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In the transition towards Open Access (OA), institutional publishing is challenged by fragmentation and varying service quality, visibility, and sustainability. To address this issue, DIAMAS gathers 23 organisations from 12 European countries, well-versed in OA academic publishing and scholarly communication. The project will: 1. Map the current landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) in 25 countries of the ERA with special attention for IPSPs that do not charge fees for publishing or reading. This will yield a taxonomy of IPSPs and an IPSP landscape report, a basis for the rest of the project. 2. Coordinate and improve the efficiency and quality of IPSPs by developing a European Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP). This quality seal will professionalise, strengthen and reduce the fragmentation of institutional publishing in Europe. EQSIP will serve as a benchmark for a gap analysis of the data. The DMP/RDMP outlines how data are to be handled (secured, stored, accessed, preserved) both during the project, and after the project is completed., Deliverable under EC review

In this episode, we are discussing the project Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication, in short: DIAMAS. At the heart of the project is support for Diamond Open Access, i.e. free for the reader as well as the author (no publishing charges). Co-lead of DIAMAS, Pierre Mounier explains the importance of lending support to not-for-profit institutional publishing. Besides the diversity offered by such scholar-led, high quality publication outlets, the multilingualism that they represent is key when the dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of citizen science across Europe is taken into account. The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Publishing lends verbal support to linguistically diverse scholarly outputs; the EU-funded DIAMAS Project paves the way for stronger and more sustainable infrastructures facilitating them. Since its inception in September 2022, the project will last for 3 years. An ultimate goal of DIAMAS is to help the providers of publishing services raise the quality and visibility of diamond open access by establishing a Europe-wide capacity center. A sister project, CRAFT-OA, focusing on the purely technical aspects of institutional diamond open access publishing begins in January 2023. The preliminary Diamond OA Journals Study (published March 2021), the first ever global survey of diamond open access journals, serves as foundation for both projects. The recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in December 2022. First published online January 10, 2023.

Pierre Mounier presents OPERAS, the European research infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities. With 10 core and a further 40+ member institutions from 16 different countries, its aim is to share knowledge between stakeholders across Europe. As a distributed infrastructure, OPERAS consists of a number of multinational Special Interest Groups that work on specific topics with the aim of developing services and conducting projects at a European level. Ranging from technical service providers and libraries through university presses and learned societies to entire research institutes and universities, OPERAS brings together a variety of stakeholders that work collectively to promote open dissemination of research-based knowledge about society and culture. All interest groups are convened twice a year for an "assembly of the commons"; further coordinating and strategic tasks are taken care of by an Executive Committee and a General Assembly. All member organisations are required to work for open access. Individuals that want to contribute are encouraged to check whether there are any member institutions in their country; in case not, they can always contact one of the coordinators (Pierre Mounier or Suzanne Dumouchel) or another member of the Executive Committee directly. Recording made in conjunction with the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. First published online: December 27, 2022.

In this episode, a true Nestor of Open Science, Pierre Mounier talks us through the origins and growth of various French infrastructures for open research, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Based at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), he has been instrumental in transforming revues.org into OpenEdition, a national publishing infrastructure for open-access journals and books in the SSH disciplines. Mounier also discusses whether political ambitions concerning the rayonnement (‘radiance’, i.e. diffusion) of French as an international language has been a factor in acquiring governmental support for a service like OpenEdition. When negotiating with private publishing houses, the situation of the SSH disciplines contrasts to the domain of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM). In the latter domain, the formation of COSO (Comité pour la science ouverte) has proved extremely important when negotiating read-and-publish deals with major publishers. Regarding the SSH, Mounier argues for a more soft and dialogic approach, since the private companies publishing French books and journals are usually small and far less profit-oriented. The multidisciplinary CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) is a driver for open access and open research in general. For example, when physicists wanted to have a French repository mirroring the preprint server arXiv.org, this initiative grew organically into the all-encompassing HAL repository, thanks to collaboration between various disciplines facilitated by the CNRS. As for research data repositories, the set-up is slightly different. There now exists both a fallback national repository for researchers that lack an institutional or disciplinary service for their data and a federated service connecting the various institutional and disciplinary repositories across the country. One such disciplinary service is the Huma-Num, which runs a repository designated for Digital Humanities (Humanités numeriques). This podcast recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. First published online December 8, 2022.

Open Science covers a large panel of activities aimed at making research more transparent and collaborative. Several definitions provide lists of different components of open science, which creates the need to imagine how to connect these components together. However, the necessary work to interconnect open science services and tools must be completed by a holistic approach that considers open science as an ecosystem producing a “milieu” of knowledge and supported by a vibrant community gathered around shared values. It leads to an ecological approach of open science where the web of interactions within the ecosystem defines its elements rather than the opposite.

Quel avenir faut-il prédire aux humanités ? Les signes d'une désaffection pour la culture humaniste se sont multipliés au cours des dernières années en France et ailleurs. Dans ce contexte morose et déprimé, le développement des humanités numériques apparaît à certains comme une planche de salut pour des disciplines autrement condamnées à disparaître. Toutefois, réinventer les humanités par le numérique suppose de relever trois défis de taille : leur rapport à la technique, leur relation au politique et enfin à la science elle-même. Les humanités numériques sont très critiquées : pour certains elles relèvent de la poudre aux yeux, pour d'autres, elles constituent une menace extraordinaire. Mais s'il y a bien quelque chose que l'on ne peut contester, c'est leur capacité à poser de bonnes questions aux différentes disciplines des sciences humaines et sociales. Penser la place que les humanités doivent tenir dans notre monde implique d'en redéfinir le contrat social et épistémique. Elles sont riches d'opportunités de ce point de vue : à condition de ne pas dénaturer la spécificité humanistique des pratiques de recherche auxquelles elles s'appliquent.

OPERAS as an infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication will provide a catalogue of services to the academic community. Despite their diversity, the services should follow common rules and principles to establish a common framework where they can be included and managed. The principles concern governance, sustainability and insurance. It entails to set up contractual relationships between the infrastructure and the service providers that reflects the principles mentioned earlier. Finally, there is a need to achieve a fully functional web of services that prevents gaps and overlaps regarding the users’ needs. The list and structure of OPERAS’ future services has been elaborated as a part of the infrastructure design study.

The OPERAS Working Group for Common Standards aims at exploring the workflows, mediums and technical standards that have recently emerged as a result of the changes brought about by the transition to Open Science. It places focus on the importance of common standards, and traces the improvements required to ensure content quality and interconnectivity for scholarly output in the SSH and beyond. The White Paper on Common Standards comprises desk research and identifies key operational and technical aspects to be addressed by digital research infrastructures and service providers. It particularly sketches the landscape of Open Science in Europe, focusing on the policy framework and the institutional initiatives at EU level; it also describes current and emerging research practices and highlights the needs of the stakeholders and communities engaged in scholarly communication. Reference is specifically made to technical and operational standards for publishing infrastructures, and their importance in providing a digital scholarly communication framework that fosters content reuse and collaboration among researchers, while enabling the implementation of innovative research methods. To this end, the white paper identifies needs yet to be met, introduces 4 complementary areas (content quality and impact assessment, interoperability, availability and processability) for the introduction of common standards, and provides basic recommendations for their future implementation. The white paper also examines where OPERAS members stand and suggests a roadmap for the community-wide adoption of standards.. As effective implementation of common standards is highly depended upon stakeholders’ increased awareness and commitment towards more effective ways of conducting, presenting and communicating research, the white paper underlines the instrumental role of the OPERAS network in specifying new standards and updating existing ones.

How do new disciplines develop in certain universities more than in others? The history of computing in France suggests a model to describe the development process that shapes the geography of science. In the 1950s a few professors of numerical analysis, often associated with a school of electrical engineering, created threefold structures comprising courses in applied mathematics, a computing facility, and a research laboratory. Such local configurations initiated a cumulative development process, attracting more resources and opening the field to novel investigations in computer science. In other universities, these configurations were not completed, and computing remained confined to technical training. In the 1960s pioneers became leaders in the growing field and controlled the definition of computer science curricula. As the institutes they had created reached considerable size, these leaders began to spin off junior professors toward other universities. The centers remain major academic institutions in the discipline today.

Voyage au long cours, la these est un exercice trop souvent solitaire. L’eventail des possibilites offertes par l’edition electronique et ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la communication scientifique directe est a la fois tres large et susceptible de reduire certaines formes d’isolement intellectuel et social. En ouvrant des possibilites de publication et d’echange depassant les contraintes classiques de temps et d’espace, le Web offre des solutions permettant de connecter le jeune chercheur a...

Dans la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales comme dans d’autres domaines, le « googling » fait fureur : que ce soit pour trouver des experts, solliciter des communications, trouver des references bibliographiques, voire, oserait-on l’ecrire, completer ses informations sur un candidat lors d’un jury de recrutement, le recours au celebre moteur de recherche generaliste est aujourd’hui courant. Or, on constate deux tendances a eviter dans le domaine de l’identite numerique des chercheurs....