Episciences is an overlay publication platform that provides traditional publishing services like peer review and dissemination through open access journals hosted on repositories. It was created to address issues with rising journal subscription costs and provide a sustainable alternative. The platform launched two journals successfully using an agile development methodology. Funding comes from a consortium of institutions and possible future author processing charges. The platform leaves papers available immediately after submission rather than waiting until after peer review. This could improve efficiency and allow version management. Episciences aims to foster new models of peer review using social networks and may eventually publish data and code alongside papers.
4. Dramatic increase of subscription
cost in American libraries
400% between 1986 and 2011
Journals became the subject of a
very lucrative international
business of which libraries are
captive
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Isn’t there a problem ?
5. Isn’t there a problem ?
Learned societies
& Publishers
Researchers and
institutions are
creating value
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6. The scholarly publishing system: the origins « 1665 »
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Journal des sçavans
• Spread & communicate scientific discoveries
• Dissemination & archiving on a stable
medium
Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London
• Establish the principles of peer-review and
scientific priority
• Genesis of scientific communities (scientific
networking)
7. Scholarly publishing nowadays: two niches
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Until
70’s
From
80’s
[Grudin 2013] Journal-conference interaction and the competitive exclusion
principle, ACM
8. Towards a new and fairer publication model
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Dynamising exchanges between scientists : scientific social network
Gathering different data types: images, codes, videos…related to the
article
Adaptable & robust tool
Multidisciplinary
Associated to an editorial process of scientific high quality
Financially independent, sustainable and stable
Keeping ALL data under open access policy
[Holzschuch 2012] « There is room for a new publication model, combining
Open Archives for immediate access with editorial peer-reviewing »
9. Towards a new and fairer publication model
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Social networks burst into
the scholarly publishing
sphere, where they bring a
formidable added value
and could benefit from
being connected with the
open access
repositories
http://maverick.inria.fr/~Jean-Marc.Hasenfratz/SIS/Carto/
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An overlay journal platform
What is an overlay journal?
« A quality assured journal whose content is
deposited to and resides in one or more open
access repositories »
RIOJA, Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal
Archives
12. Providing traditional publishing services
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•Submitting paper / data
•Etablishing author’s precedence
•Ownership of ideas
Registration
•Quality control ensured by peer-review
•Scholarly recognition of the author
Certification
•Wide communication of the findingsDissemination
•Preserving a fixed version of an article for
future reference and citationArchival record
•Advanced scientific social networksDiscussion
Offering a
definitive &
immediate
open access to
scientific results
without
embargo nor
financial
compensation
13. Offered services
• Technical
– High quality technical environment comprising 24/7 services
– Long-term archiving of articles
– Web design, archiving of the reviews and correspondance
• Editorial
– Management of the peer-review process
– Management of the journal volumes and issues
– Contribution to some basic quality checking tasks: metadata, references…
– Communication and community management: social networks, online discussions
– General visibility: interaction with major indexing services and databases (DBLP,
Scopus…)
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14. Episciences: stakeholders
• CCSD*provides a technical platform
of peer-reviewing
• Scientific communities are organised
thematically:
– Episciences Maths(Institut Fourier)
http://www.episciences.org/page/epimath
– Episciences IAM Informatics &
Applied Mathematics(Inria)
http://www.episciences.org/page/epiiam
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*CCSD is a joint service unitof the CNRS,
Inria and the University of Lyon
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Editorial workflow: « Go »
Repository
Publication
Repository: HAL,
arXiv, CWI…
Journal
Publication
Author
Submission to a
journal
(editorialboard)
Reviewers
Comments,
interactions…
« Go »
Validation
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Editorial workflow: « No Go »
Repository
Publication
Repository: HAL,
arXiv, CWI…
Author
Submission to a
journal
(editorialboard)
Reviewers
Comments,
interactions…
« No Go »
Validation « No
Go »
In case of rejection of
publication, the manuscript
remains in the archive
18. IAM Landscape
• Wide use of HAL or arXiv repositories
• Significative content available online both in volume
and %
• Autonomous scientists using home made open source
publishing tools
Episciences is created as a support to the community
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19. Methodology
• Agile method
• Two full-scale journals were successfully launched:
– One well-established journal « DMTCS »
– One newly created journal « JDMDH »
• Platform already up and running
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http://jdmdh.episciences.org
DMTCS
http://dmtcs.episciences.org
JDMDH
http://jdmdh.episciences.org
Well-established scientific journal at the
cross-section between Computer
Science & Mathematics
Covers all aspects of data mining
methods for the Humanities, Emerging
domain with a scientific committee who
decided to go for an open journal
Created in the late 90’s, first published
over a home made server, then moved
to OJS
Reaction after a first contact with a
predatory publisher
Existing workflow, content & visual
identity
First Episciences native journal
Well-organised editorial team No legacy data, more flexibility upon
organisation and handling of the tool
Change management Initiate a workflow and structure an
editorial team, set up the website
Tools handling Choose a visual identity, define rating
criteria
Management of legacy data: 34 issues,
15 vol, 411 articles including
proceedings & special issues
Training on the tool
Building a readership and a reputation
21. Funding scheme
– Baseline: a consortium of cooperating institutions
(financial ou inkind contribution)
– Possible collaborations with initiatives such as
OpenEdition offering Freemium subscription schemes
– Author Processing Charges in case of additional
copy-editing services
– Hybrid business model, i.e. a combination of open
and closed conditions, is ruled out
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22. Leaving away the post peer-review
publishing paradigm
• Consequences
– No author anonymity
– Immediate high visibility
– Could lead to less poorly written papers -> more efficient
peer-review
– Availability whatever happens during peer-review
– Asset for version management (in case of errata)
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23. Further features offered by open
repositories
• Grobid -> automatic PDF to metadata recogniser to simplify the
submission process for an author
• Automatic detection of bibliographical references for linking the
paper to other relevant publications
• Automatic detection of plagiarism / state of the art (data mining tool
based on keywords, content, bibliographical references)
• A reference XML version of all papers, which in turn can be used
to produce different publication formats (HTML, ePub, PDF with a
specific layout, etc.)
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25. Issues
• IAM advisory board currently being set up:
- A group of about twenty internationally recognised experts
- Role: select new incoming journals, attract new journals, ensure the
coherence and quality of the journal portfolio, incite synergies with other
communities
• Additional services
- Can be envisaged such as : Copy-editing, Proof-reading, Branding
- Are subject to a specific business model which will be set up under
needs and demand
• Social functions
- Commenting , sharing articles
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26. A moving landscape…
We are in an exciting exploratory phase
Institutional endeavour
• The involvement of scientists is essential
• Academics bodies shall become responsible of their scientific information
policies/strategies
• Foster cross-institutional initiatives
Towards new peer-review models
• Open peer-review: Identification of the reviewer becomes possible, Reviews
could become publication objects of their own
• « Invisible college »: Social networks allows discussions, feedback and many other
forms of knowledge sharing and building. All data issued from these networks are
a fundamental richness that should also be open.
27. Data journals, journals of the future?
The Episciences workflow is designed independently of the nature of the initial
document.
It may not be a textual object but a compound of notes, programs (possibly active)
and data that could benefit from the same kind of certification process.
Where are we heading to? [verify, reproduce, compare, reuse, extend, share data]
• Allowing programs reproducibility
• Monitoring of calculations and data sets
• Testing datasets to launch new applications (serendipity)
• Favouring transdisciplinarity
• Referencing, indexing programs, DOI, going towards finer granularity from
document to data
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Intro Maud -> présentation du titre de la présentation
Intro (Maud) : annonce du plan de la présentation et introduit Gaëlle qui parle de diapo n° 3 à diapo n°14 ?
Here is the plan of our speech which should last about 30 mn
Let’s consider some background elements
As an introduction,
Let me tell you about what is part of our motivation?
As you see, this graph shows how exponential the increase of subscription costs is in American libraries
It is about four hundred per cent (400%) between (1986) Nineteen eighty six and (2011) Twenty Eleven
What can justify such a situation?
Step by step, scholarly journals became the subject of a very lucrative business of which academic libraries are captive today !
This increase is one of our motivation but his not the only one.
Another part of our motivation is : the way of functioning of the current publishing system -> where the balance seems broken.
Let’s consider some core questions.
Who’s creating value?
Research is made by researchers
Articles are written by researchers
Reviewing and selecting articles are conducted by researchers
-Who is financing research and researchers?
-What about Publishers?: are they providing good services for a fair price?
-What about Learned societies?: how much do they work at the service of research?
In this system, it seems to us that some publishers and scholarly societies no longer offer the necessary services and tend to become profit centers.
How to go back to a fair situation ?
Let’s get back to the basics and question the origins and functions of scientific journals.
The origins are not so old
The main functions are quickly described in this slide,
where you can see -> the incentives of the first journals
Journal des sçavans -> the first scientific and literary periodical in Europe :
Which were the motivations of Denis de Sallo : Spread & communicate scientific discoveries ; Disseminate and archive on a stable medium
Three months later appear -> Henry Oldenburg, published the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science.
* Establish the principles of peer-review and scientific priority
* Genesis of scientific communities (Scientific networking)
Today those motivations are still relevant even though the journals from the seventeenth century evolved.
We will see, in the next slide how they have undergone significant changes, particularly in the Computer Science domain where conferences have gained a very special place.
To illustrate this change, we rely on Jonathan Grudin’s article.
In this slide, Grudin uses a metaphor of ecological niche in the computer science domain.;
he identifies the places and channels used by journals and conferences in terms of scholarly publishing = they form a real ecosystem.
This metaphor helps capturing the changes that occurred in the role of journals and conferences and the consequences of theses changes.
Grudin makes the comparison with biological species. Usually, each of them occupies a unique ecological niche:
In the recent times and until the 70’s, journal and conferences had clearly distinct roles
In the 80’s, in Computer Science, things began to change
Conference invaded journal’s niche :
>Conferences are more and more selective, more and more relevant for computer scientists (for building a reputation)
With the technological evolutions, proceedings have a good quality of print, the journal monopoly on wide circulation and archival status is broken !
There is more and more recognition of the rise of the conferences : they are highly selective !
An interesting question is: what happens now with the empty niche ?
->The ecologists tell us a new species will evolve to occupy a niche that can support life.
In our case, this means:
Is there a room for a new publication model ????
-for a new type of journal ?
-for overlay-journal, based on communities relationships ?
Transition : Is there an empty niche where the following could be developed:
a social network which could be connected to a system were publications and data are available
And linked to a peer-review system ?
According to Nicolas Holzschuch, Inria Researcher, there is such an empty niche ! :
He writes :
[Holzschuch 2012] « There is room for a new publication model, combining Open Archives for immediate access with editorial peer-reviewing »
Here are his specifications for a new publication model:
-Dynamising exchanges between scientists : scientific social network
-Gathering different data types: images, codes, videos…related to the article
-Adaptable & robust tool
-Multidisciplinary
-Associated to an editorial process of scientific high quality
-Financially independent, sustainable and stable
-Keeping ALL data under open access policy
So we have two major concepts with :
The opportunity of a niche for overlay-journals
And The added value of the socials networks
Now, let’s consider it in more details in the next slide
As may you know,
Social networks burst into the scholarly publishing sphere where they bring a formidable added value.
The aggregated data that Social network users generate with all of their searching is an extremely valuable information.
Look for example why Elsevier bought Mendeley.
For the future, we expect Social Network to be connected with the open access repositories.
This will form a new network of Open Meta-Knowledge where there will be good interactions and rich links between researchers themselves.
This is a value that we would like to exploit with open archives and overlay journals systems in the future.
We have looked at two topics which are :
An empty niche which leave a place for a new model of publication : overlay-journal
And the added value of social networks for the research
Translated into real terms, which tool or services can we build to answer those needs?
How ensure this strategy ?
We intend to build a new service of scholarly publishing based on a public infrastructure: episciences
Episcience is our answer to thoses challenges and this project is currently under construction
We said Episciences is an overlay journal platform but what is an overlay journal ?
Overlay journal have already been presented at ELPUB conference by the RIOJA project and can be defined as follows:
« A quality assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories »
We agree this definition
The idea behind overlay journals is to offer a definitive & immediate open access to scientific results without embargo nor financial compensation [pour les revues qui sont désireuses de suivre ce modèle]
But basically they provide the traditional publishing services:
Registration : after submission of the paper, the registration establish author precedence and fix ownership of ideas
Certification : the quality control is ensured by peer-review this establish the scholar recognition of the author
Dissemination : It allows the wide communication of the scholarly findings
-Archival record : Preserving a fixed version of an article for future reference and citation
Discussion : Advanced scientific social networks ; allow a constructive feedback to author
Through the hosting on open access repositories, further services are also offered.
First, some Technical services
With HAL open archive there is a high quality technical environment comprising 24/7 services
in Episciences :
web design of the overlay journal website
the archiving of the mail history and correspondance
editorial services are provided with episiciences :
Management of the peer-review process
Support for handling the management of the journal volumes and issues
Contribution to some basic quality checking tasks
Communication and community management
General visibility: interaction with major indexing services and databases
Thoses services offers a Widely accessible, free and sustainable service
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Si on le temps :
Long term archiving is offered too :
Since March 2010, long-term archiving of the publications submitted in the HAL open archive is ensured by the CINES (National Computing Centre for Higher Education). Each main file in the submission (text files in pdf format or image files in jpeg format) is copied to the CINES archiving system.
Precise affiliation for authors, curated metadata (with the help of the Inria librarian network)
Additional services such as creation of personal / institutional webpages (papers from a given author or institution can be gathered coherently) -> tackles what Smith called in his article "the deconstructed journal" the scatter problem
Who are the stakeholders of this project ?
CCSD : *CCSD is a joint service unit of the CNRS, Inria and the University of Lyon.
CCSD has developed the HAL open archive and provides the Episciences platform for peer-reviewing.
Some scientific communities joined in the project :
The 1rst one is the Mathematic community under the umbrella of Institut Fourier of Grenoble
The 2nd one is the IAM Informatics & applied mathemathicS under the auspices of INRIA
INRIA
Public science and technology institution , Inria is a public research body fully dedicated to computational sciences.
Here we can see the editorial workflow in case of paper acceptance in a journal
Let’s discover the main steps :
the is a prerequisite before a submission in Episciences: the article in the pre-print stage MUST be deposited in the HAL, Arxiv or CWI archive
Then the author submits his paper to a journal
The board select some reviewers, and invite them to process the review
If the review is positive, the reviewer sgives a green light for publication
The editorial board, is the only one who can accept the paper for publication,
Then when the button « accepted » is activated,
A new version of the paper is online with a new stamp
Note : In case of paper rejection for a journal publication, the article remains in the archive
There is a persistence of the materials that are deposited in the repository.
->After the theoritical introduction, Maud will now investigate the practicalities of the implementation.
Thank you Gaëlle
As you just said, Episciences is not just a publishing platform, it is a working publishing platform!
There are already two journals running on it and a third one is currently being started.
Let me walk you through what has already been done in this project and what could happen next.
First let me tell you a bit more about our community. As I said, Inria is the French national research institute in computer science and applied mathematics. What are the characteristics of our community?
We have scientists who are heavy users (and consumers) of HAL, arXiv and open repositories in general.
In our community, there is a significative part of the content which in already available online. In HAL (the French national repository), there are 61 000 full text items (in computer science). 25% of which are preprints.
Chiffres donnés par Alain : dans Hal il y a 61’000 dépôts avec full text et 10’300 dans HAL-Inria
25% sont des preprints
(en info ou en général ?)
At Inria, we have a deposit obligation for all papers – a paper which is not available on an open repository won’t be taken into consideration during the yearly evaluation of the research team.
Last but not least, computer scientists have very early developed home-made tools to publish in open access (we will see that later in the presentation) and we are dealing with a community who is ready for overlay journals and in search of editorial support. Episciences answers a need and was created as a form of support to the community.
----
Réponse :
GR : nous souhaitions « planter le décor IAM » en explicitant le contexte (particularités) de travail des chercheurs en informatique et maths applis qui de notre point de vue sont :
-> des habitués des archives ouvertes
-> qui ont accès à de plus en plus de contenus en archive ouverte
-> qui plus est, ont une obligation de dépôt chez Inria
-> qui sont autonomes dans leurs usages des outils (par exemple, DMTCS a d’abord fonctionné avec un outil « maison » puis un outil open source, et in fine viennent nous voir pour avoir du soutien et souhaitent basculer dans episciences)
The methodology we put in place is based on the agile method. We set up a reduced team and worked on a trial / error mode.
As soon as the platform was in a beta version, we decided to launch two journals. There were no test journals, nor demonstrators.
The first one is an existing journal, DMTCS, which decided to migrate at the end of 2013.
The second one is a newly created journal, JDMDH, which started working at the beginning of 2014.
Successful experiment.
Platform is up and running and bugs and new functionnalities are resolved and developed in real time as soon as the users signal them.
We currently have two journals running on Episciences.
DMTCS is a well-established scientific journal at the cross-section between Compter Sciences & Mathematics.
- Created in the late 90’, it was first managed by a commercial editing house but quickly transferred to the scientific editors.
The online system evolved from a collection of simple web pages and an editorial process managed through mail, over a home-brew server software, to the Open Journal System (OJS).
what proved to be easy in DMTCS case is the fact that the editorial team is well organised, has been working together for years and that the workflow, the visual identity and web content are existing.
what was more challenging was to conduct the change, assist the team in handling a new tool (with different functionalities) and above all, manage the legacy data. Over 400 articles (published through different systems) whose metadata and pdf had to be integrated on an open repository (HAL in this case).
JDMDH is the exact opposite. It is a newly created journal, corresponding to an emerging domain with a scientific committee that has collectively decided to go for an open journal and to join efforts with Inria on the new platform. JDMDH covers all aspects of data mining methods for the humanities.
What was easy in this case was the total flexibility of a newly built editorial board. And of course the non-existence of legacy data.
What is tricky is to agree on a workflow, assign tasks to the members of the editorial board, put in place automatisms, create a website, choose a visual identity and get used to the tool. Having said that, the biggest challenge (and it is one that every new journal faces) is to build a readership and a reputation.
Economic model: Dramatically diminish publication costs
Cf. EU Peer project: 2 to 50€ management costs per item (HAL: 15€)
Cf. Peer: 200 € peer reviewing costs per published papers for most commercial journals (manpower related to editorial secretariat)
As we want to offer editorial services, we do know that the costs per article won’t be of 15€ per publication. So we thought about financing sources:
- the baseline (and it is currently what is implemented) is a consortium of cooperating institutions which can contribute either financially or inkind to the IAM community. The core resources are are pooled through this consortium of partners
Other components can also be envisaged for a balanced funding scheme:
unite forces with initiatives such as OpenEdition which sell additional services (cataloguing, smart formats (ePub)) to university libraries
and/or author processing charges when there is a request for additional copy-editing services
What we rule out are hybrid models with open and closed conditions, ie journals in which only articles for which the author (or their institution) has paid a fee are open access. The rest being accessible through a subscription.
Leaving away the post peer-review publishing paradigm
papers are made public right at the time of their deposit on the publication repository,
which means the peer-review process actually takes place after the actual publication
Consequences:
Having the paper online before peer-review obviously prevents author anonymity. Can be difficult in some communities but there are clear benefits. Here are some of them:
Whatever the time and the duration of the review process, the paper benefits from a high visibility right from the onset
open manuscripts reduce the number of poorly written submissions, thus leading to a more efficient peer-review process
The paper remains available whatever the success of the peer-review. That guaranties the continuous availability of the corresponding results independently of the outcomes and possibly incidents of the certification process.
The paper may evolve further if new elements validating or invalidating the paper are discovered
A wide range of Associated services can be envisaged thanks to linking of the platform to a publication repository.
In the context of our current developments on the HAL platform, we can list:
automatic PDF to metadata recogniser (title, author, affiliation, keywords and abstract information
automatic detection of bibliographical references for linking the paper to other relevant publications
- a systematic creation of a reference XML version of all papers
What we are currently working on.
What’s coming next and which new developments can be expected?