Helene Bosc et le progres en acces libre en france

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:45:01 +0000

Herbert Gruttemeier has written an excellent article about OA's remarkable
progress at the national level in France "The way to Open Access : French
strategies to move forward" http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005888/

I must however, correct either an unfortunate oversight or a grave
injustice in this article, for its failure to cite and credit the
pioneering work of France's first and most active and tireless OA
advocate, Helene Bosc. The work of Helene -- though she is now officially
"retired" from INRA -- goes on relentlessly. (She is, for example, the
organiser of the forthcoming Euroscience Symposium on Open Access in Munich
in July 2006 http://www.esof2006.org/scientific_session_detail.php4?ID=146
-- nor is that the only ongoing OA project up her sleeve!)

Gruttemeier's otherwise commendable paper states (perhaps correctly) that :

    "[INIST's] website dedicated to OA (http://www.inist.fr/openaccess) is
    probably (as far as usage statistics and user feedback indicate) the
    most popular source of Open Access information in the French-speaking
    world."

but omits to state that France's first and oldest website dedicated
to OA, and the one from which the INIST OA website was undoubtedly
seeded, was and is Helene Bosc's pioneering INRA website:
http://www.tours.inra.fr/prc/internet/documentation/communication_scientifique/comsci.htm

Let us again be thankful that there is Open Access and the Web to ensure that
the historic record can be set straight, to correct any oversights or undercites...

----
Re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News:
    OA momentum in France
    Herbert Gruttemeier, The way to Open Access : French strategies to
    move forward, Library and Information Service (Tushu Qingbao Gongzuo),
    50, 1 (2006) pp. 27-33.  http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005888/
    Abstract: In France, the movement in favour of open access to
    scientific research output is getting increasingly coordinated
    and supported at the political level. The CNRS, leading research
    organization in Europe and signatory of the Berlin Declaration,
    has an evident strategic role to play in this development.  Various
    initiatives that have emerged in the French academic world in recent
    years have led, for example, in early 2005 to the joint announcement,
    by four major research institutions, of a common policy to promote
    open access to published material and other types of digital
    resources, and to set up institutional archives. The article
    highlights some key issues of this policy, gives an overview of
    the current and past CNRS involvement in Open Access and describes
    the principal functions, as well as the related challenges, of the
    future institutional repositories.
OAN link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 3/22/2006 07:44:00 AM.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_03_19_fosblogarchive.html#114303164551994051
    "Open Access to Oeuvre of Bosc and of Chanier on Open Access"
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4598.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4471.html

Received on Wed Mar 22 2006 - 13:51:38 GMT