Marin Dacos, director of the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing (Cleo), and Jean-François Rivière, publishing manager at the Cleo will be in Rome from February 6 to 10, 2012, at the invitation of the École française de Rome.
On Monday 6, Marin Dacos will give a lecture on “Open access to academic research results. From ArXiv to OpenEdition freemium” at 5 pm:
Launched by physicians in 1991 in response to their need for swift peer-to-peer exchange, the movement for open access to academic research has now, at the start of the 21st century, become a movement, based on the Berlin Declaration for open access to knowledge, research articles and data (2003). With over 360 signatories from higher education and research establishments, the Declaration is at once a reaction to the problem posed by an industrial publishing oligopoly that governs thousands of journals, a statement of intent about publications’ needs for academic impact, and a democratic principle expressing the need for open access to complete research results for all citizens. From the mainstream perspective, the stakes are obviously clearer when it comes to research into health: medication, health risks, etc.
However, from a democratic perspective, the subject touches upon the foundations of the humanities and social sciences and asks probing questions about the relations that our disciplines might desire and develop with society. Supporters of open access have moved beyond petitioning and now demand for open access, not as an ideal, but as a concrete reality, not as a goodwill-based commando operation, but as an economically viable long-term plan. To this end, they have analyzed the stalling points in the opening process, a process that requires funding to move beyond the state of utopia.
In this hour of budgetary constraints and public deficits, can academic knowledge be provided free-of-charge? Quality electronic academic publishing requires professionals and is expensive, very expensive, much more so than publishing to paper, despite what our old (and inaccurate) prejudices might say. Quality publishing does not come gratis, but it can be open access. As long as creative economic models are found to enable financing, generated by the very fact that the publications themselves are freely accessible to all.
Conference location: École française de Rome, Piazza Navona, 67, Conference room (1st floor).