For a national policy of IST
Common proposals COUPERIN-ADBU-AURA

Couperin, ADBU and AURA are representative organizations acting in different capacities in the field of documentation for higher education and research.

In the current context of the ongoing reorganization of the Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche (Ministry of Higher Education and Research), they felt it necessary to present their proposals on rethinking national policy of the Scientific and Technical Information (IST) in France.  

These proposals are not intended to cover all the issues, but to highlight significant points of rationalization, constituting priorities in the establishment of a real national policy of IST in France. In the long run, they hope to lead to a more comprehensive reflection on IST in France, involving all parties concerned both within Higher Education and Research and beyond.

A widely shared conclusion

The access to IST is now a strategic issue for research. French institutions of higher education and research currently have irregular access to documents, necessary for the different public operators, and the lack of financial means to launch a massive policy of the acquisition of documents on a national scale puts French research in a delicate situation.

The three organizations share the findings of the IST Committee expressed in the preamble of the report written by Jean Salençon: “Access to Scientific and Technical Information (IST), its circulation and its availability are key factors in the effectiveness of scientific research, industrial competitiveness and social progress. Their importance therefore justifies the attention that public entities focus on this sector and it also explains the amount and the spectacular growth of investments in its favor in all developed countries. However, in France and abroad, experts and parties concerned agree to recognize that the situation of IST is not satisfactory and, worse still, is deteriorating.”

The main cause of this degradation lies in the sustained inelastic character of the IST world market: whatever the price demanded by the market, the demand for IST remains constant in the scientific community; this resource is essential.

The difficulty weighing on a strained market is even further accentuated in France by insufficient financial means and a lack of coordination between the different actors involved. Contrary to the widespread perception, not only are doubled purchases completed, but because the hidden costs of acquisitions in IST (especially transaction costs) are themselves redundant, there is a disappointing final result: the documentary coverage from which French researchers can benefit varies according to their host institution and lacks readability for the end user.

Establishing a national policy for IST therefore does not aim to achieve savings (they can only be marginal as the market retains its inelasticity), but to achieve better efficiency (total costs / customer satisfaction).

National licences

The need for the establishment of a policy at the national level results from three observations, shared by all institutions:

• Most of the resources offered to users results in annual print subscriptions on the basis that a premium is paid for the electronic version, or global agreements allow a right of temporary access to online resources to which the institutions are not subscribers. The overall cost of these resources, all media combined, is about 100 million € annually for the entire national community, in which approximately 48 million € are only for the electronic version. However, in the case of the non-renewal of agreements with suppliers, online resources will no longer be available.

• The bulk of funds invested in IST is mobilized by agreements with publishers based on a system that binds the institutions to maintain the annual sales of suppliers and to undergo a programmed increase in costs much higher than that of the budgets or of inflation only.

• Linked to the two preceding paragraphs, it results in a loss of documentary offerings at the expense of resources not distributed by multinational scientific publishing and of trade-offs, resulting in a reduction of resources allocated to pedagogical resources: gradually institutions lose control of their documentation policies, both in research resources and in research devoted to training.

The implementation of a policy of acquisition of library resources in the form of national licences is the primary means for providing access to these resources in a sustainable manner and for irrigating more widely and equitably the different scientific communities. The multidisciplinary institutions, both small or medium sized, are being heavily penalized and are unable to acquire a sufficient number of resources in multiple disciplines; but large scientific institutions are also penalized by the current economic model, based on the maintenance of particularly high historical business figures.

National licences allow an escape from the current double impasse. It means that each product acquires a single operator, which can vary according to the scope of the licence :

• Resources of interest to the national community of research and higher education

• Resources of interest to a particular disciplinary community of research and higher education, institutionally or geographically dispersed

• Standard membership (the full product from a supplier, or a core collection of general interest)

• Definitive and permanent acquisition (complete retrospective collections of major publishers worldwide, closed corpus of texts) for the establishment of a national heritage collection of IST, and the securing of the supply available to users.

National policy and institutional policies

As understood, a national licensing policy is in no way antithetical to institutional policies. Rather, an intelligent application of the subsidiarity, based on the analysis of members' needs in line with the objectives of French research allows optimization of public policies, and an intervention at the right level: the point is that operators act in the spirit of community, beyond institutional partitioning. This principle of subsidiarity leads to a distributed national model (versus centralized) and open: perhaps to an operator of any national institution (EPST, EPSCP, EPA) provided that it represents the whole community of higher education and research. Moreover, as the creation of the national heritage collection of IST continues, each institution would be invited to take part in a national policy of shared conservation, needed for an optimal articulation of print and electronic media, and for the establishment of a balanced IST national library card. Finally, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as stated above, each establishment would remain in charge of its acquisitions, particularly in terms of acquired resources in addition to core collections at the national level.

This principle of sharing at the national level joins the changes currently being implemented within the headquarters of MESR, under the RGPP: MISTRD (Mission Information Scientifique et Technique et du Réseau Documentaire), through the DGESIP and the DGRI, which took the place of the former BIST (Bureau de l’Information Scientifique et Technique) and SDBIS (Sous-Direction des Bibliothèques et de l’Information Scientifique). Designed to focus on the strategic management of ISTs, MISTRD aims to bring about the devolution of operational missions that still belong to them until the end of 2009. While remaining vigilant to the means to which it will in fine be assigned, Couperin, as well as the ADBU and the AURA, salute the transverse positioning of the new MISTRD.

Homologically, this position for the three professional associations leads to the expansion of the missions of the ABES, allowing it to take charge:

• Firstly, of the operational tasks related to standardization, to theses, to retroconversion, to networks and then to monitoring initiatives of a collaborative nature, that until now have been mainly provided by the MESR:

• The function of expertise, including standardization and theses

• The central filing system of theses from Nanterre

• The retroconversion

• The description of educational resources

• The description of electronic resources

• The description of scientific literature produced by research

• The monitoring of digitization projects and the management NUMES

• The monitoring of the SUDoc-PS network

• The modernization of interlibrary loan and document delivery

• The alignment of the various initiatives taken to date in order to form a French-speaking resource portal in SHS (Cairn, Perseus, Adonis).

• Secondly, the role of a national operator alongside other institutions (EPST, EPSCP , EPA) ; for example historical collections of major global scientific publishers or the standard subscription to products of interest to the vast majority of the national community of research and higher education, both for print and electronic media, interdependent of the business models currently offered by suppliers.

Given the stakes, and to ensure strong consistency between the expectations of institutions and of the guided policy, the ABES should establish a Scientific Council. With regard to strengthening the skills of the ABES in a context of institutional autonomy (LRU law), the creation of a Board of Directors should be reviewed to ensure better representation of institutions. The evolution of the statutes of the ABES is necessary. Therefore Couperin, the ADBU and the AURA value the establishment of a foreshadowing committee for this renewed ABES, bringing together all stakeholders (Service de la coordination stratégique et des territoires, CPU, ADBU, ABES, AURA, Advanced, Couperin, IGB, IGF) and whose task by the end of 2009 would be :

• To redefine the scope of the current agency and its missions

• To assess the means, notably by humans, to fulfill these missions

• To clarify the governance of the agency, in the sense of a greater steering by the institutions

Another actor now seems to want to enter the field of the acquisition of archives and subscriptions to the community of higher education and research: the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). This hypothesis is now suffering from an institutional incorporation of the establishment of the current proposed terms of access.

Even if the BNF has legitimacy and a proven expertise in the field of digital conservation (eg, a mirror site of the ABES) to ensure the long-term archiving of national electronic collections acquired for the research and higher education community, it appears, however, premature to designate it as a national operator, a priori.

This new positioning of the BNF highlights, however, the fact that a national policy of the IST involves thinking at an inter-ministerial level, which exceeds the scope of these proposals, but which is the very next stage of reflection.

Financial means, legal and administrative portage

The policy proposed here allows a significant gain in terms of efficiency, but requires additional resources in terms of recurrent funding for current subscriptions, in terms of investing in single acquisitions (collections and closed corpus, retrospective collections), the latter could become the object of a multi-annual programming, like the policy in Germany, after which our country would be endowed with the necessary library base for research.

The amount of resources required is difficult to assess in the absence of an accurate census of the needs and the communities concerned, for each of them. But we can reasonably assume that the effort needed would consist of aligning the spending of national documentation for higher education and research on the level of what is practiced in comparable countries, in other words, a doubling of the current level: in effect, brought to the number of students, library spending for teaching and research are at least twice as high in Spain, Germany and Great Britain than in France, according to a study conducted by the ADBU.

The establishment of national licences also means new ways of financial portage: in effect, in the absence of a centralized financial management of acquisitions, the current sharing device requires heavy and complex legal arrangements based on creation of groups of commands at the national level. This procedure requires an institution to ensure the financial portage of important public markets: nowadays, ABES assures the portage of 10 groups of commands, the five others being carried by other institutions (Universities of Lyon 1, Nancy 1, Lille 1 and the INIST-CNRS). The acquisition of resources under national licences in turn requires a single and centralized portage of funding for each negotiated resource. The budgetary means allocated to this policy must be paid directly to the institutions that are the legal holders of the contracts.

This centralized financial portage provides a quadruple benefit :

• It prevents the provided additional means from creating a windfall for stakeholders in the publishing market; and from introducing a logic of cost inflation

• Without lowering the endowments currently assigned to universities, it can readjust the part of purchases by institutions devoted to research on one hand (a non-negligible part of these costs having been supported by the various national operators), and to training, on the other hand, which is currently lacking in policies of acquisition

• It offers greater efficiency in the negotiations, with the single operator in charge of the resource it acquires and any reactivity that does not precisely permit the burden of management imposed by the system of grouping of commands

• It shelters single operators from management problems inherent in financial arrangements under the groups of command.

Beyond the acquisition policy

A national policy of IST finally implies active support to current attempts to make new models of scientific publications emerge, for even if it does not replace the current business model, it at least balances again the ratio of current forces. In this area again, France is lagging farther and farther behind.

Therefore, Couperin, the ADBU, and the AURA recommend:

• Subordinating the granting of subsidies of the ANR to the mandatory deposit of research articles in "open archives";

• Encouraging the assumption of journals in open access (author-payer model) and, in addition, non-commercial paying magazines, like those promoted by SPARC;

• Engaging in state-level discussions with French publishers in order to make them define their policy towards open access, on the model of the RoMEO tool from the SHERPA project (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/). It is the visibility and impact of French research on the new battleground which is the web.

ADBU - Association des directeurs et des personnels de direction des bibliothèques universitaires et de la documentation (Association of the Directors and management teams of academic libraries and documentation)

The ADBU is an association of directors and management staff of university and other similar libraries, as well as all agencies under the Ministry responsible for Higher Education and Research whose main activity is to be concerned with documentation and information sciences.

The ADBU provides a space for dialogue, sharing, monitoring and exchanging of good practices, development and the national organization of scientific and technical information.

It works actively for the recognition and development of libraries in universities and more widely in the institutions under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, in the recognition and in the development of the role of university and other similar libraries in the economy of academic publishing, and in the development of regional, national and international documentation networks.

http://www.adbu.fr/

AURA - Association du réseau des établissements utilisateurs de l'ABES (Network association of the institutions users of ABES)

The AURA is an association of library institutions using the services of l'Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur -Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education (public and private).

It pursues the following objectives:

• Ensuring relationships between ABES and its users,

• Contributing to the discussion of the ABES in representing the views of institutions including the assessment of existing products and services, advice on pricing, proposals for improvement and evolution, suggestions for new products and services, the expression of the needs of users in training and information.

Furthermore, the association may participate in the promotion of services of the ABES besides foreign institutions and notably French-speaking ones.

http://aura.bu.univ-paris5.fr/

COUPERIN - Consortium Universitaire des Publications Numériques

The French consortium Couperin is a network that unites different members: universities, research institutions and other organizations. It includes currently more than 200 institutions. It evaluates, negotiates and arranges the purchase of digital library resources at the best price for its members. It promotes a national policy on the acquisition of scientific archives to ensure equal access to IST for the entire scientific community. It works on improving scientific communication with the development of open archives. It encourages the establishment of systems for non-commercial dissemination of IST.

COUPERIN has built and developed a national network of skills and exchanges, has developed an expertise to manage the strategic and technological issues related to the management, publishing and dissemination of scientific and technical information. The work includes online publications of institutions, open archives, statistics of usage of electronic resources, permanent archiving, e-books, and the management of electronic resources.

http://www.couperin.org