux, en faisant un parallèle avec le procès que les grands journaux comme le New York Times ont lancé contre OpenAI et autres entreprises d’intelligence artificielle pour avoir entrainé les logiciels d’AI sans autorisation et surtout sans paiement leurs archives.

    Thus the two main sources of trustworthy knowledge, science and journalism, are poised to extract protection money—to otherwise exploit their vast pools of vetted text as “training data.” But there’s a key difference between the news and science: Journalists’ salaries, and the cost of reporting, are covered by the companies. Not so for scholarly publishing: Academics, of course, write and review for free, and much of our research is funded by taxpayers. The Times suit is marinated in complaints about the costly business of journalism. The likes of Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature won’t have that argument to make. It’s hard to call out free-riding when it’s your own business model.
    [...]
    Enter Elsevier and its oligopolistic peers. They guard (with paywalled vigilance) a large share of published scholarship, much of which is unscrapable. A growing proportion of their total output is, it’s true, open access, but a large share of that material carries a non-commercial license. Standard OA agreements tend to grant publishers blanket rights, so they have a claim—albeit one contested on fair-use grounds by OpenAI and the like—to exclusive exploitation. Even the balance of OA works that permit commercial re-use are corralled with the rest, on propriety platforms like Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. Those platforms also track researcher behavior, like downloads and citations, that can be used to tune their models’ outputs.
    [...]
    As the Times lawsuit suggests, there’s a big legal question mark hovering over the big publishers’ AI prospects. The key issue, winding its way through the courts, is fair use: Can the likes of OpenAI scrape up copyrighted content into their models, without permission or compensation? The Silicon Valley tech companies think so; they’re fresh converts to fair-use maximalism, as revealed by their public comments filed with the US Copyright Office. The companies’ “overall message,“ reported The Verge in a round-up, is that they “don’t think they should have to pay to train AI models on copyrighted work.” Artists and other content creators have begged to differ, filing a handful of high-profile lawsuits.

    The publishers haven’t filed their own suits yet, but they’re certainly watching the cases carefully. Wiley, for one, told Nature that it was “closely monitoring industry reports and litigation claiming that generative AI models are harvesting protected material for training purposes while disregarding any existing restrictions on that information.” The firm has called for audits and regulatory oversight of AI models, to address the “potential for unauthorised use of restricted content as an input for model training.“ Elsevier, for its part, has banned the use of “our content and data” for training; its sister company LexisNexis, likewise, recently emailed customers to “remind” them that feeding content to “large language models and generative AI” is forbidden.
    [...]
    One near-term consequence may be a shift in the big publishers’ approach to open access. The companies are already updating their licenses and terms to forbid commercial AI training—for anyone but them, of course. The companies could also pull back from OA altogether, to keep a larger share of exclusive content to mine. Esposito made the argument explicit in a recent Scholarly Kitchen post: “The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the OA movement and the people and organizations that support it have been co-opted by the tech world as it builds content-trained AI.“ Publishers need “more copyright protection, not less,“ he added. Esposito’s consulting firm, in its latest newsletter, called the liberal Creative Commons BY license a “mechanism to transfer value from scientific and scholarly publishers to the world’s wealthiest tech companies.“ Perhaps, though I would preface the point: Commercial scholarly publishing is a mechanism to transfer value from scholars, taxpayers, universities to the world’s most profitable companies.
    [...]
    There are a hundred and one reasons to worry about Elsevier mining our scholarship to maximize its profits. I want to linger on what is, arguably, the most important: the potential effects on knowledge itself. At the core of these tools—including a predictable avalanche of as-yet-unannounced products—is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarize, and to recommend. The object of each verb is us—our scholarship and our behavior. What’s at stake is the kind of knowledge that the models surface, and whose knowledge.
    [...]
    These dynamics of cumulative advantage have, in practice, served to amplify the knowledge system’s patterned inequalities—for example, in the case of gender and twentieth-century scholarship, aptly labeled the Matilda Effect by Margaret Rossiter.

    The deployment of AI models in science, especially proprietary ones, may produce a Matthew Effect on the scale of Scopus, and with no paper trail. The problem is analogous to the well-documented bias-smuggling with existing generative models; image tools trained on, for example, mostly white and male photos reproduce the skew in their prompt-generated outputs. With our bias-laden scholarship as training data, the academic models may spit out results that, in effect, double-down on inequality. What’s worse is that we won’t really know, due to the models’ black-boxed character. Thus the tools may act as laundering machines—context-erasing abstractions that disguise their probabilistic “reasoning.” Existing biases, like male academics’ propensity for self-citation, may win a fresh coat of algorithmic legitimacy. Or consider center-periphery dynamics along North-South and native-English-speaking lines: Gaps traceable to geopolitical history, including the legacy of European colonialism, may be buried still deeper. The models, in short, could serve as privilege multipliers.
    [...]
    So it’s an urgent task to push back now, and not wait until after the models are trained and deployed. What’s needed is a full-fledged campaign, leveraging activism and legislative pressure, to challenge the commercial publishers’ extractive agenda. One crucial framing step is to treat the impending AI avalanche as continuous with—as an extension of—the publishers’ in-progress mutation into surveillance-capitalist data businesses.
    [...]
    So far the publishers’ data-hoovering hasn’t galvanized scholars to protest. The main reason is that most academics are blithely unaware of the tracking—no surprise, given scholars’ too-busy-to-care ignorance of the publishing system itself. The library community is far more attuned to the unconsented pillage, though librarians—aside from SPARC—haven’t organized on the issue. There have been scattered notes of dissent, including a Stop Tracking Science petition, and an outcry from Dutch scholars on a 2020 data-and-publish agreement with Elsevier, largely because the company had baked its prediction products into the deal. In 2022 the German national research foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), released its own report-cum-warning—“industrialization of knowledge through tracking,” in the report’s words. Sharp critiques from, among others Bjorn Brembs, Leslie Chan, Renke Siems, Lai Ma, and Sarah Lamdan have appeared at regular intervals.

    None of this has translated into much, not even awareness among the larger academic public. A coordinated campaign of advocacy and consciousness-raising should be paired with high-quality, in-depth studies of publisher data harvesting—on the example of SPARC’s recent ScienceDirect report. Any effort like this should be built on the premise that another scholarly-publishing world is possible. Our prevailing joint-custody arrangement—for-profit publishers and non-profit universities—is a recent and reversible development. There are lots of good reasons to restore custody to the academy. The latest is to stop our work from fueling the publishers’ AI profits.

    #profits #Elsevier #science #commons #inégalités

  • Aggiustare il mondo. La vita, il processo e l’eredità dell’hacker #Aaron_Swartz

    La vita troppo breve dell’hacker Aaron Swartz – morto suicida l’11 gennaio del 2013 – ha tantissimi aspetti incredibili. Piccolo genio dell’informatica cresciuto in un sobborgo di Chicago, incontra, da adolescente, studiosi del calibro di Tim Berners-Lee e Lawrence Lessig e lavora con loro per costruire le architetture informatiche, e le licenze d’uso, del futuro. Con un cambio di vita radicale, deciderà poi di dedicarsi all’attivismo politico e tecnologico proprio mentre i suoi coetanei più talentuosi sfruttano l’onda della Silicon Valley per arricchirsi. Lui dedicherà, invece, le sue energie e il suo talento a combattere per l’#open_access, per la sicurezza delle comunicazioni, per l’anonimato e per “liberare” contenuti e cultura dai confini, e pedaggi, delle grandi banche dati. A un certo punto, però, il governo degli Stati Uniti d’America lo prenderà di mira e, lentamente, la potente macchina giudiziaria americana lo stritolerà. Il suo insegnamento, le sue teorie, la sua passione sono ancora oggi, a distanza di dieci anni dalla sua morte, esempio per tantissimi utenti, hacker e cittadini della società dell’informazione.

    https://libri.unimi.it/index.php/milanoup/catalog/book/100

    #livre

  • CRA - Centre de Rétention Administrative

    En 2012, à #Toulouse - Cornebarrieu, Meybeck participe à la campagne « #Ouvrez_les_portes » organisée par Migreurop et Alternative Européenne, campagne visant à obtenir l’accès des journalistes et de la société civile aux centres de rétention pour lesquels nous n’avons pratiquement aucune information, ni sur ce qui s’y passe, ni comment sont traités les migrants, ni sur le respect de leurs droits.

    https://www.desrondsdanslo.com/CRA.html

    #rétention #détention_administrative #CRA #centre_de_rétention_administrative #France #Cornebarrieu #open_access_now #migrations #asile #réfugiés #renvois #expulsions
    #livre #BD #bande_dessinée

  • Baromètre #Science_Ouverte de l’UGA

    Pour suivre la progression de l’ouverture de ses publications, l’Université Grenoble Alpes a produit son premier baromètre de la science ouverte.
    Le Baromètre français de la Science Ouverte, publié en 2019, par le Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation permet de mesurer l’évolution de l’accès ouvert aux publications en #France.

    L’Université de Lorraine s’en est inspirée pour développer un baromètre adaptable par établissement et a mis à disposition de la communauté son code afin que que chaque université puisse le réutiliser pour produire son propre baromètre.

    Pour le baromètre UGA les sources de données utilisées pour établir la liste de publications sont le Web of Science, HAL, PubMed et Lens.org. Seules, les publications avec un DOI (Digital Object Identifier) sont retenues afin qu’elles puissent être soumises à Unpaywall pour identifier les publications en libre accès. Elles sont ensuite enrichies de la discipline scientifique grâce au jeu de données fournies par le BSO du MESRI.

    Le baromètre a été établi sur le périmètre de l’EPE Université Grenoble Alpes.
    Les données ont été collectées durant l’automne 2020.

    Limites

    la liste des publications utilisées pour produire le baromètre n’est pas exhaustive : seules les publications disposant d’un DOI sont prises en compte. Les sources utilisées et le fait qu’un DOI soit nécessaire peuvent impliquer que les publications en sciences humaines et sociales soient sous représentées.

    https://guide-hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/actualites/formations-et-evenements-uga/barometre-science-ouverte-de-l-uga-853860.htm?RH=17734

    Pour voir les résultats :


    https://view.genial.ly/601cf90b1892760d0964e30d

    #open_access #baromètre #Université_Grenoble_Alpes #statistiques #chiffres #indicateur

  • Bon plan : le Collège de France met en ligne gratuitement plus de 10 000 cours prestigieux

    Vous voulez vous la péter en soirée ? Voici un grand nombre de sujets pointus sur lesquels vous pourrez disserter.

    Alors que la #France est reconfinée à cause d’une nouvelle vague de contamination, le #CollègeDeFrance semble très soucieux de continuer à faire vivre la #culture et éveiller les consciences lors de cette période troublée. L’institution vouée à « enseigner le savoir en train de se faire dans les domaines des lettres, des sciences ou des arts » est un établissement public d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche, créé au XVIe siècle.

    Dans le cadre de sa politique de libre accès au savoir, le Collège de France met à disposition plus de 10 000 contenus gratuits. Vidéos, podcasts, conférences, séminaires... la maison du savoir français ouvre le champs des possibles pour nous abreuver de connaissances en français, en anglais et en russe.

    Pour les passionnés de littérature, le Collège de France a également répertorié plus de 200 livres à lire en ligne, comme Lettres noires : des ténèbres à la lumière d’Alain Mabanckou ou l’intrigant Catherine Deneuve, femme maison, dans lequel Jérémie Kessler explore l’évolution de la carrière et de l’image de Catherine Deneuve par le prisme de la maison dans sa filmographie.

    Des cours sur les Australopithèques à l’état des lieux de la migration européenne, en passant par l’étude des anneaux jacobiens (avis aux passionnés de maths), c’est un très vaste programme que propose le Collège de France – à tel point qu’il est facile de se perdre dans la masse d’informations présentes sur leur site Internet. Vous pourrez tout de même sélectionner les différentes thématiques et rubriques, si vous ne souhaitez pas vagabonder des heures à la recherche d’un contenu qui retiendra votre attention.

    Ce sera l’occasion de répondre à plusieurs questions existentielles telles que « Le cinéma est-il plus autoritaire que la littérature ? » ou « L’Homme peut-il penser une fin absolue ? ». Une autre manière de se pencher sur le monde et de philosopher, coincés entre nos quatre murs.

    https://www.konbini.com/fr/cinema/bon-plan-le-college-de-france-met-en-ligne-gratuitement-plus-de-10-000-cour

    Bon plan : le Collège de France met en ligne gratuitement plus de 10 000 cour

    Le LIEN DU SAVOIR !!!! : ---->

    https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/savoirs

    #opensource #accesLibre

  • The Academic Year 2030/31: A Triptych Fantasy

    “Before we leave the library courtyard, notice the sculpture of the large, hovering open lock. It’s the universal icon of Open Access, evoking the idea that science only thrives when it’s shared. In reality, under rampant digital capitalism, many scholars gave control of their work to academic publishers like Chump, who then sold public universities access to their own staff’s research for an estimated $10 billion annually.

    https://americanethnologist.org/features/pandemic-diaries/post-covid-fantasies/the-academic-year-2030-31-a-triptych-fantasy
    #open_access #citation #édition_scientifique #université #science #partage

  • Le site #Internet_Archive mis en danger par des poids lourds de l’édition

    Sous la pression d’une #plainte déposée devant un tribunal new-yorkais par quatre poids lourds de l’édition aux États-Unis, le site Internet Archive a décidé d’avancer de 15 jours la fermeture de sa #bibliothèque_d’urgence, créée en réponse à l’#épidémie de #coronavirus.

    Une infraction « massive et délibérée » au #droit_de_reproduction. C’est ce que quatre éditeurs, dont la filiale américaine du groupe #Hachette, reprochent au site Internet Archive, connu notamment pour son archivage du web mondial, la #Wayback_Machine, dans laquelle on peut retrouver des pages web disparues.

    Mais l’Internet Archive, c’est aussi une immense #médiathèque, riche de millions de #livres, #films, #images, jeux vidéo et documents sonores. Côté bibliothèque, son « but ultime » est de « mettre tous les travaux publiés de l’humanité à la disposition de tous dans le monde ». Chacun·e, à condition d’être inscrit·e, peut emprunter jusqu’à dix livres à la fois, pour une durée de quinze jours. Les livres sont prêtés sous la forme de fichiers pdf. Selon Internet Archive, 17 500 livres sont empruntés chaque jour.

    Comme dans une bibliothèque classique, un livre doit être disponible pour pouvoir être emprunté – une règle que le site a « concoctée de toutes pièces », lui reprochent les plaignants. Ce concept du « #prêt_numérique_contrôlé » autorise un prêt à la fois pour un livre numérisé donné. Soutenu par le Conseil des directeurs des bibliothèques d’État des États-Unis, il n’avait encore jamais été mis en cause devant les tribunaux.

    Ce qui a décidé les #maisons_d’édition à risquer un #procès pas gagné d’avance, c’est la #Bibliothèque_nationale_d’urgence mise en place à la fin du mois de mars par Internet Archive, pour répondre à la fermeture des écoles, bibliothèques et universités en raison du coronavirus, et donc à l’impossibilité d’aller y chercher des livres. Installé aux États-Unis, le site avait simplement décidé de « suspendre les listes d’attente […] pendant toute la durée de l’urgence nationale américaine » : c’est-à-dire qu’il n’y avait plus besoin qu’un livre (numérique) revienne pour être emprunté à nouveau. Plusieurs lecteurs pouvaient ainsi en bénéficier en même temps.

    Mercredi 10 juin, son fondateur, #Brewster_Kahle, a publié sur son blog un billet (https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-) pour annoncer la fin prochaine du dispositif, avancée au 16 juin, espérant trouver avec les détenteurs de droits « un système qui marche ».

    Son initiative a été soutenue publiquement par des dizaines de bibliothèques et d’universités, ces institutions se revendiquant du principe du « #fair_use », qui autorise des dérogations aux droits de reproduction, particulièrement quand il s’agit d’enseignement, et selon les circonstances. C’est le cas, estime Brewster Kahle, de l’épidémie due au coronavirus.

    Au contraire, cette ouverture des portes numériques est intervenue, selon les éditeurs, au pire moment, celui-là « même où de nombreux auteurs, éditeurs et librairies indépendantes, sans parler des bibliothèques, luttent pour survivre ». Le risque pour Internet Archive est vital, la loi sur le #droit_d’auteur (#Copyright_Act) autorisant des #dommages_et_intérêts pouvant atteindre 150 000 dollars par œuvre en cas de violation délibérée. Si le site propose au prêt 1,3 million de livres, certains sont toutefois dans le #domaine_public.

    « La #gratuité est un concurrent indépassable », estiment les éditeurs dans leur plainte, rappelant l’argument le plus éculé de l’industrie musicale. Internet Archive « ne fait qu’exploiter les investissements que les éditeurs ont faits dans leurs livres », accusent-ils, et « au moyen d’un modèle économique conçu pour profiter librement du travail des autres ». La plainte s’acharne à démontrer que l’Internet Archive serait une entreprise commerciale vivant de la #numérisation des livres, un travail qu’elle effectue contre rémunération pour les bibliothèques. Urgence ou pas, elle demande la destruction de toutes les copies illégales.

    Avec les livres prêtés par l’Internet Archive, on est pourtant loin du mp3 recopié ou downloadé en clic. Brewster Kahle rappelle dans une lettre adressée le 10 avril à Thom Tillis, un sénateur républicain président de la Commission sur la #propriété_intellectuelle, réservé sur la légalité du procédé, que son organisation, sans but lucratif, est régulièrement reconnue comme bibliothèque par la Californie. Cela fait bientôt dix ans, dit-il, que les livres sont prêtés selon la règle « #un_lecteur_à_la_fois ». De plus, se défend le fondateur de la bibliothèque, « nos livres numériques sont protégés par les mêmes protections techniques que celles utilisées par les éditeurs pour garantir que les lecteurs n’ont accès à un livre que pendant les deux semaines de son prêt, et que des copies supplémentaires ne peuvent être faites ».

    Toujours à destination de l’élu républicain, il explique : « Vos électeurs ont payé pour des millions de livres auxquels ils n’ont pas accès actuellement » – 15 millions de livres bloqués derrière les portes fermées de 323 bibliothèques, rien qu’en Caroline du Nord, l’État du sénateur, a compté Brewster Kahle.

    Aux éditeurs, il fait remarquer que la bibliothèque d’urgence ne comporte aucun livre publié il y a moins de cinq ans ; 90 % des livres empruntés ont plus de dix ans, et deux tiers datent du XXe siècle. Quant aux auteurs qui ne voudraient pas que leurs livres soient ainsi prêtés, il leur suffit de le demander par mail, poursuit Kahle. Certains ont au contraire, affirme-t-il, demandé à figurer dans la bibliothèque numérique.

    Dès le 31 mars, la Guilde des auteurs avait mobilisé ses membres contre la bibliothèque d’urgence, parlant de « piratage pur et simple », et proposé un modèle de réclamation. Ce groupement d’auteurs avait déjà fait connaître son désaccord avec le prêt de livres numérisés selon le principe « un livre papier, une copie numérique » en janvier 2019. Le #Syndicat_national_des_auteurs (#National_Writers_Unions) a de son côté préféré entamer des discussions amiables avec Internet Archive et les défenseurs du prêt numérique contrôlé.

    L’Internet Archive est en effet, aux États-Unis, loin d’être la seule bibliothèque à pratiquer de la sorte. La pratique du prêt numérisé contrôlé est théorisée, défendue et pratiquée par de nombreux juristes et des bibliothèques universitaires ou locales, comme celles des villes de Los Angeles, San Francisco et Boston. Un livre imprimé peut être prêté : c’est le principe des bibliothèques. Il doit en être de même pour sa déclinaison à l’identique au format numérique, un exemplaire numérique prêté à une personne à la fois.

    En attendant la décision du tribunal new-yorkais, des internautes se posent à travers le monde la question d’archiver l’Internet Archive et ses téraoctets de documents.

    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-idees/110620/le-site-internet-archive-mis-en-danger-par-des-poids-lourds-de-l-edition
    #open_access #confinement #édition_scientifique #recherche #justice

  • #Policing_the_Planet. Why the Policing Crisis Led to #Black_Lives_Matter

    Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in #New_York_City under Police Commissioner #William_Bratton. It’s a #doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over—to deadly effect.

    With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York–based Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martín Espada, and journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond.

    https://www.versobooks.com/books/2107-policing-the-planet

    #livre #open_access #police

    ping @fil @reka @isskein @davduf @karine4 @cede

  • L’Université face au déferlement numérique
    https://journals.openedition.org/variations/740
    Thomas Bouchet, Guillaume Carnino et François Jarrige

    En dépit des idéologies de l’horizontalité et du partage invoquées pour légitimer ces nouvelles technologies numériques, c’est bien l’imposition par en haut qui l’emporte dans les faits. L’université numérique ne constitue que l’un des éléments d’une politique plus vaste de numérisation à l’œuvre dans tous les domaines, mais elle en est l’un des laboratoires privilégiés. L’enseignement supérieur et la recherche sont ainsi au cœur de la récente loi « Pour une République numérique » adoptée par l’Assemblée nationale à la fin du mois de janvier 2016 et portée conjointement par le ministre de l’économie Emmanuel Macron et la secrétaire d’État au numérique Axelle Lemaire. Reposant largement sur un rapport remis par le Conseil du numérique – instance de lobbying créé en 2011 par le gouvernement Fillon, sous la présidence Sarkozy, afin de militer activement pour « la métamorphose numérique de la société » – ce texte de loi entend à la fois accroître les régulations afin de protéger les utilisateurs de l’internet, et créer les conditions d’un déploiement général du Net désormais pensé comme un « droit fondamental » pour tous les citoyens. La numérisation de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche est au cœur du texte de loi et les articles le concernant ont été parmi les plus discutés. Elle prévoit notamment de faciliter l’accès aux données publiques pour la recherche, de favoriser l’accès ouvert aux travaux de recherche financés sur fonds publics, mais aussi d’intensifier la « pédagogie numérique ». Au nom de l’accès universel au savoir – idéal que personne ne contestera – et de l’adaptation continue des formations au marché du travail et à ses besoins, le projet de loi prévoit aussi que les formations en ligne (notamment via les MOOC : Massive Open Online Courses) pourront se substituer aux cours dits en présentiel et devenir diplômantes : « La République doit s’appuyer sur les nouveaux moyens apportés par l’univers numérique pour donner à tous les habitants de tous nos territoires les moyens d’accéder aux formations indispensables à une adaptation permanente aux évolutions économiques et sociétales induites par la mondialisation numérique ».

    Ce texte est un peu daté...
    Depuis 2016 les choses se sont accélérées à coup d’injonctions de l’UE et du ministère de la recherche : https://seenthis.net/messages/851586

    #Open_access #numérisation #accès_ouvert #informatisation

    • Texte issu du numéro 19 de la revue Variations autour de la critique des humanités numériques.
      https://journals.openedition.org/variations/670

      Alors que le printemps arrive en Europe, Variations refleurit aussi, avec une nouvelle livraison. Le dix-neuvième numéro de la revue est celui d’une relance éditoriale autour d’un dossier thématique visant à nommer les impensés de la transformation numérique des sciences humaines et sociales. Dans le fourmillement actuel des travaux sur la question, il nous a semblé nécessaire de présenter les enjeux d’une approche critique des humanités numériques...

  • L’accès et la circulation des savoirs se font dans un monde de plus en plus ouvert. Les données en libre accès se multiplient, mais leurs usages ne vont pas de soi… #numérique #internet #usages #openaccess

    https://sms.hypotheses.org/24810

    Open source, open educational resources, open data, open courses, ces différentes expressions anglophones traduisent la multiplication des données actuellement accessibles en mode ouvert sur le web. Elles modifient progressivement les modalités d’accès et de circulation des savoirs à l’ère des géants du numérique –les GAFAM. Dans les domaines de l’éducation comme des données publiques, leurs usages ne vont pas forcément de soi.

    Ces questionnements ont fait l’objet d’un ouvrage collectif coordonné par Luc Massou, Brigitte Juanals, Philippe Bonfils et Philippe Dumas, regroupant une sélection de communications sur les sources ouvertes numériques dans le secteur éducatif et social réalisées lors d’un colloque à l’université Aix-Marseille en 2016 (...)

    • La #science_ouverte doit être interrogée bien au-delà de ce premier discours consensuel sur l’ouverture des données et des publications (soit un mouvement contre les éditeurs privés et l’appropriation commerciale du savoir - mouvement qui, soit dit au passage, est en phase d’institutionnalisation depuis quelques années).
      Plusieurs points sont systématiquement refoulés : le coût écologique de l’ouverture des données, la gouvernance économique (volonté de réduire les coûts), la transformation (voir la destruction) des métiers d’éditeur et de bibliothécaire...
      Les politiques scientifiques d’évaluation sont également systématiquement passés sous silence (le fameux #publish_or_perish). Je vous invite à lire ce très bon texte de #Peter_Sloterdijk (https://seenthis.net/messages/54405) sur l’augmentation du plagiat comme conséquence du publish or perish (ou publier pour publier à défaut d’être lu : le pacte de non-lecture).
      Ce que l’ouverture des données va également permettre, c’est le recours massif aux robots (#machine_learning), seuls capables de rechercher les mots clefs souhaités dans un corpus numérique monstrueux. Cela pose et posera des questions épistémologiques qui ne sont pour le moment jamais évoqués dans cet appel à une science 2.0 (ou e-science) jamais nommée.

      P.-S. Je parle essentiellement ici des SHS.

      #informatisation #accès_ouvert #open_access

  • Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian Magazine
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-releases-28-million-images-public-domain-180974263

    ulture connoisseurs, rejoice: The Smithsonian Institution is inviting the world to engage with its vast repository of resources like never before.

    For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge.

    #musée #images #open_access

  • #UKRI wants monographs to be #open_access by 2024

    Proposals are likely to raise concerns over the future of longer-form academic publishing.

    Academic monographs will need to be made freely available within 12 months of publication if authors are supported by public research funds, according to new open access proposals from the UK’s main research body.

    Under new draft proposals published on 13 February, #UK_Research_and_Innovation will require all scholarly monographs, book chapters and edited collections that acknowledge its funding to be made open access from January 2024, unless a contract has been signed before this date that prevents adherence to the policy.

    Open access publication on an online platform or in a free-to-view institutional repository will be mandatory “within a maximum of 12 months of publication, with a preference for immediate [open access]”, according to the guidelines, which have been published as part of a consultation on the plans.

    The move is likely to raise concerns about the future of academic monographs, of which some 8,000 were submitted to the 2014 research excellence framework. With some publishers that offer open-access monographs charging authors upwards of £10,000, questions are likely to be raised over whether institutional budgets will stretch to cover the costs of this type of longer-form publication.

    Learned societies and some commercial publishing groups might also be concerned by the prospect of a one-year open access embargo, with a Universities UK report published in October suggesting that a green model with a two- or three-year delay on open access publication would be more commercially feasible.

    However, UKRI says it is still considering “definitions of in-scope monographs, edited collections and book chapters”, and “potential exceptions, including where significant reuse of third-party materials is required”.

    In addition, UKRI has also set out its proposed open access policy for peer-reviewed articles supported either by direct funding from the £7 billion-a-year body or the eight research councils that it funds.

    Under the proposed policy, articles accepted for publication on or after 1 January 2022 should be made “freely and immediately available online through a journal, open access publishing platform or an institutional or subject repository”.

    That requirement is broadly in line with the Plan S principles agreed by the European Union and 17 European national research agencies, including UKRI, which oblige researchers funded by participating agencies to publish only in open-access titles from January 2021.

    Under Plan S, academics will also be able to publish in journals that are not fully open access during a three-year transition period if their publishers have signed what are called “transformative agreements” committing to switch fully to open access.

    Speaking to Times Higher Education, Sir Duncan Wingham, UKRI’s executive champion for open access, acknowledged that there were “particular problems” about the inclusion of monographs in open access rules.

    “We recognise very clearly that the state of the open access [monograph] publishing market is nowhere near the same level of maturity as the research journal publication market,” said Sir Duncan, who is chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council.

    The longer 2024 time frame for implementation reflected the desire to “listen to as wide a set of views as possible” on this issue, Sir Duncan said, adding that there are “areas [of the open access consultation] where we are less firm” in proposals than others.

    That said, Sir Duncan continued, there is “no reason why any discipline should be immune from open access simply because of the way it publishes”, in a reference to the arts and humanities, where monographs are more common.

    The consultation, which has been launched as part of UKRI’s ongoing open access review, will close on 17 April. UKRI will use responses to inform its final policy, which it intends to announce in 2020.

    https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ukri-wants-monographs-be-open-access-by2024
    #résistance #édition_scientifique #monographies #livres

  • Les travaux scientifiques financés par l’#argent_public en #libre_accès

    Les chercheurs financés par des fonds publics devront rendre accessibles tous leurs travaux dans des revues consultables sans restriction sur internet. Il s’agit d’un changement complet du système académique qui reposait sur des revues coûteuses et réservées aux abonnés.

    C’est l’ex-directeur de la recherche à la Commission européenne, Robert-Jan Smits, qui a mis un coup de pied dans la fourmilière avec son plan dit « Open Access ». « Seuls 15% des résultats de la recherche financés par de l’argent public sont disponibles immédiatement pour le public. On a peu progressé parce qu’il y a d’énormes intérêts financiers dans ce domaine », relève-t-il.

    Le marché de la publication pèse 15 milliards d’euros par année, et il est dominé par un petit nombre d’entreprises « qui font pas mal de profit », précise Robert-Jan Smits.

    Dans ce système actuellement dominant, l’argent des contribuables est redistribué aux scientifiques via les agences de financement. Il sert aussi aux universités à payer les abonnements aux revues... des journaux fermés au public et à la communauté globale non abonnés.
    Chercheurs suisses favorables

    Le plan européen, appelé Plan S, entrera en vigueur en Europe en 2021. En Suisse, le Fonds national pour la recherche scientifique vise déjà 100% de publications en libre accès. Cette situation a été reçue plutôt favorablement par la plupart des chercheurs.

    « Tout le monde est d’accord pour affirmer qu’il faudrait davantage publier en open access. Mais, en pratique, le système bouge très lentement. Il y a beaucoup de conservatisme et d’intérêts différents. Donc je pense qu’à ce stade-là, forcer la chose et aller de l’avant est important et pertinent », explique le professeur associé à l’Université de Lausanne (UNIL) Marc Robinson-Rechavi.

    La publication est aussi souvent le moteur de la carrière des chercheurs. Pour Sophie Martin, professeur ordinaire à l’UNIL, la question du libre accès n’est pas la seule. « Il y a toujours des questions sur l’audience, qui va lire le travail ? Quel niveau de prestige vise-t-on ? Cela reste des questions importantes dans une carrière scientifique qu’on ne peut pas ignorer ».
    Une chance pour la société civile

    Le bénéfice d’une telle démarche devrait ainsi retourner à la société civile. « Concrètement, cela veut dire qu’un enseignant qui donne un cours, par exemple sur le cancer du sein, va pouvoir accéder au dernier article scientifique à ce sujet et en discuter avec ses élèves, ou des patients qui souffrent d’une maladie rare vont pouvoir se plonger dans cette littérature alors qu’aujourd’hui ce n’est presque pas possible », explique le biologiste et historien à l’Université de Genève Bruno Strasser.

    A ce jour sur internet, il existe déjà plus de 13’000 revues en accès libre. La révolution pour une science plus ouverte a commencé.

    https://www.rts.ch/info/sciences-tech/10832455-les-travaux-scientifiques-finances-par-largent-public-en-libre-acces.ht

    #édition_scientifique #Suisse #open_access #science #université

    • https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

      WP pas à jour : le 31/05/2019, après le départ de Robert-Jan Smits, une version plus « réaliste » du Plan S a été diffusée :

      Open Access : une nouvelle version du Plan S, plus réaliste et applicable | Inserm - La science pour la santé
      https://www.inserm.fr/actualites-et-evenements/actualites/open-access-nouvelle-version-plan-plus-realiste-et-applicable

      L’objectif global du Plan S demeure identique, mais plusieurs aménagements et précisions en font désormais un plan plus réaliste et applicable. Citons les mesures les plus importantes :

      Le délai d’application est repoussé d’un an, au 1 janvier 2021. 
      Le dépôt de manuscrit auteur accepté (MAA) dans une archive ouverte (HAL) est clairement reconnu comme une des voies de conformité au Plan S, à condition que le MAA soit sous licence CC-BY et disponible immédiatement, sans délai d’embargo. 
      Le soutien de la cOAlition S aux nouvelles initiatives ou modes de publications est affiché (modèle « Diamant », par exemple).
      Le financement de publications dans des revues hybrides n’est plus exclu d’office. Il reste possible à conditions que ces journaux fassent partie d’accords « transformants » (publish and read, par exemple) et transparents, possiblement conclus jusqu’à une date limite de fin 2024. 
      Le besoin de révision des modes d’évaluation de la recherche - notamment en début de carrière des chercheurs - est également identifié et nécessite de poser de nouvelles règles internationales d’évaluation.

  • Open Access, the Global South and the Politics of Knowledge Production and Circulation

    #Leslie_Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he serves as the Associate Director. An early practitioner of the Web for scholarly exchange and online learning, Leslie is particularly interested in the role and design of network in the flow of knowledge and their impact on local and international development. As one of the original signatories of the #Budapest_Open_Access_Initiative, a historical and defining event of the global open access movement, Leslie has been active in the experimentation and implementation of scholarly communication initiatives of varying scales around the world. The Director of Bioline International, Chair of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, Leslie is a long-time advocate for knowledge equity and inclusive development. Leslie has served as advisor to numerous projects and organizations, including the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the American Anthropological Association, the International Development Research Centre, UNESCO, and the Open Society Foundation. He was the Principal Investigator of the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network, funded jointly by the IDRC and DIFD.

    https://www.openlibhums.org/news/314
    #circulation_des_savoirs #savoirs #open_access #production_des_savoirs #université #science #recherche

    ping @karine4 @cede

  • First article published in UCL’s open access megajournal

    UCL’s new megajournal ‘#UCL_Open’ has published its first article, delivering on our commitment to provide academics, students and the general public with ground-breaking research free of charge.

    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2019/aug/first-article-published-ucls-open-access-megajournal
    #résistance #édition_scientifique #savoir #université #connaissance #UCL #alternative #open_access #revues_scientifiques

    –------
    Welcome to UCL Open: Environment
    https://ucl.scienceopen.com
    #UCL _open_environment

  • #DOAJ (#Directory_of_Open_Access_Journals)

    DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

    https://doaj.org
    #liste #OA #open_access #édition_scientifique #université #revues #revues_scientifiques

    • List of OA journals in geography, political ecology, anthropology, planning, area studies, and various social sciences

      “…….So things might have happily continued, had not the corporate interests within this limited, subsidised economy pushed journal subscription prices to the point where access to the knowledge went into a state of decline, at a time when new publishing technologies enabled researchers to take publishing back into their own hands. These new technologies have been used to demonstrate how access can be greatly increased, improving the circulation of knowledge, restoring the researcher’s control of knowledge, and extending its value as a public good by making it far more widely available.” Willinsky J. 2003. The Nine Flavours of Open Access Scholarly Publishing . J Postgrad Med 49:263-7.

      Academics write most of their work in journals. Journals should publish and curate good quality work, but unfortunately the majority are also used to make money for commercial publishers. This is not a win-win situation. Corporate profits are frequently high because companies retain author copyrights, and sell the material to (mainly) scholarly and university libraries, that frequently struggle to stock key journals because of the cost. Five companies are now dominating the field, and buying out smaller ones. Financing of this form of scholarly publishing is opaque. Academics do not rock the boat on this very often, because their prestige and careers are linked too much to the journals they publish in, and most of the prestigious ones are commercial and expensive. Our systems of merit and performance measures are not yet geared to rewarding publishing that is ethical, or based on social justice criteria (Cahill and Irving 2015). This is especially bad at research universities. (good ref. here, a depressing study here that shows social scientists in particular don’t care as much about OA as they about the rank of outlets).

      To make some contribution to the debate about whether social scientists can avoid the big commercial, firewalled journals, I list below decent academic journals that are free or cheap to publish in, have proper refereeing, and are Open Access – free for readers. Copyright is retained by the author in most but not quite all of them. Open access journals can also impose substantial fees on authors instead of readers. Those with high fees above cUS$500 for authors are excluded- like most social scientists I don’t have more than this to contribute to a publication and I don’t think more is justified. There is a long debate about whether in our internet world, we should be paying at all, which I won’t get into here.

      The list began with fields my students and I publish in, hence the small number of themes [environment & development, human geography, anthropology, urban studies and planning, area studies, general social science, and the university research/teaching/publication process], but it should be useful as a starting point. Further discussion on journals and open access here. Journals are the main systems of prestige, ranking and hierarchy that we have, much as it would be fairer to ignore them and just publish in the most appropriate venue for the readership. I have included Scopus and its useful impact factor derivative Citescore (released Dec 2016, now called Scopus Sources), Web of Science (formerly ISI) and their newish Emerging Sources Citation Index listings.

      For the majority of my colleagues reading this who have not thought much about OA and publishing ethics (and are manically trying to publish in the best places), I hope you find something you can contribute to. In brief, open access is the best way to publish scholarly material – more readers, and articles under authors’ control. It is a logical outcome of the invention of the web, and the Academic Spring protests of 2012 (analysis, reasons), which have had echoes – eg the Lingua debacle over the resignation of an editorial board that was dissatisfied with Elsevier’s control of copyright and high OA charges, and all the Netherlands universities’ fight with the same company in 2015 about high charges.

      Most of the journals on the list are run by the “community economies” of unpaid academics, university libraries or departments, or scholarly societies, and a few are commercial but still have acceptable author fees that mere mortals could afford (APCs) *. Only if the big publishers are able to offer OA at reasonable fees, is it worth considering publishing an OA article with them. That said, as Sir/Prof. Tim Gowers argues, journals these days exist only to accommodate author prestige – you can publish anything online, or easily just email the author for a copy of an article (or use Researchgate, Academia.edu or Sci-hub). So OA journals need to be as good in quality and meticulous as those conventional ones that are costing our libraries a fortune. I hope I only list good ones here.

      The invention of the web and its rollout in the early 1990s spelled the end of the need for conventional firewalled journals. Printed copies are no longer required (although they may be desired by a few) and the culture among scholars has changed to storing individual article PDFs and only printing them if needed. There are few costs for hosting a journal online – storing its files is easy. Costs, or value, are all in the labour. To suggest there are major cost implications of OA is not true, unless professional editors or translators are used. If publishing is done largely by academics and their institutions, which is my hope, the cost of running journals is absorbed into regular workloads or taken up by grants, and we have a true change in publishing underway. “The commitment of scholars everywhere to finding new ways of improving access to knowledge” (Willinsky 2003) need not be commercialised or costly. The ‘big five’ publishers (who now control 66% of papers in social sciences in the WoS, and rising…) and some of the smaller ones will have to adapt or perish (but they do produce indexing, which is useful for now). We will have our copyrights and a larger potential readership, and university libraries will have more money to spend. We will also be able to support smaller and multilingual world periphery journals.

      Useful sites

      DOAJ if your journal isn’t on here, a curated list of proper OA journals, not good. However in 2016 they did some housecleaning, but it was pretty poorly done so many legit. journals complained about being missed off. This now (2017) seems to be rectified.
      A campaign to alert you to dodgy publishers, because there are some http://thinkchecksubmit.org.
      A listing of academic articles on radical OA http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/resources/radical-open-access-literature
      A video about OA https://youtu.be/L5rVH1KGBCY


      Paywall (2018) the movie https://paywallthemovie.com – free and recommended.
      Open Access Chronicle http://paper.li/jimtill/1309217562
      Beall’s List, Original site was removed in Jan ’17 – possibly the author was threatened with litigation in some way. (now archived and updated https://beallslist.weebly.com). Crappy journals designed to make money, and allowing substandard work, (were) identified and weeded out. Beall, now retired, did focus on the negatives of OA, was criticised for libertarian views supporting free enterprise but only for the conventional, subscription-based publishing establishment. And it must be said, he held a very embarrassing conspiracy theory about all OA publishing!
      QOAM Quality Open Access Market. Crowd-sourced assessment of OA journals. Evolving. List of journals and publishers is useful. http://www.qoam.eu
      Francophone journals list (geography) http://www.openedition.org/catalogue-journals?searchdomain=catalogue-journals&q=geography
      All Australian university-run journals https://aoasg.org.au/australian-oa-journals
      Useful journal list in the environmental field, not all free http://www.esf.edu/es/sonnenfeld/envsoc_journals.htm
      JURN – good and updated list of OA journals, edited and searchable. Site down 2019 try here for a pdf instead http://www.jurn.org/directory
      ESOP young academics list of OA planning journals https://aesopyoungacademics.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/open-access-week-planext-and-a-list-of-oa-journals
      List of online anthropology journals http://www.antropologi.info/links/Main/Journals
      INASP It funds Nepal Journals Online (most with credible academic status), Bangladesh Journals Online (BanglaJOL), Philippines Journals Online (PhilJOL) and Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL), (and other countries). For Africa see www.ajol.info. Not all of these are good though; if I find good ones there I will place them below. For Eastern Europe see https://www.ceeol.com
      Latin America journal listing (til 2015) http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/journals
      Impact of the social sciences – a useful LSE project with some actual data.
      Giant list by Jan Szczepanski, 9mb word file! Not all are cheap or taking english articles. https://www.ebsco.com/open-access/szczepanski-list
      Radical Open Access conference, June 2015, Coventry http://radicalopenaccess.disruptivemedia.org.uk/videos
      Walt Crawford writes more about OA publishing than anybody else- even book length manuscripts interrogating the DOAJ database. He shows reputable free OA journals are predominant – only a minority have high APCs.

      https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-decent-open-access-journals

  • Les réseaux sociaux scientifiques : visibilité et openaccess

    Selon une enquête récente du CNRS1, les chercheurs font un usage massif des #réseaux_sociaux qui sont intégrés au cœur de leurs pratiques professionnelles. Ces réseaux permettent une meilleure visibilité des travaux et démultiplient les possibilités d’identifier les ressources dont les scientifiques ont besoin pour poursuivre et étendre leur activité.

    https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00971365/document
    #HAL #open_access #OA #édition_scientifique #research_gate #université #academia.edu

  • Must we decolonise #Open_Access? Perspectives from Francophone Africa

    A long read featuring the recent work of Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou and Florence Piron, on how a truly open and inclusive ‘Open Access’ movement must include those at the periphery

    I recently watched the recording of the fantastic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion session at OpenCon, and I was struck by the general theme of how ‘openness’ isn’t necessarily the force for equality that we perhaps think it is, and how issues of power, exploitation, and hierarchy means that it should be understood differently according to the context in which it is applied. In the session, Denisse Albornoz used the expression of ‘situated openness’ to describe how our Northern conception of openness should not be forced on anyone or any group – it needs to be understood first in individual contexts of historical injustices and post-colonial power structures.

    What stood out for me most in this session, however, (because it related most to my work) was Cameroonian Thomas Mboa’s presentation, which talked about the ‘neo-colonial face of open access’. The presentation employed some very striking critical terms such as ‘cognitive injustice’ and ‘epistemic alienation’ to Open Access.

    I’ve always known that the Open Access movement was far from perfect, but at least it’s moving global science publishing in the right direction, right? Can working towards free access and sharing of research really be ‘neo-colonial’ and lead to ‘alienation’ for users of research in the Global South? And if this really is the case, how can we ‘decolonise’ open access?

    Thomas didn’t get much time to expand on some of the themes he presented, so I got in contact to see if he had covered these ideas elsewhere, and fortunately he has, through his participation in ‘Projet SOHA’ . This is a research-action project that’s been working on open science, empowerment and cognitive justice in French-speaking Africa and Haiti from 2015-17. He provided me with links to four publications written in French by himself and his colleagues from the project – Florence Piron (Université Laval, Quebec, Canada), Antonin Benoît Diouf (Senegal), and Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba (Cameroon), and many others.

    These articles are a goldmine of provocative ideas and perspectives on Open Access from the Global South, which should challenge all of us in the English-speaking academic publishing community. Therefore, I decided to share some excerpts and extended quotes from these articles below, in amongst some general comments from my (admittedly limited) experience of working with researchers in the Global South.

    The quotes are taken from the following book and articles, which I recommend reading in full (these are easily translatable using the free tool Google Translate Web, which correctly translated around 95% of the text).

    Chapter 2 – ‘Les injustices cognitives en Afrique subsaharienne : réflexions sur les causes et les moyens de lutte’ – Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou (2016), in Piron, Dibounje Madiba et Regulus 2016 (below)
    Justice cognitive, libre accès et savoirs locaux – Collective book edited by Florence Piron, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba and Samuel Regulus (2016) (CC-BY) https://scienceetbiencommun.pressbooks.pub/justicecognitive1
    Qui sait ? Le libre accès en Afrique et en Haïti – Florence Piron (2017) (CC-BY) (Soon to be published in English in Forthcoming Open Divide. Critical Studies of Open Access (Herb & Schöpfel ed), Litwinbooks
    Le libre accès vu d’Afrique francophone subsaharienne – Florence Piron, Antonin Benoît Diouf, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou, Zoé Aubierge Ouangré, Djossè Roméo Tessy, Hamissou Rhissa Achaffert, Anderson Pierre and Zakari Lire (2017) (CC-BY-NC-SA)
    Une autre science est possible. Récit d’une utopie concrète dans la Francophonie (le projet SOHA) – Revue Possibles, 2016 (CC-BY)

    Piron et al’s (2017) article starts with a stinging critique of those of us in our Northern scholarly publishing community cliques, and our never-ending open access debates over technicalities:

    “… there are many debates in this community, including on the place of open licenses in open access (is an article really in open access if it is not freely reusable in addition to being freely accessible?), on the legitimacy of the fees charged to authors by certain journals choosing open access, on the quality and evaluation of open access journals, on the very format of the journal as the main vehicle for the dissemination of scientific articles or on the type of documents to be included in institutional or thematic open archives (only peer-reviewed articles or any document related to scientific work?).

    Viewed from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, these debates may seem very strange, if not incomprehensible. Above all, they appear very localized: they are debates of rich countries, of countries of the North, where basic questions such as the regular payment of a reasonable salary to academics, the existence of public funding for research, access to the web, electricity, well-stocked libraries and comfortable and safe workplaces have long been settled.” Piron et al. (2017)

    … and their critique gets more and more scathing from here for the Open Access movement. OA advocates – tighten your seatbelts – you are not going to find this a comfortable ride.

    “… a conception of open access that is limited to the legal and technical questions of the accessibility of science without thinking about the relationship between center and periphery can become a source of epistemic alienation and neocolonialism in the South”. Piron et al. (2017)

    “Is open access the solution to the documented shortcomings of these African universities and, in doing so, a crucial means of getting scientific research off the ground? I would like to show that this is not the case, and to suggest that open access can instead become a neo-colonial tool by reinforcing the cognitive injustices that prevent African researchers from fully deploying their research capacities in the service of the community and sustainable local development of their country.” Piron (2017)

    Ouch. To understand these concepts of ‘cognitive injustice’ and ‘epistemic alienation’, it helps to understand this ‘world system’ and the power relationship between the centre and the periphery. This is based on Wallerstein’s (1996) model, which Thomas featured in his OpenCon slides:

    “… a world-system whose market unit is the scientific publication circulating between many instances of high economic value, including universities, research centers, science policies, journals and an oligopoly of for-profit scientific publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, 2015).” Piron et al. (2017)

    “… we believe that science, far from being universal, has been historically globalized. Inspiring us, like Keim (2010) and a few others (Polanco, 1990), from Wallerstein’s (1996) theory, we consider that it constitutes a world-system whose market unit is the scientific publication. Produced mainly in the North, this merchandise obeys standards and practices that are defined by the ‘center’ of the system, namely the main commercial scientific publishers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015), and their university partners are the US and British universities dominating the so-called world rankings. The semi-periphery is constituted by all the other countries of the North or emerging from the South which revolve around this center, adopting the English language in science and conforming to the model LMD (license, master, doctorate) imposed since the Bologna process to all the universities of the world with the aim of “normalizing” and standardizing the functioning of this world-system. The periphery then refers to all the countries that are excluded from this system, which produce no or very few scientific publications or whose research work is invisible, but to whom the LMD model has also been imposed (Charlier, Croché, & Ndoye 2009, Hountondji 2001)”. Piron et al. (2017)

    So, the continuing bias and global focus towards the powerful ‘center’ of the world-system leads to the epistemic alienation of those on the periphery, manifesting in a ‘spiritual colonisation’:

    “… this attitude that drives us to want to think about local problems with Western perspective is a colonial legacy to which many African citizens hang like a ball.” Mboa (2016).

    So where does Open Access fit in with this world-system?

    “… if open access is to facilitate and accelerate the access of scientists from the South to Northern science without looking into the visibility of knowledge of the South, it helps to redouble their alienation epistemic without contributing to their emancipation. Indeed, by making the work of the center of the world-system of science even more accessible, open access maximizes their impact on the periphery and reinforces their use as a theoretical reference or as a normative model, to the detriment of local epistemologies.” Piron et al. (2017)

    Rethinking Northern perspectives

    This should be an eye-opening analysis for those of us who assumed that access to research knowledge in the North could only be a good thing for the South. Perhaps we need to examine the arrogance behind our narrow worldview, and consider more deeply the power at the heart of such a one-way knowledge exchange. Many of us might find this difficult, as:

    “The idea that open access may have the effects of neocolonialism is incomprehensible to people blind to epistemological diversity, who reduce the proclaimed universalism of Western science to the impoverished model of the standards imposed by the Web of Science model. For these people, the invisibility of a publication in their numerical reference space (located in the center of the world-system) is equivalent to its non-existence. The idea that valid and relevant knowledge can exist in another form and independently of the world-system that fascinates them is unthinkable.” Piron et al. (2017)

    Having spent a little time at scholarly publishing events in the Global North, I can attest that the mindset described above is common. There are kind thoughts (and a few breadcrumbs thrown in the form of grants and fellowships) towards those on the periphery, but it is very much in the mindset of helping those from the Global South ‘catch up’. Our mindset is very much as Piron describes here:

    “If one sticks to the positivist view that “science” is universal – even if its “essence” is symbolized by the American magazine Science – then indeed African science, that is to say in Africa, is late, and we need to help it develop so that it looks more and more like the North”. Piron (2017)

    And whilst in the North we may have a lot of respect for different cultural perspectives, genuine reciprocal exchanges of research knowledge are rare. We are supremely confident that our highly-developed scientific publishing model deserves to be at the centre of our system. This can lead to selective blindness about the rigorousness of our science and our indexed journals, in spite of the steady drip drip drip of reports of biased peer review, data fraud and other ethical violations in ‘high-impact’ Northern journals, exposed in places like retraction watch.

    North/South research collaborations are rarely equitable – southern partners often complain of being used as data-gatherers rather than intellectual equals and partners in research projects, even when the research is being carried out in their own country.

    “These [Northern] partners inevitably guide the problems and the methodological and epistemological choices of African researchers towards the only model they know and value, the one born at the center of the world-system of science – without questioning whether this model is relevant to Africa and its challenges”. Piron et al (2017).

    These issues of inequity in collaborative relationships and publication practices seem inextricably linked, which is not surprising when the ultimate end goal of research is publishing papers in Northern journals, rather than actually solving Southern development challenges.

    “In this context, open access may appear as a neocolonial tool, as it facilitates access by Southern researchers to Northern science without ensuring reciprocity. In doing so, it redoubles the epistemic alienation of these researchers instead of contributing to the emancipation of the knowledge created in the universities of the South by releasing them from their extraversion. Indeed, by making the work produced in the center of the world-system even more accessible, free access maximizes their impact on the periphery and reinforces their use as a theoretical reference or as a normative model, to the detriment of local epistemologies, which generates situations absurd as, for example, the use of a theoretical framework related to wage labor in the Paris region to analyze the work of women in northern Mali” Piron (2017)

    “The resulting consequences are, in particular, the teachers of the Southern countries who quote and read only writers from the North and impose them on their students and the libraries of our universities who do everything to subscribe to Western scholarly journals while they do not deal with our problems. (Mboa Nkoudou, 2016 )”

    This is also a striking example:

    “It is very sad to note that geographers in Ouagadougou are more familiar with European work on the Sahel than those at the Higher Institute of Sahel in Maroua, Cameroon.” Piron (2017)

    The lack of equity in research knowledge exchange and collaboration is also caused by another one-way North to South flow: funding. Research in the South is often dependent on foreign funding. Big Northern donors and funders therefore set the standards and agendas in research, and in how the entire research funding system works. Southern partners rarely get to set the agenda, and researchers rarely get to develop the research questions that guide the research. They have to learn to jump through administrative hoops to become credible in the eyes of the Northern donor (for more information see ‘Who drives research in developing countries?‘).

    Southern institutions are also compelled, via league tables such as the World Unviersity Rankings, to play the same game as institutions in the North. Institutions are ranked against each other according to criteria set in the North, one of which is citations (of course, only citations between journals in the Web of Science or Scopus, which is overwhelmingly Northern). And so to stay ‘competitive’, Southern institutions need their researchers to publish in Northern journals with Northern language and agendas.
    Northern agendas and local innovation

    Whilst it is tempting to think that the issues and criticism described above is mostly a problem for the social sciences and humanities, there are also real issues in the ‘hard’ sciences – perhaps not so much in their epistemological foundations – but in very practical issues of Northern research agendas. For example, Northern research, being based in Europe and the US, is overwhelmingly biased towards white people, in diversity of leadership, diversity of researchers, and most importantly in the whiteness of clinical trial subjects. This is problematic because different ethnic populations have different genetic makeups and differences due to geography, that mean they respond differently to treatments (see here, here and here). Are African and Asian researchers informed of this when they read research from so-called ‘international’ journals?

    Furthermore, these Northern agendas can also mean that research focuses on drugs, equipment and treatments that are simply not suitable for developing country contexts. I was reminded of a discussion comment recently made by a Pakistani surgeon on the Northern bias of systematic reviews:

    “There is a definite bias in this approach as almost all of the guidelines and systematic reviews are based on the research carried out in high income countries and the findings and the recommendations have little relevance to the patients, health care system and many a time serve no purpose to the millions of patients based in low resourced countries. e.g. I routinely used Phenol blocks for spasticity management for my patients which were abandoned two decades ago in the West. Results are great, and the patients can afford this Rs 200 phenol instead of Rs 15,000 Botox vial. But, unfortunately, I am unable to locate a single systematic review on the efficacy of phenol as all published research in the last decade was only on the use of Botox in the management of spasticity.” Farooq Rathore (HIFA mailing list, 2016).

    Similarly, I’ve read research papers from the South that report on innovative approaches to medical treatments and other problems that utilise lower-cost equipment and methodologies (in fact, as is argued here, research in low-resource environments can often be more efficient and innovative, containing many lessons we, in the North, could learn from). This point is also made by Piron et al:

    “… the production of technical and social innovations is rich in Sub-Saharan French-speaking Africa, as evidenced by the high number of articles on this subject in the Sci-Dev magazine, specializing in science for development, or in the ecofin site, an economic information agency turned towards Africa. But these are mostly local innovations that mobilize local resources and often recycled materials to, for example, introduce electricity into a village, better irrigate fields or offer lighting after sunset. The aim of these innovations is to contribute to local development and not to the development of international markets, unlike innovations designed in the North which, while targeting the countries of the South, remain highly marketable – just think of milk powder or GMO seeds. The issue of open access to scientific publications is a very secondary issue for local innovators in such a context”. (Piron et al. 2016)

    These examples of innovation aside, there are many cases where the ‘epistemic alienation’ described above leads to ‘the exclusion or contempt of local knowledge’ (Mboa, 2016), even amongst researchers in the global South.

    “In fact, Western culture abundantly relayed in the media and textbooks is shown to be superior to other cultures. This situation is pushing Africans to multiply their efforts to reach the ideal of life of the “white”. This situation seems to block their ability to think locally, or even to be reactive. Thus, faced with a given situation specific to the African context, many are those who first draw on the resources of Western thinking to propose elements of answers.” Mboa (2016)

    Free and open access as ‘showcasing products’

    The Research4Life (R4L) programme also comes in for criticism from Piron et al. which will come as a shock to Northern publishing people who often use the ‘… but they’ve got Research4Life’ line when faced with evidence of global research inequalities.

    “… while pretending to charitably provide university libraries in the Global South with free access to pre-defined packages of paid journals from the North, this program, set up by for-profit scientific publishers, maintains the dependence of these libraries, limits their understanding of the true network of open access publications and, above all, improves the market for the products sold by these publishers.” Piron et al (2017)

    “… this program encourages the continued reliance of these libraries on an external program, designed in the North and showcasing Northern products, while it may disappear as soon as this philanthropic desire is exhausted or as soon as trading partners will not find any more benefits.”

    Whilst I still think R4L is a great initiative (I know many researchers in the Global South who are very appreciative of the programme), it’s difficult to disagree with the conclusion that:

    ‘… this program mainly improves the opportunities of Northern publishers without contributing to the sustainable empowerment of university libraries in the South … this charity seems very hypocritical, let alone arbitrary, since it can stop at any time.” Piron (2017)

    Of course, the same could be said of Article Processing Charge (APC) waivers for developing country authors. Waivers are currently offered by the majority of journals from the big publishers (provided according to the same HINARI list of countries provided by Research4Life), although sometimes you have to dig deep into the terms and conditions pages to find them. Waivers are good for publishers to showcase their corporate social responsibility and provide diversity of authorship. However, they are unsustainable – this charity is unlikely to last forever, especially as they rely on the pool of Southern authors being relatively limited. It should also be noted that developing countries with the most active, growing researcher communities such as Nigeria, South Africa and India do not qualify for either R4L access or APC waivers.

    Speaking of APCs, something I observe regularly amongst Southern researchers is a confusion over the ‘Gold’ OA author-pays model, and this too is noted:

    “In northern countries, many researchers, especially in STEM (Björk and Solomon, 2012) [ 7 ], believe (wrongly) that open access now means “publication fees charged to authors” … this commercial innovation appears to be paying off, as these costs appear to be natural to researchers.” Piron (2017)

    This also appears to be paying off in the Global South – authors seem resigned to pay some kind of charge to publish, and it is common to have to point out to authors that over two-thirds of OA journals and 99% of subscription journals do not charge to publish (although, the rise of ‘predatory’ journals may have magnified this misunderstanding that pay-to-publish is the norm).

    It may be tempting to think of these inequalities as an unfortunate historical accident, and that our attempts to help the Global South ‘catch up’ are just a little clumsy and patronising. However, Piron argues that this is no mere accident, but the result of colonial exploitation that still resonates in existing power structures today:

    “Open access is then easily seen as a means of catching up, at least filling gaps in libraries and often outdated teaching […] Africa is considered as lagging behind the modern world, which would explain its underdevelopment, to summarize this sadly hegemonic conception of north-south relations. By charity, Northern countries then feel obliged to help, which feeds the entire industry surrounding development aid [….] this model of delay, violently imposed by the West on the rest of the world through colonization, has been used to justify the economic and cognitive exploitation (Connell, 2014) of colonized continents without which modernity could not have prospered.” Piron (2017)

    To build the path or take the path?

    Of course, the authors do admit that access to Northern research has a role to play in the Global South, provided the access is situated in local contexts:

    “… African science should be an African knowledge, rooted in African contexts, that uses African epistemologies to answer African questions, while also using other knowledge from all over the world, including Western ones, if they are relevant locally.” Piron (2017)

    However, the practical reality of Open Access for Southern researchers is often overstated. There is a crucial distinction between making content ‘open’ and providing the means to access that content. As Piron et al. 2017 say:

    “To put a publication in open access: is it, to build the path (technical or legal) that leads to it, or is it to make it possible for people to take this path? This distinction is crucial to understand the difference in meaning of open access between the center and the periphery of the world-system of science, although only an awareness of the conditions of scientific research in the Southern countries makes it possible to visualize it, to perceive it.”

    This crucial difference between availability and accessibility has also been explained by Anne Powell on Scholarly Kitchen. There are many complex barriers to ‘free’ and ‘open’ content actually being accessed and used. The most obvious of these barriers is internet connectivity, but librarian training, language and digital literacy also feature significantly:

    “Finding relevant open access articles on the web requires digital skills that, as we have seen, are rare among Haitian and African students for whom the web sometimes comes via Facebook … Remember that it is almost always when they arrive at university that these students first touch a computer. The catching up is fast, but many reflexes acquired since the primary school in the countries of the North must be developed before even being able to imagine that there are open access scientific texts on the web to make up for the lack of documents in the libraries. In the words of the Haitian student Anderson Pierre, “a large part of the students do not know the existence of these resources or do not have the digital skills to access and exploit them in order to advance their research project”. Piron (2017)

    Barriers to local knowledge exchange

    Unfortunately, this is made even more difficult by resistance and misunderstanding of the internet and digital tools from senior leadership in Africa:

    “Social representations of the web, science and copyright also come into play, especially among older academics, a phenomenon that undermines the appropriation of digital technologies at the basis of open access in universities.” Piron et al. (2017)

    “To this idea that knowledge resides only in printed books is added a representation of the web which also has an impact on the local resistance to open access: our fieldwork has allowed us to understand that, for many African senior academics, the web is incompatible with science because it contains only documents or sites that are of low quality, frivolous or entertaining. These people infer that science in open access on the web is of lower quality than printed science and are very surprised when they learn that most of the journals of the world-system of science exist only in dematerialized format. … Unfortunately, these resistances slow down the digitization and the web dissemination of African scientific works, perpetuating these absurd situations where the researchers of the same field in neighboring universities do not know what each other is doing”. Piron et al. (2017)

    This complaint about in-country communication from researchers in the South can be common, but there are signs that open access can make a difference – as an example, in Sri Lanka, I’ve spoken to researchers who say that communicating research findings within the country has always been a problem, but the online portal Sri Lanka Journals Online (currently 77 open access Sri Lankan journals) has started to improve this situation. This project was many years in the making, and has involved training journal editors and librarians in loading online content and improving editorial practices for open access. The same, of course, could be said for African Journals Online, which has potential to facilitate sharing on a larger scale.

    Arguably, some forms of institutional resistance to openness in the Global South have a neocolonial influence – universities have largely borrowed and even intensified the Northern ‘publish or perish’ mantra which focuses the academic rewards system almost entirely on journal publications, often in northern-indexed journals, rather than on impact on real world development.

    “The system of higher education and research in force in many African countries remains a remnant of colonization, perpetuated by the reproduction, year after year, of the same ideals and principles. This reproduction is assured not by the old colonizers but by our own political leaders who are perpetuating a system structured according to a classical partitioning that slows down any possible communication between researchers within the country or with the outside world, even worse between the university and the immediate environment. For the ruling class, the changes taking place in the world and the society’s needs seem to have no direct link to the university.” Mboa (2016)

    Mboa calls this partitioning between researchers and outsiders as “a tight border between society and science”:

    “African researchers are so attached to the ideal of neutrality of science and concern of its ‘purity’ that they consider contacts with ordinary citizens as ‘risks’ or threats and that they prefer to evolve in their ‘ivory tower’. On the other hand, ordinary citizens feel so diminished compared to researchers that to talk to them about their eventual involvement in research is a taboo subject …” Mboa (2016)

    Uncolonising openness

    So what is the answer to all these problems? Is it in building the skills of researchers and institutions or a complete change of philosophy?

    “The colonial origin of African science (Mvé-Ondo, 2005) is certainly no stranger to this present subjugation of African science to northern research projects, nor to its tendency to imitate Western science without effort. Contextualization, particularly in the quasi-colonial structuring of sub-Saharan African universities (Fredua-Kwarteng, 2015) and in maintaining the use of a colonial language in university education. Considering this institutionalized epistemic alienation as yet another cognitive injustice, Mvé-Ondo wonders “how to move from a westernization of science to a truly shared science” (p.49) and calls for “epistemological mutation”, “rebirth”, modernizing “African science at the crossroads of local knowledge and northern science – perhaps echoing the call of Fanon (1962/2002) for a “new thinking” in the Third World countries, detached from European model, decolonized.” Piron et al. (2017)

    For this to happen, open access must be about more than just access – but something much more holistic and equitable:

    “Can decentralized, decolonised open access then contribute to creating more cognitive justice in global scientific production? Our answer is clear: yes, provided that it is not limited to the question of access for scientific and non-scientific readers to scientific publications. It must include the concern for origin, creation, local publishing and the desire to ensure equity between the accessibility of the publications of the center of the world system and that of knowledge from the periphery. It thus proposes to replace the normative universalism of globalized science with an inclusive universalism, open to the ecology of knowledges and capable of building an authentic knowledge commons (Gruson-Daniel, 2015; Le Crosnier, 2015), hospitable for the knowledge of the North and the South”. Piron et al. (2017)

    Mboa sees the solution to this multifaceted problem in ‘open science’:

    “[Cognitive injustice comes via] … endogenous causes (citizens and African leaders) and by exogenous causes (capitalism, colonization, the West). The knowledge of these causes allowed me to propose ways to prevent our downfall. Among these means, I convened open science as a tool available to our leaders and citizens for advancing cognitive justice. For although the causes are endogenous and exogenous, I believe that a wound heals from the inside outwards.” Mboa (2016).

    Mboa explains how open science approaches can overcome some of these problems in this book chapter, but here he provides a short summary of the advantages of open science for African research:

    “It’s a science that rejects the ivory tower and the separation between scientists and the rest of the population of the country. In short, it’s a science released from control by a universal capitalist standard, by hierarchical authority and by pre-established scientific classes. From this perspective, open science offers the following advantages:

    it brings science closer to society;
    it promotes fair and sustainable development;
    it allows the expression of minority and / or marginalized groups, as well as their knowledge;
    it promotes original, local and useful research in the country;
    it facilitates access to a variety of scientific and technical information;
    it is abundant, recent and up to date;
    it develops digital skills;
    it facilitates collaborative work;
    it gives a better visibility to research work.

    By aiming to benefit from these advantages, researchers and African students fight cognitive injustice. For this, open access science relies on open access, free licenses, free computing, and citizen science.” Mboa (2016).

    But in order for open science to succeed, digital literacy must be rapidly improved to empower students and researchers in the South:

    “Promoting inclusive access therefore requires engaging at the same time in a decolonial critique of the relationship between the center and the periphery and urging universities in the South to develop the digital literacy of their student or teacher members.” Piron et al. (2017)

    It also requires improving production of scientific works (‘grey’ literature, as well as peer-reviewed papers) in the South for a two-way North/South conversation:

    “Then, we propose to rethink the usual definition of open access to add the mandate to enhance the visibility of scientific work produced in universities in the South and thus contribute to greater cognitive justice in global scientific production.” Piron (2017)

    And providing open access needs to be understood in context:

    “… if we integrate the concern for the enhancement of the knowledge produced in the periphery and the awareness of all that hinders the creation of this knowledge, then open access can become a tool of cognitive justice at the service of the construction of an inclusive universalism peculiar to a just open science.” Piron, Diouf, Madiba (2017)

    In summary then, we need to rethink the way that the global North seeks to support the South – a realignment of this relationship from mere access to empowerment through sustainable capacity building:

    “Africa’s scientific development aid, if it is needed, should therefore be oriented much less towards immediate access to Northern publications and more to local development of tools and the strengthening of the digital skills of academics and librarians. These tools and skills would enable them not only to take advantage of open access databases, but also to digitize and put open access local scientific works in open archives, journals or research centers.” Piron (2017)

    So what next?

    Even if you disagree with many the above ideas, I hope that this has provided many of you with some food for thought. Open Access must surely be about more than just knowledge flow from North to South (or, for that matter the academy to the public, or well-funded researchers to poorly funded researchers). Those on the periphery must also be given a significant voice and a place at the table. For this to happen, many researchers (and their equivalents outside academia) need training and support in digital skills; some institutional barriers also need to be removed or overcome; and of course a few cherished, long-held ideas must be seriously challenged.

    “These injustices denote anything that diminishes the capacity of academics in these countries to deploy the full potential of their intellectual talents, their knowledge and their capacity for scientific research to serve their country’s sustainable local development”. Piron et al., (2016).

    What do you think…?

    http://journalologik.uk/?p=149
    #édition_scientifique #OA #open_access #Afrique #Afrique_francophone #décolonisation #post-colonialisme

  • The open access wars: How to free science from academic paywalls - Vox
    https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls

    That’s because in February, the UC system — one of the country’s largest academic institutions, encompassing Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and several other campuses — dropped its nearly $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.

    On the face of it, this seemed like an odd move. Why cut off students and researchers from academic research?

    In fact, it was a principled stance that may herald a revolution in the way science is shared around the world.

    The University of California decided it doesn’t want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

    Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world’s research output. “They’re a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher. Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals, generating billions of dollars a year for its parent company RELX .

    This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

    In 2018, Elsevier’s revenue grew by 2 percent, to a total of $3.2 billion. Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president for global policy at Elsevier, says the company’s net profit margin was 19 percent (more than double the net profit of Netflix).

    When the internet arrived, electronic PDFs became the main medium through which articles were disseminated. At that point, “librarians were optimistic this was going to be the solution; at last, journals are going to become much, much cheaper,” Fyfe says.

    But instead of adopting a new business and pricing model to match the new means of no-cost dissemination, consolidation gave academic publishers the freedom to raise prices. Starting in the late 1990s, publishers increasingly pushed sales of their subscriptions into large bundled deals. In this model, universities pay a hefty price to get a huge subset of a publisher’s journals, instead of purchasing individual titles

    But critics, including open access crusaders, think the business model is due for a change. “I think we’re nearing the tipping point, and the industry is going to change, just like the industry for recorded music has changed, the industry for movies has changed,” MacKie-Mason says. “[The publishers] know it’s going to happen. They just want to protect their profits and their business model as long as they can.”❞

    #Science #Open_access #Accès_libre #Université_Californie #Elsevier