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      Open Access as a Regulation of Scientific Information in Health

      1.1. Introduction

      At the time of writing (April 2020), a pandemic was spreading across the world, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Medical research is at the front line in finding a suitable vaccine against Covid-19. More broadly, however, all research in the field of health contributes to possible responses to the disease, and to its wider management (development of Covid-19 tests by virologists, large-scale implementation of tests by veterinary researchers, etc.). A recent preprint [COL 20] has shown – through a scientometric approach – the breadth of the health fields mobilized around Covid-19 research [BRA 20]. Scientific journals and preprint servers have seen the number of submitted articles soar [HOR 20].

The pandemic has led to a policy dynamic, driven by funding agencies, that requires all publishers to make all articles dealing with Covid-19 research immediately available. The Wellcome Trust¹ was the first, followed by the call for data from the US White House². The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) also called upon organizations, scientific communities and publishers to ensure immediate Open Access to scientific publications and research data³.

      The biomedical fields are well and truly present, but they are poorly represented in the acronym STM, which conveys a definition that is more representative of the economic and industrial actors (notably, the scientific publishers and their powerful STM association) than of the research fields and their communities. Hence, throughout this chapter, we have chosen to use the term “Health”, with the first letter capitalized. It is more unifying and closer to the French definition of the biomedical sector discussed in this chapter. However, one of the characteristics that allows these fields to constitute a sector is the role and the place that Open Access to scientific information has represented in the development of their content since the 1990s.

      This chapter aims to give an account of the regulations generated by Open Access and which today link the field of scientific communication with the field of Health. We will address the way these regulations affect the publication and dissemination models of digital scientific information. The aim is to provide an account of the nature of these regulations and the issues they raise regarding scientific certification, regulations and issues that are crucial in Health.

1.2. The political anchoring of Open Access in the field of Health

      The public and societal importance of the field of Health led to it being one of the first fields to switch from paper to digital journals in the late 1990s. As Momen [MOM 03] points out,

      Health is perhaps the area of most intense demand for greater access to scientific and technical information, partly because failure to obtain it can be literally fatal.

When experimenting with the first electronic journal projects, publishers always included biomedical titles in their corpus [WIL 94]. This is not insignificant because, perhaps more than in any other field, the high financial stakes that govern health research place the scientific publication system at the heart of the mechanisms of permanent competition. With the deployment of the Web in the early 2000s and the rules of its attention economy [CIT 13], Open Access to scientific information has even become a value [RIF 05] around which public policies have turned to reach out to researchers, with recommendations and requirements. As a reminder, according to the Budapest Declaration of 2002⁴, Open Access is defined by two complementary channels. The Green Road – or self-archiving – characterized by archiving and online publication of a copy of articles in an open archive, possibly with an embargo period. The Gold Road, characterized by a publication with free, open and immediate access in an Open Access journal.

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