INTERVIEW WITH AGNÈS PONSATI

Graduated in Spanish Philology with a Diploma in Library Science and Documentation by the the University of Barcelona. She is the director of the Unit of Scientific Information Resources for Research of the CSIC. She worked in the Library of the University of Barcelona (1987-1990) and as the coordinator of the libraries of the CSIC in Catalonia, being in charge of its automation in the CSIC Office in Catalonia (1990-1993). She has published articles and participated in different national and European projects about the management and application of Information Technologies in scientific libraries. Furthermore, she was a member of the Library Advisory Board of different scientific editors (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, IOP, BRILL). Currently, she is a member of the “Open Access” Work Group of Science Europe, which is an association to which the CSIC belongs.

I was assigned by the CSIC to the Open Access Work Group of Science Europe, which I´m part of since 2012. The meetings of this work group are usually held in the Science Europe office in Brussels. So, since then, I usually come here twice a year. These meetings are normally one and a half days long. The last meeting was actually held on the 25th and 26th of October. The group is closing its work agenda and has finished the self-evaluation process as requested by the standards of Science Europe.

As I said, throughout the work group life, the meetings have been biannual. If the Governing Board of Science Europe eventually decides to keep the Open Access group, we will come back to Brussels often.

It basically consists in representing the CSIC as a Research Performing Organisation of SE in the topics related to the open access to scientific publications. The aim is to provide the institutional view regarding these topics, share it, spread it and, in turn, give an opinion at the debates that take place in the core of the group. The group is composed of experts in the matters related to the most important Funding Agencies and Scientific Research Organisations in Europe. So, the level of information exchanged is highly valuable and it offers a very important experience and benchmarking task to all the members.

It allows us to known what our counterparts do, how they do it, what challenges they have to face and how they tackle them. In turn, we collaborate with the members of the organisation to establish a framework of common requirements and principles with the aim of fostering open access to the results of scientific research. This allows the CSIC to be at the level of the European institutions that lead the most important advances in open access.

Indeed, on October 11th, this report was finally published, in which we have worked with the FNRS (Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium) and the INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research, France) for more than a year. This is one of the tangible results of the work agenda that the group set for 2014-2016.

The report presents a comparative picture of how the policies and terms of open access were developed in the different member institutions of Science Europe. For the analysis, we used the data from two surveys with very similar questions that the members answered in two different times, 2012 and 1014. One of the surveys was performed by Science Europe and the other one by the Global Research Council. The strengths and weaknesses of these policies and terms were analysed. The report includes a final section that updates the situation of the members regarding these policies in 2016.

The purpose of this report is to show the situation of Open Access in each of the institutions and member countries to explore the future actions that allow to align positions.

The main conclusions that may be drawn from the report are diverse but, in general, we could mention the following: on the one hand, it is stated that since 2012 most of the institutions of Science Europe have developed policies and terms to favour Open Access, and some of them which have not done so yet showed their intention and/or need to do it. The follow-up of results generated by the institutions from these policies is still emerging and work must be done to establish mechanisms that allow it. It is demonstrated that many of these policies collide with the publishing restrictions and policies of scientific editors. The lack of awareness and scientific culture with open access from the scientific community is an additional barrier for the effective development of open access. We must decisively wager for the new generations, who are the ones that can turn this situation around.

With respect to the position of the CSIC, it must be taken into account that, despite the fact that the CSIC signed the Declaration of Berlin in 2006 and implemented its institutional repository in 2008 as a demonstration of such commitment with the Green Way for the development of Open Access, we still lack an institutional term that reinforces the policies of DIGITAL.CSIC. The repository has grown and it has been developed without this term, and the CSIC should be happy to have one of the most important institutional repositories in Europe, according to the Ranking Web of Repositories (9th position, after CERN, CNRS HAL …). But having a term approved by the Presidency of the CSIC would boost it even further, undoubtedly.

Since two years ago, H2020 has a transversal OA term for all the projects funded which affects the results published. Besides, more recently, the pilot you mention for different areas affects the research data. The term for publications considers some restrictions (6 months for STM and 12 for HH and CCSS) for publication in repositories and obviously none if the publication is done in “full OA” or hybrid journals.
Whether or not the scientific community agrees with this measure, I think there will be some reticence but, in the end, it´s not a matter of choice. Scientists will have to understand that tax money must seek the common good.

Open Science is a relatively new and generic concept still to be specified. We could consider that it aims to define a scenario in which a series of circumstances allow scientific activity and its results to be shown within a framework of openness, transparency, collaboration, exploitation…, etc. However, in order for Open Science to become a reality and a solid concept, other realities that make up its foundation must take place: open access to research results, open access to scientific data, services and infrastructure for the support and management of open scientific data and publications, and a scientific culture directed to social interest.

Anyways, I think there will be no Open Science until we change some very settled models like, for instance, the model of scientific communication based on subscriptions to scientific journals, the lack of global policies to provide a new model of scientific governance, the models of scientific evaluation based on measures controlled by the private sector, the lack of scientific infrastructure that allows making science and share it openly…

I think all of them are important and I consider them to be very closely related, don´t you?