Co-building Open Science: Portrait of the University Library as a Publisher

Abstract

Located in Lyon, France, the Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University is home to 30 000 students in law, management and humanities, around 600 academic staff and 18 research units. A dedicated research support team has been implemented within the University library in 2015, to promote open access to research results. In 2017, answering to requests expressed by researchers to be helped in their online publishing, the library has launched an in-house incubator for open access journals in social sciences and humanities. Researchers and staff from the research units were provided with an open access standard-compliant publishing platform, technical and editorial assistance and training for current publications. The incubator raison d’être is to allow the University’s research to be available on an open access basis, to reinforce good publishing practices among research units and to improve the overall visibility of the research produced by Jean Moulin Lyon 3 researchers. The project quickly gathered momentum: two other HEI have approached the library to see if they could publish on the platform, thus expanding its role beyond the limits of its parent institution. The Lyon 3 incubator team has been instrumental in forming, in late 2018, a network of French incubators and publishing platforms in social sciences and humanities. Named REPÈRES, the network promotes sharing good practices among public-funded open access publishers. In a publishing landscape where the announced demise of the big deals’ risks paving the way for the unchecked rise of APCs, the Jean Moulin Lyon 3 library project is a contribution to bibliodiversity in that it supports an open access model and the use of vernacular languages (French in the case at hand). It also reinforces the intertwining of academic and library staff for the common goal of scientific publishing, thus placing the library in the position of co-building science.