Participating in open access

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 principle of open access

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.

Why and how have these rights been hijacked by major publishers?

"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

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 three possibilities.

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

By publishing in a fully open access journal. In the biomedical field, gold journals often require authors to pay Article Processing Charges (APC).

Watch out for hybrid journals

Diamond Open Access

By publishing free of charge in open access journals or platforms that are funded upstream by a funder, a university, a non-profit organization...

Learn more

Green open access: 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.

For funders to agree to fund Open Access in a hybrid journal, that journal must:

Either have implemented a transformative agreement. These agreements are signed between consortia of libraries and publishers; very few have been signed in France;
Either be considered as a "transformative journal": when the journal reaches 75% of articles in Open Access, its publisher commits to make it totally Open Access (at the latest by the end of 2024);
Or ask for "reasonable" article processing charges (exception granted by the ERC).

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists all fully open access journals.

Institutional policies on open access

The Institut Pasteur Charter for Open Access to Publications

The Institut Pasteur aims at reaching 100% of the year's publications in Open Access from 2021 onwards.

With the Charter for Open Access to publications, the Institut Pasteur requires their researchers to:

publish in CC-BY and without embargo, either in a native Open Access journal or by applying the rights retention strategy
deposit their publications in the HAL-Pasteur open archive

The Charter goes along with a practical guide to answer questions about Open Access and HAL.

The charter was developed as part of a project led by the CeRIS.

Contact: hal-pasteur@pasteur.fr

Download the Charter

The Institut Pasteur's Open Science Monitor

According to this barometer, 90% of Pasteurian publications published in 2023 were open access in December 2024. In comparison, at the national level, 67% of French publications published in 2023 were in open access in 2024 (all fields).

Learn more

The cOAlition S and Plan S: new requirements from research funders

Launched in September 2018, cOAlition S brings together European (European Commission) and national funders (including ANR, the French National Research Agency). It counts many supporters, including the Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation and the WHO.

Its general principles are grouped in Plan S, which requires immediate open access to scientific publications (from 2021). To allow the reuse of these publications, they must be under a Creative Commons open license (CC-BY) and immediatly open (no embargoes are allowed). To meet these requirements, several options are available:

Publication in Open Access journals or Open Access publishing platforms, in CC-BY ;
Deposit of publications in open archives, in CC-BY and without embargo (this option requires the application of the Rights Retention Strategy).

National policy

In France, the National Research Agency (ANR), which is part of the cOAlition S, has required since 2019 that all publications resulting from the projects it funds be posted in HAL, the national open archive. In its 2022 Action Plan, ANR plans to implement the Rights Retention Strategy initiated by the cOAlition S. With this strategy, all the publications resulting from the projects funded by ANR (at least the author accepted manuscript) will have to be deposited with the CC-BY license or equivalent in HAL, immediately after publication.

ANR has been joined by four other French funders (ADEME, ANRS, INCA, ANSES) which now request the deposit in HAL, following the signature in 2020 of a joint statement in support of Open Science.

Open access and legal questions

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.

Creative Commons licenses

"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)

Creative Commons website

French Act for a Digital Republic

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:

At least half of the research must be funded by public funds (taking into account all costs including salaries);
The embargo period is limited to six months (in science, technology and medicine).
This right overrides the contract signed with the publisher.

Article 30 of the French Act for a Digital Republic (in French)

SHERPA/RoMEO

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.

SHERPA/RoMEO website

Open science

Open access is part of the broader "open science" movement.

Fields covered by open science

source : Knoth, Petr; Pontika, Nancy (2015): Open Science Taxonomy. figshare. Figure. (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1508606.v3)

Find out more about open science

Find out more about the Institut Pasteur's commitment to Open Science

Questions & Answers

What do scientists gain by participating in open access?

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).

Is open access compatible with patent applications?

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).

My articles are already in ResearchGate. What are the advantages of depositing them in HAL as well?

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.