The open access movement is committed to making academic publications and knowledge a common good for humanity.
For the past 25 years, the open access movement has been fighting against the privatization of knowledge by a small number of major academic publishers.
The idea is to make academic literature available online to be used and reused, free of charge, by anyone. The movement wants to create the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print and link to scholarly publications, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
To find out more, see the Budapest Open Access Initiative, signed in 2002.
"34% profit margin and profitability four times higher than their friends on the London Stock Exchange – welcome to the world of academic publishing! These are the figures for Elsevier, the industry leader, which owns 16% of the scholarly journals published worldwide [...]"
See the video Privés de savoir? [Deprived of knowledge?] (#DATAGUEULE 63) on YouTube
For several years, the Institut Pasteur has pursued an open access policy that confirms its commitment to open science and ensures the visibility of its publications. Under this policy, all scientists are asked to submit their publications to the HAL-Pasteur open archive as soon as they have been accepted by a publisher. This self-archiving has been compulsory since 2017 for scientists applying for a promotion.
Publications based on research funded by the EU's H2020 program must be made openly accessible online, free of charge, AND also submitted to an open archive. (Guidelines to the Rules on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Open Access to Research Data in Horizon 2020)
All too often, scientists are unaware of their rights with regard to publishers, especially when they sign contracts that transfer all their rights over their publications. Creative Commons licenses were introduced to make sure authors can retain their rights when publishing on an open access basis.
"The licenses proposed by the Creative Commons organization are standard contracts in which authors determine which rights they wish to associate with their publication. Six contracts can be drawn up by combining four basic conditions: attribution, no derivatives, no commercial use and "share alike" (reuse on the same terms as the original contract). They can be applied to any type of work." (source: Inist glossary)
In France, the Act of October 2016 "For a Digital Republic", also known as the Lemaire Act, contains an article (30) which gives scientists the right to deposit their postprint (the author file as accepted for publication but not yet formatted by the publisher) in an open archive. The terms are as follows:
The SHERPA/RoMEO website provides information about the self-archiving policies of different publishers.
Note that the rights laid down in the French Act for a Digital Republic (described above) take precedence over publisher policies and any contracts signed between publishers and researchers upon publication of a work.
Open access is part of the broader "open science" movement.
Find out more about open science
Open access gives visibility to scientists' research. The HAL open archive is very well referenced in search engines such as Google and is harvested by the European OpenAIRE portal, in conjunction with H2020-funded research projects. Since May 2017, the PubMed database has provided a link to the HAL open archive if it contains the author's file. With HAL, publications are also archived on a long-term basis in the Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur (CINES).
In this respect, open access is the same as any other type of publication: research results should not be published before the patent application has been filed. You can then publish in any type of journal (regardless of whether it is open access).
ResearchGate is a commercial platform, and as such it may disappear at any moment. HAL, however, was set up following a national memorandum of understanding; it is a public platform and long-term archiving is guaranteed.
It is also worth noting that some publishers do not authorize the publication of articles via ResearchGate and will request deletion of the PDFs. Several of the articles available on the platform have already been removed by ResearchGate following legal proceedings brought by Elsevier and other publishers in 2017. The HAL-Pasteur moderation team at the CeRIS is responsible for verifying the distribution rights of articles and guaranteeing that scientists' submissions to open archives are legal.
ResearchGate cannot be considered as an article repository; it is primarily a scholarly social network.
Anne Lassailly-Bondaz
Coordination and training
Moderating submissions to HAL
33 (0) 1 45 68 89 81
How to get involved
The success of the open access movement depends on the involvement of those in the research community (researchers, institutions, funding bodies and publishers). For researchers, there are two possibilities.
Gold open access
By publishing in a fully open access journal whose funding model does not rely on author contributions. Unfortunately, this option has been hijacked by publishers, which make authors pay excessive article processing charges (APCs).
Watch out for hybrid journals
Green open access
By depositing your publications in an institutional or thematic repository known as an open archive. This is also known as self-archiving.
Various formats are possible: the author accepted manuscript (postprint), the version of record (published version), and the author's original version or preprint (before peer review).
Identifying open archives
Gold open access Watch out for hybrid journals
Some subscription-based journals offer authors the option of making their article available free of charge subject to payment of an APC (a model known as Open Choice, Online Open, etc., depending on the publisher). This model should be avoided at all costs because the journal is only available behind a paywall, so institutions are effectively paying twice to access content. In 2019, this model will no longer be covered by funding bodies.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists all fully open access journals.
Green open access: Identifying open archives
The Institut Pasteur open archive
de l’Institut Pasteur
The open archive of the Institut Pasteur International Network
Find an open archive using OpenDOAR