We are very grateful to Philippe Aigrain (Sopinspace) who set up a blog for our working group this year.
We started the discussion between us. But our objective is not to stay in a small circle and we are inviting other researchers to discuss on different subjects on Scientific Publishing.

Scientific communication is more and more studied at different political levels in Europe and in the world, but the researchers are the most concerned by this problem and their view must be expressed to be taken in account.
See our blog Opening Scientific Communication: a european blog.
The 3 main categories are : Open Access Archiving , Open Access Publishing and Licensing and Terms of Use. But we are open to other discussions. Let us know your ideas!

On 16th July a session on achieving Open Access by self-archiving was held at the Euroscience Open Forum in Munich. Helene Bosc (INRA, Tours, France), as convenor, introduced the topic and the speakers. Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton, England) moderated the session and gave an overview of the issues in an introductory presentation. Eloy Rodrigues (University of Minho, Portugal), speaking from the perspective of the successfully established repository in his own university, described how the repository has developed and focused especially on how researchers can be motivated to deposit their articles. Eberhard R. Hilf (University of Oldenburg, Germany) spoke from another perspective - that of how content in distributed repositories can be collected together - and described developments in Germany, particularly the physics open access service Physdoc which operates across a large number of repositories of physics content. Alma Swan (Key Perspectives, Truro, England) drew these perspectives together and spoke about how Open Access can be achieved in institutions and what it means for the progress of scientific research. Eberhard R. Hilf has collated the presentations and produced an excellent summary of the event which can be found at:
http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf/vortraege/esof06/

A report on the group activities to January 2006 was presented in Euroscience News 34. The work has continued on the same lines, with preparation for ESOF 2006 and a study, through the group’s discussion list, of issues in publishing and, for French members, continued action towards members of French Parliament to improve the copyright law draft.

1) The programme for the ESOF symposium “Open Access –threat or blessing?” is now finalised as a round table discussion, on Sunday 16th July, centred on Open Archives and moderated by Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton and Université du Québec de Montréal). Panellists are : Eloy Rodriguez: (University of Minho, Portugal), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom) and Eberhard Hilf (Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg, Germany). The programme is aimed at active researchers, to make them aware of the benefits to be gained from self archiving their articles on dedicated public servers (Open Archives). An overview was presented by Stevan Harnad in ES News 34. The detailed programme can be accessed on the ESOF 2006 web site.

2) In March 2006, the European Commission published a Study on "The Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe" (pdf - 828.7KB).

The EC solicited comments on its recommendations. Our work group focussed on EC recommendation A1: "Guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication", focussed on Open Archives.

Through exchanges within the discussion list, several specific suggestions were drafted for sharpening and strengthening recommendation A1 so as to maximise its likelihood of being adopted and achieving its objectives. Our report (pdf - 211.2KB) received the support of Euroscience president Patrick Connerade and was submitted to the EC on behalf of Euroscience.

3) In France, the subject of intellectual property and copyright was in the forefront of news because of the debates in the National Assembly (December 2005 through March 2006) and in the Senate (May-June 2006) of a new law, as reported in ES News 34. The text voted by the National Assembly refused the "education and research exceptions" to allow copying (downloading or photocopy), even though they were included in the 2001 EU directive which the new law should transpose in national laws. We continued our action towards legislators, in concert with other organisations (Associations of Librarians, Conference of University Presidents) to have these exceptions written in the law. P. Baruch, F. Laloë and F. Praderie met Senator J.Valade, Chairman of the Senate Commission for Cultural Affairs, and presented to him the specific needs of the research community. The meeting was fruitful: our arguments for allowing these exceptions for scientific purposes were well received. Senator Valade, a chemist and former Minister of research knew already of this issue and assured us that he would support the scientists’ views. Indeed, an amendment in this direction, although somewhat restrictive, was voted by the Senate. A joint commission met to reduce discrepancies between the two assemblies and accepted the exceptions (June 2006). The amended text was voted by the Assembly on June 30.

The discussions, both in the Parliament and in the media, were dominated by the problems relevant to reproduction of audiovisual (mostly musical) works ; other issues, such as education, research, open-source software were not in the forefront. The new law is much too restrictive in many fields, contains obscure details and does not fully come up to expectations. Nevertheless, many potential pitfalls were avoided.

Apparently, no other organisation led the fight to defend the interests of science in these debates. We feel that Euroscience played here its statutory role of representing the "Voice of Science in Europe".

Hélène Bosc, (Convenor of the workgroup)
Pierre Baruch

The symposium prepared by our workgroup has been accepted at ESOF2006, and we are proud to announce it:

Open Access - threat or blessing?
Is self archiving beneficial for researchers and compatible with conventional publishing?

How to combine the benefits of the traditional publishing system with the ease, rapidity of access and relatively low cost of on-line access-provision?
In addition to traditional (paper) and on-line publication, a new means of providing free access for all is author self-archiving of published journal articles on the Web. In signing the Berlin Declaration (2003), a large number of scientific institutions have encouraged their researchers to provide Open Access (OA) to their research output. A specific, concrete recommendation at “Berlin 3” (Southampton, Feb. 2005) has now made it quite explicit how to put the Berlin principle into practice: by having all institutional researchers self-archive their own articles in their own institutional repositories. A key author/institution motivation is the growing body of evidence (1) that OA increases citation impact. Recent surveys (2) have shown that the majority of researchers worldwide are still unaware of the possibility and benefits of OA self-archiving but are willing to comply if prompted by their institutions. The proposed session will be aimed at designing ways to raise researchers' awareness of the reasons for and practical ways of providing OA by Self Archiving.

The session will be organized as a round table discussion, chaired by Stevan Harnad (Southampton and Montreal), with presentations of the archive policy of some scientific institutions, of its perception by researchers as users, and of some recent findings on usage and impact.

The participants are: Eloy Rodrigues (University of Minho, Portugal), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom), Eberhard Hilf (Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg, Germany).

The symposium is organised by Hélène Bosc (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Nouzilly, France) and Pierre Baruch.

(1) S. Hitchkock . The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

(2) SWAN A., BROWN S.N., JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. (2004)
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
SWAN A. Survey 2005
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt

Le Monde, 12 Jan 2006

Etrangement, la délibération du projet de loi sur le droit d'auteur n'a porté que sur la défense des industries audiovisuelles contre le "piratage" sur Internet. Le droit d'auteur ne concerne-t-il que la chanson, et le ministère de la culture n'a-t-il d'autre tâche que de protéger des intérêts commerciaux ? La communication dans le domaine scientifique, par exemple, est-elle sans importance ? Cette vue restreinte et commerciale de la culture ne fait pas honneur à notre pays. L'artillerie lourde contre la liberté des échanges risque de provoquer des dommages collatéraux dans d'autres secteurs, qui n'ont pas pris part au combat.
Dans la recherche scientifique, une large et rapide transmission du savoir est essentielle. La production scientifique est un processus continu, jamais achevé, qui se construit sur des résultats ou des hypothèses déjà formulés, pour les confirmer, les compléter ou les réfuter. Il diffère en cela de la production artistique, où la diffusion d'une œuvre se fait à son achèvement. La communication entre chercheurs est assurée par la publication des résultats originaux dans des journaux spécialisés, avec comité de lecture et "examen par les pairs" ; les lecteurs y ont généralement accès par voie électronique. Depuis quelques années se mettent en place dans tous les pays des "archives ouvertes" pour la recherche, présentant en accès libre les travaux que les chercheurs y déposent eux-mêmes. Elles sont en quelque sorte un pendant érudit du "peer-to-peer" (P2P), qui fait tellement débat pour la consommation audiovisuelle. Cette avancée ne saurait, même par accident, être remise en cause par une régulation du P2P.
Tout ce système, international par définition, implique une libre et rapide diffusion de la connaissance dans un contexte où les articles scientifiques ne sauraient se comparer à des biens marchands. Il est rare que les chercheurs attendent rétribution de leurs publications, abandonnant la plupart du temps leurs droits d'auteur aux éditeurs. Ce que les scientifiques attendent de leurs publications, c'est avant tout une reconnaissance internationale : plus leurs travaux sont facilement accessibles par tous, collègues ou étudiants, et de partout, y compris des pays les moins développés, plus ils sont satisfaits. Il serait donc normal que cette diffusion de la connaissance scientifique ne soit pas entravée par une nouvelle loi et que la diffusion électronique non commerciale des articles scientifiques reste la plus libre possible.
Mais, hélas, la transcription en droit français de la directive européenne de mai 2001 sur le droit d'auteur, objet du projet de loi, n'a pas retenu une disposition essentielle, établissant des exceptions aux restrictions à la reproduction "lorsqu'il s'agit d'une utilisation à des fins exclusives d'illustration dans le cadre de l'enseignement ou de la recherche scientifique". Universités et laboratoires se trouveront vite en infraction.
A long terme, cette "exception française" pourrait pousser nos chercheurs à choisir les éditeurs et les archives ouvertes étrangères ? Anglo-saxonnes, en fait ; la visibilité de notre recherche en souffrira un peu plus. A vouloir trop protéger certains intérêts, on risque, par inadvertance, de graves conséquences pour d'autres activités.

Pierre Baruch, physicien,
Franck Laloë, physicien,
Françoise Praderie, astronome.

Tous trois travaillent avec l'association Euroscience sur les problèmes de la communication scientifique.

The goal of our working group is to help in finding answers to some of the numerous questions raised by the evolution of scientific communication by internet and which are confronted by scientists.

Some of these questions have been discussed during the ESOF 2004 symposium held at Stockholm [1] and as announced, the ESOF 2006 symposium will be a follow up.

The deadline for submitting a pre-programme at ESOF was 15 June, so we submitted a draft for this date. But a lot remains to be done for preparing this event and for making the scientific community aware of what is at stake.

Two representatives of learned societies have joined us. However our small team would welcome additional members .It seems essential that scientists, totally involved in laboratory activities, could express their opinion. If you are interested in discussing these issues (essentially by e-mail) we would be pleased to have you join us.

E-mail : hbosc@tours.inra.fr

Helene Bosc
Convenor of the working group

[1] The symposium was devoted to the publication of the so-called primary literature, excluding education, training and popularisation.
The agenda and the contributions made can be found on the ESOF 2004 site:
http://www.esof2004.org/programme_events/session_papers.asp

Dear colleagues and friends, distinguished members of Euroscience,
We are happy to announce that Euroscience Board recently approved [2] our proposal to create a new Euroscience Working Group: Science Publishing. Indeed, the final act of any scientific research process is publishing papers. The sound functioning of the learned publishing being of primary importance for all scientists, it was quite natural that Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2004 tackled that issue as well [3] en bas de page). We suggest that this should be a regular practice driven by Euroscience at every next ESOF since one of the roles of a Forum of that scale is to discuss problems common to all scientists. The goal of the Working group will be just to prepare proposals for appropriate discussion formats to the Organizing committees of every next Forum.

The very lively debate on scientific publishing and open access is spreading beyond the scientific and publishing circles as shown, among others, by the announcement by the European Commission of "a study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe" and by the publication of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report "Scientific Publications: Free for all?"

However, the situation evolves rapidly, and the open questions remain more numerous than the answers proposed. Euroscience has therefore the strategic task to maintain the issue of science publishing on the front burner, preparing with much care the discussions in the frame at every next ESOF.
The learned societies in Europe should be the indispensable partners in the process, and we hope that Euroscience and its new Working Group will assure the leadership. We are happy to report that as kind of follow up to the ESOF 2004 event, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is hosting in March 2005 a meeting [4], where one of us (PB) together with Mrs Hélène Bosc will represent Euroscience. A recent but already very devoted ES member, Mrs Bosc [5] was kind to accept the task of being convenor of the Working Group on the science publishing. Her competence will be an asset in this important and complex enterprise

Join this new Working Group, whose work surely will have a good resonance already in Munich, 2006!

[1] Proposed by Simeon Anguelov (sanguelov@eagle.cu.bas.bg), Pierre Baruch (Pierre.baruch@wanadoo.fr), and Françoise Praderie (francoise.praderie@obspm.fr), Co-organizers of the Symposium “Spreading the Word: who profits from the scientific publishing”, held in the frame of ESOF 2004 at Stockholm, 2004. They contributed this text to the web site of Euroscience.

[2] ES Board meeting, 29-30 January 2005, Geneva

[3] The symposium was devoted to the publication of the so-called primary literature, excluding education, training and popularisation . The agenda and the contributions made can be found on the ESOF 2004 site: http://www.esof2004.org/programme_events/session_papers.asp
The main bulk of the papers presented will be published as well in the journal Learned Publishing vol.18, No 1, January 2005 and the following issues.

[4] Subject: The Future of the Research Information Chain -The role of Publishers and Learned Societies
Venue: Budapest, 17 & 18 March 2005. Co-organizers: ALLEA (All European Academies –The European Federation of National Academies of Sciences and Humanities), and STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers)

[5] Hélène Bosc is librarian and translater from Russian at INRA, France (National Institute for Agricultural Research), since 1967. She was actively involved in spreading the information on the transformations in the scientific communication, and in setting up an experimental Open Archive in 2002. Key-note speaker at the symposium “Spreading the Word: who profits from the scientific publishing” (In a paperless world a new role for academic libraries: providing Open Access http://cogprints.org/4092/).