(wrong string) élène Bosc.on

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:19:33 -0400

One more of Richard Poynder's revealing and insightful OA Interviews,
this time of France's first and foremost OA champion, Hélène Bosc.

The full interview is here. 

Peter Suber, writes:
      "This is another richly textured interview, unearthing
      details about the early history of OA, OA in France, OA
      in Europe, and the career of one of Europe's first and
      most influential OA activists.... It's difficult to
      excerpt, but here's a little to whet your appetite..."

Here are some excerpts from Peter's excerpts:
      Former INRA librarian, [convenor for the EuroScience
      Working Group on Science Publishing,] and passionate
      champion of Open Access (OA) in France, Hélène Bosc began
      advocating for OA in 1995, before the term even
      existed...

      Like other librarians who have embraced OA, Bosc's
      starting point was the so-called serials crisis....
      RP: So how would you present the case for self-archiving
      mandates both generally, and within the context of
      France?

      HB: Mandates are necessary to fill up repositories. All
      the author surveys and outcome studies that have been
      undertaken worldwide show this to be so, including
      studies in France: In a study I did, for instance, I
      showed that by assisting researchers to archive Ifremer
      has managed to capture 80% of recently published papers
      in the institution's repository, Archimer. By contrast
      HAL has captured only 10-15 % of French research
      output....

      RP: How would you describe France's take-up of OA as
      compared to other Western countries?

      HB: As we said, HAL was created over seven years ago, and
      following the signing of the protocole d'accord in July
      2006, all French researchers were supposed to deposit
      their publications in HAL. That would seem to suggest
      that we were ahead of other countries, and yet today we
      are not: In spite of our technical lead, HAL has achieved
      the global default deposit rate of only 10-15 %....

      RP: What is at stake?

      HB: What is at stake is that if France wants to be in the
      research vanguard, it must embrace OA quickly, before all
      the other countries pull ahead.

      My view is that as the first French universities see the
      deposit rate in their repositories approach 100% they
      will understand the OA citation advantage, and start to
      benefit from all the other advantages provided by OA....
Received on Fri Mar 27 2009 - 19:20:46 GMT