Suprisingly good CNRS guidelines on open access

When it comes to good practices, research institutions are often good at declarations of principles, and not so good at implementation. For example, it is easy to declare that research assessment should be qualitative and not rely too much on bibliometrics, but harder to do it in practice.

This is why I am pleasantly surprised by recent CNRS guidelines on open access. These guidelines take the form of a letter to CNRS researchers who have to fill yearly reports on their work. 

 

The salient points about open access are:

• Over the last three years, the proportion of articles by CNRS researchers that are openly accessible rose from 49% to 77%. (OK, these data mean little in the absence of more details.)

• CNRS is adopting a rights retention strategy, as proposed by Coalition S: it recommends that all articles be distributed under a CC-BY license. In particular, this allows the articles to be made openly accessible right at the time of publication.

• CNRS is not asking researchers for their lists of publications: instead, CNRS just takes publication lists from the national preprint archive HAL.

• The weak point of all this seems to be the impractical and clunky nature of HAL. However, as reminded in the letter, HAL is increasingly interoperable with disciplinary archives such as ArXiv and BiorXiv. And indeed, my recent articles were automatically harvested by HAL from ArXiv.

This goes in the direction of having a strong open access mandate while requiring no extra work from researchers. To get there, it remains to make the CC-BY license mandatory, and the upload of articles to HAL fully automatic.

CNRS rejects Couperin's claimed victory in Springer big deal

After long and tortuous negotiations, the French consortium Couperin has claimed victory in its recent agreement with Springer, after having secured price decreases. This claim seems reasonable, as prices of big deals with publishers tend to increase steadily. Of course, critics can still point out that Springer remains very expensive compared to smaller, more efficient publishers. But at least Springer seems amenable to some compromises in negotiations. And one should not forget that the greediest and most obnoxious publisher remains Elsevier, who even refused to join the Initiative for open citations.

I was therefore surprised when CNRS announced its rejection of the Springer deal, although CNRS takes part in Couperin and was actively involved in the negotiations. The email announcement came from Alain Schuhl, a CNRS official who is also a member of Couperins’ governing council. (See the email and its English translation below.) This email was a warning to CNRS researchers that access to Springer journals was now cut off. However, articles from 2017 and earlier are still available, as they are coverd by the previous subscription.

The explanation for the rejection is that the deal’s price was too high according to the Ministry’s open science plan. This explanation makes little sense for two reasons: