LIBER Endorses Jussieu Call For Open Science and Bibliodiversity

LIBER’s Executive Board has endorsed the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity.

The Call was drafted on the campus Jussieu in Paris by a French group comprising researchers and scientific publishing professionals working together in Open Access and Public Scientific Publishing task forces of BSN (Bibliothèque scientifique numérique, or Digital Scientific Library). It aims to “develop and implement alternative models matching the aims of open science by asserting the need of supporting innovation for a thorough renewal of publishing functions”.

This is in-line with LIBER’s upcoming 2018-2022 Strategy, and the activities of LIBER’s many working groups on topics including Open Access, Metrics and Copyright.

Eight key areas of action are outlined in the Jussieu Call.

1. Open Access must be complemented by support for the diversity of those acting in scientific publishing – what we call bibliodiversity – putting an end to the dominance of a small number among us imposing their terms to scientific communities;
2. The development of innovative scientific publishing models must be a budget priority because it represents an investment into services meeting the genuine needs of researchers in our digital age;
3. Experiments should be encouraged in writing practices (publishing associated data), refereeing (open peer-reviewing), content editorial services (beyond-pdf web publishing) and additional services (text mining);
4. The research evaluation system should be thoroughly reformed and adapted to the practices of scientific communication;
5. More investment efforts in open source tools upon which these innovative practices are based should be made and coordinated;
6. The scientific community needs a secure and stable body of law across different countries to facilitate the availability of text mining services and thus strengthen their use;
7. Scientific communities must be able to access national and international infrastructures which guarantee the preservation and circulation of knowledge against any privatization of contents. Business models should be found which preserve their long-term continuity;
8. Priority should be given to business models that do not involve any payments, neither for authors to have their texts published nor for readers to access them. Many fair funding models exist and only require to be further developed and extended: institutional support, library contributions or subsidies, premium services, participatory funding or creation of open archives, etc.

For more, please see the Jussieu Call website.