France: Open Access Law Adopted | Hacker News Reader

France: Open Access Law Adopted

openaire.eu

266 pointsokket57 comments

This is excellent news. The people of a country should absolutely have access to the research they have funded. France has taken an important step in standing up to the anachronistic publishing cartels who siphon public money in order to lock down rather than disseminate knowledge. Here's to hoping the rest of the world follows this example.

Yes it's good news. Now we just have to actually fund research.

Agreed! Although it may take a long time to get there...

Without taking a side in the discussion, we should make a distinction between the research and the subsequent paper. The government funding is for the research. Scholarly papers are created for publication, not to meet the requirements of the research funding.

That would be unpractical. You already cannot copyright the ideas (the research). You can patent it, but the issue addressed here is specifically copyright.

The thing is, for the last hundred years or so, publications have been the communication channel about research, so the two are often conflated (for the most part) - most importantly in science evaluation, which is where the money comes from, so research without publishing is not incentivized at all.

That doesn't seem like a practical distinction. If eg. a grant is to "promote the progress of science" on some topic, then accepting that the research is communicated only on posters, in narrow circles, or orally would not seem to fulfill the purpose of the grant (compared to full, written publication, available for everyone to read).

This isn't an important distinction to the research process up until a paper is accepted for publication, so perhaps asserting ownership of any eventual publications in the grant's terms is a minimally disruptive way to bring publications into the public domain. Already it's the case that researchers conduct research and agencies award grants with the intent that any useful or interesting results will be published, so I don't see any material changes happening in research itself if this "loophole" were closed.

i think the purpose of government funding is both for research and a public communication of its effects. is it not the effects (a carefully designed text / 'publication') we should share with the stakeholders? a public mandate is a reasonable strategy for sustaining quality research, in contrast to a money wall filter system.

> and it still needs to be voted on by the Sénat on September 27

So technically it hasn’t been adopted yet.

The French Senate can at most delay the adoption of a new law. The Assemblée Nationale has the final say and can overrule any modification made by the Senate.

While the lower chamber could have a change of mind, it is very unlikely to happen.

I worked on this law!

So, if I'm reading this correctly, the law gives any government/EU funded author the right to publish a preprint for any scientific article they produce, even when a journal has a license forbidding such publication? But it does not require an author to do so, right?

If a scientific article has been funded by at least 50% by the state, public establishments, local collectivities or the european union and is published in a review coming out at least once a year, the author (or authors, provided they all agree) have a right to put up, for free and in an open format, the final version of this article on the Internet.

So, not just a preprint, and yes, journal licenses forbidding such publication have now no legal value. It does not require the author to do so.

EDIT: see answer below for a few more precisions.

Well, that's not exactly right. It's a bit less cool.

The author's right to put their articles in open access is not immediate, it happens at the soonest of:

— when the publisher make the article freely available itself, or

— 6 months after initial publication in sciences, or 12 months in humanities.

Oh, the humanities

Why, the difference? I'd like that legally challenged.

The difference exists because in the humanities the situation is very different from science. Publishers are a lot smaller and more locals, they often have a real added value (the vast majority of humanities academics do not produce camera ready PDFs themselves), and are thus a lot less predatory.

Turning an article into a clean PDF is a sufficient value addition to deserve an extra six months of exclusive license?

As a humanities type who nevertheless despises the academic uselessness of the realm, let me suggest that the extra six months is given to humanities papers because nothing that happens in them matters, and any value that anyone can contrive to get from them, they deserve to keep.

But maybe that's a little too harsh. Is anything valuable coming out of the humanities these days?

No, it's because of the narrative that nothing that happens in the humanities matters.

> Is anything valuable coming out of the humanities these days?

You know, back in the late 19th century things were the other way around. The sciences had to argue for their value while the humanities held sway over the mind-share in academia. Google the debates of Huxley and Arnold -- many people think the culture clash only goes back to the C.P.Snow era, as if.

A part of the problem with the humanities is its amnesia. The humanities sprang from humanism. The humanities is academic humanism. Secular humanism is what has given us the idea of the separation of Church and State, among many other society-altering changes. Academic humanism has been a great moderating influence on the world, and continues to be. The smartest people I meet in academia are in the humanities, not the sciences. It is only relatively recently the the notion that the sciences are pre-eminent came to be. Since the time of their birth in the Renaissance the humanities grew in the shadow of the theological scholastics, and then brought about the Enlightenment. Which was nice.

You've bought into a narrative. The humanities teaches us about how narratives and ideologies shape our minds, so your comment dismays me.

edit: I don't blame you though. I was in the humanities for nearly 10 years before I bothered to look into the history and philosophy of humanism and the humanities.

I made my comment because I wholly agree with you about the importance and the past contributions of the humanities, and because I'm so disappointed in how deeply they've lost their way.

The biggest problems in the world today are humanities problems (although tech and science may be able to indirectly end-run around them if we survive long enough), and the humanities are completely failing to make any useful progress. I'm bitter about it, because there are so many smart people wasting themselves in trivial cleverness-competitions rather than solving meaningful problems, and because they're my tribe and they're betraying their potential. (And, bias disclosure: at least partly because I can't find anyone to date who's interested in the things I'm interested in, whose work I don't think is ultimately useless and unimportant.)

Despair not my friend.

To criticize something as useless and unimportant is a value judgement. How you arrive at those values is what the humanities is all about. Tech and science can't do an end-run around the humanities because whilst their domains overlap (somewhat) their methods and materials differ.

> I'm so disappointed in how deeply they've lost their way.

No. No they haven't. See my reply to you above. The more you repeat phrases like this the more I'm going to believe that part of your identity is invested in this world-view. It's a brutally pessimistic one, and it rests on the prongs of a false dichotomy.

> they're my tribe

I'm in the humanities and I'm not your tribe.

I'd be happy to hear about the important things that the humanities have produced recently. In your comment above, the only claims about their current value that I see is the statement that they continue to be a moderating influence on the world, and that they teach us how narratives shape our ideas.

I'm dubious that their moderating influence is significantly more than the residual influence of old moral ideas, albeit with newly enforced reach (i.e., hey guys, "do unto others" should maybe also apply to women/black people/gays). You couldn't get a patent for that kind of obvious development of an old idea. And the notion that narratives shape perceptions doesn't strike me as a particularly profound insight, although I suppose it could be argued that's a post hoc bias.

Secular humanism and democracy are more than two hundred years old. What have the humanities given to the world since then that compares to those, or that compares to the changes to the world that science has made in that period?

If you care about these kinds of questions, that's what I mean by "my tribe", regardless of the answers we each give. I'm not invested in my perception that the humanities are under-performing their potential, but I don't currently see a strong argument on the other side. Maybe I'm failing to consider something.

If you don't want people to buy into the narrative that the humanities doesn't produce anything of value these days, would it not be best to mention something that has happened in the last century?

I don't have a brief answer, but recommend https://www.martineve.com/2014/11/27/book-open-access-and-th... if you'd like to read a book about it. The book is OA.

Thanks for the link! How did you happen upon it? Out of curiosity, do you think you could venture a semi-brief response? :)

Wait in the US this already happens, so is this law just France catching up to the US?

Yes, but you know, France is within the EU, this means you have a precedent in the EU which is very good to have other countries within the EU joining the party. Once you have 3 big countries doing so, because papers have usually authors from many institutions around the EU, nearly all the papers will have a way to get freed. And this is good.

What did you do?

He is an advisor to Axelle Lemaire, French Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs.

Where's the downvote button when you need it?

why?

I'm curious. Does this apply to just French journals? Or just French scientists? How would that work with journals based in other countries? Or multi-national research collaborations?

Phew! With just reading the title of this I thought the article would have been something stating France just made encryption illegal without a way for law enforcement to circumvent it

Congratulations France!!! I hope we follow you in Norway, although I don't quite know what our current law on the matter is :-D

It is of big importance that large rich countries like France does this. It should have a strong influence on other countries. The ultimate goal is of course for the US to implement such a law as the US is the worlds most influential and important country, especially within research.

What do they mean by "...cannot be commercially exploited?" Would a for-profit corporation be violating copyright just by viewing it? What are the punishments for "commercial exploit[ation]"?

The translation is not good, so a "shorter" version:

1. If you publish your research work in a journal and the research work has been financed for at least 50% by public institutions, you can provide on the web for free your paper too (if the coauthors agree). You are allowed to put it online directly if the journal is a free/open access journal or after 6 to 12 months.

2. A publisher cannot prevent you to do that.

3. You cannot use these available papers to make money out of them with a service similar to a publisher "une activité d'édition à caractère commercial". Basically, to prevent competition with the original publisher. So, you cannot create a big website with both the papers and advertising.

If you are a company getting access to the paper through the university website or the website of the author, this is fine. Wikipedia could start collecting and make the papers available too.

Punishments will be set by a judge according to the French civil law on copyrights I suppose.

> 2. A publisher cannot prevent you to do that.

Not directly, but wouldn't it open up a box of issues where publishers make it harder for authors who distribute their papers for free to get published the next time around?

Not in the way the current system works because the publishers are doing nothing, they are just taking the papers as reviewed by the committee as-is.

In fact, with this law, we are most likely going to see is that the universities will automatically hook into something like: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/

When you submit a paper to a journal, your university normally request that you submit your paper to the internal university store. This store will then automatically push your paper to this open access library after X months.

If this moves this way, publishers would have to say: French researchers cannot publish with us any more....

Despite the unclear wording, the intention here is clearly to protect the commercial publisher who is otherwise being harmed by this law (the author usually gives some exclusive distribution rights to the publisher and this law changes that by declaring this exclusivity void and mandating open access, perhaps via a parallel publishing channel).

That's great news. Hopefully it will set an example. Everything that is state founded should be available to everybody (sans few exceptions like defense systems etc.). Hopefully more countries will follow and policy will be adopted in more areas than just scientific writing.

What would stop journals from blacklisting scientists who publish their articles under open access laws? Would anyone publish their article if they knew it meant never being able to publish in Nature again?

This law removes legal restrictions that might have made it impossible for researchers to openly redistribute those articles.

But this will generally be combined with grant funding rules that require to provide the research results under open access conditions. So yes, people will publish their articles because they are willing to jump through almost any hoops to fulfill the funding requirements; and blacklisting is unlikely since in that case they'd have to blacklist all France now and generally all EU, which is slowly but strongly moving to a requirement to have all EU-funded research published with free access.

> What would stop journals from blacklisting scientists who publish their articles under open access laws?

Nothing; of course, that just hastens the death of the journal system.

"What would stop journals from blacklisting scientists who publish their articles under open access laws?"

I think there would just be far too many of them.

Moreover, the Scientists could feign that they were not possibly involved in the alternative distribution of it.

I think 'blacklisting' would be an aggressive posture, and likely viewed as unethical, it's not something they could likely get away with.

I think the 'prestige' of being published in Nature etc. will outweigh most concerns.

It would be similarly aggressive if a journal were to sue a scientist for copyright infringement for posting their own work.

What difference would that make? Getting into journals like Nature is about getting research shared amongst fellow researchers. The value that journals add is in curating interesting research so a busy scientist can still keep up to date with the key developments in the field. With open access it'll be easier than ever for new curators to emerge.

The value that journals provide is identifying high-value research for other scientists to read, and also for the researchers' employers and funders who use it as a basis to decide whether to hire the researchers, give them tenure, or fund them.

> The value that journals provide is identifying high-value research for other scientists to read

No, it's other scientists who do that for the journals, for free. They can just as well do it for any other publication.

The only value journals add is printing it on a piece of paper. So basically they provide the same value as a €30 Deskjet.

> "The value that journals provide is identifying high-value research for other scientists to read"

As I said before, curation.

> "and also for the researchers' employers and funders who use it as a basis to decide whether to hire the researchers, give them tenure, or fund them."

If that's true, sounds like it's time for the processes around hiring of science staff to get an overhaul.

Exactly. That's the problem with giving the authors only the right to make articles publicly available and not forcing them to do so. That would have removed any pressure from the editors. Actually, they could be pressured not to accept public funding >= 50%, but then the editors should find somebody else to pay that money.

Is it too corny to say, "vive la liberté!" ? Well done France. It's little moments like these that give one faith in humanity. I think I'm going to start calling them Snowden moments. :)

The right but not the obligation?

I don't think the primary barrier to open access is the willingness of the researchers to self-publish, as long as they can still publish in any journal that they want. Seems like a very sensible trade-off to make the law easier to pass. I'm somewhat worried about what publishers might try to do to dissuade them, but everything I can think of would involve messing heavily with the peer review process which is fairly dangerous.

How about the right to free speech? It may be a useful step in making information accessible.

The legal right or the human right? If you're referring to the legal right, to which jurisdiction are you referring? If to the human right, that's a social justice issue not a legal one.

Human rights have become "social justice" issues and not legal ones? Are you trying to draw a distinction between the implementation and the theory of the thing, because I'm failing to see law not being both, with the unfortunate secondary label of "social justice" being entirely useless.

great news!

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