Information Practices and Knowledge in Health - Группа авторов

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the early 2000s, the United States developed and ultimately mobilized open access to health information. The famous National Institute of Health (NIH), a government agency directly dependent on the Department of Health, was a major player and in 2004 adopted a policy in favor of Open Access, supported by the PubMed Central database, essential for researchers in the field. Researchers were invited to archive a copy of their published article on PubMed Central no later than 6 months after its publication [ZER 04]. Four years later, in 2004, this incentive became mandatory, with a 12-month period. As Moorhead et al. [MOO 15] point out,

      As a policy leader and major funder of health research, the NIH has, through its Public Access Policy, placed health literature at the forefront of the move toward open access to research.

      In fact, unlike fields such as high-energy physics, where communities have mobilized around the principles of Open Access and have set up Open Repositories [GIN 97], in Health, it is public policies that, in light of the public health issue, have placed Open Access at the heart of thinking behind models for the dissemination of validated scientific information. Peter Suber [SUB 08] emphasizes the unprecedented nature of the approach, which was initiated by United States legislation and implemented by funding agencies.

      Strive to provide open access to these articles within six or twelve months – set according to the field of research – after publication.

      Define and implement clear policies […] for the dissemination of and open access to scientific publications resulting from publicly funded research.

      The success of these aligned policies can be measured by the 5.9 million articles published worldwide. And as has been pointed out [TEN 16], the cumulative number of Open Access articles has increased far more than the number of non-full-text articles. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, downloads of articles indexed with the keyword “Covid-19” were in the millions [KOU 20] and were not generated by researchers alone. Members of the general population, wanting to be informed, accessed these articles using search engines.

      Building on the policies that promote Open Access in Health and aiming to speed up access to information, BioMed Central (BMC) is a new player making its way onto the digital scientific publishing scene. In the early 2000s, it developed an offer of digital journals ex nihilo that published articles in Open Access. To do so, it relies on the Gold model (characterized by publications with free, open and immediate access for the author and the reader) and is included in the Berlin Declaration for Open Access. However, BMC “adapted” the original Gold model by asking the author (or their institution) to pay to publish, in order to find the resources to develop its platform and model. BMC thus introduced the article processing charge (APC), a publication fee that allows the publisher to finance the publication, which is in fact distributed under a Creative Commons License. This is an ingenious reversal of the subscription business model: payment is no longer made by the reader (or their library) but by the author (their institution or research project). The Gold Author-Pays model is born [TEN 16]. This transformation led to more precise terminology: the original Gold model was renamed the Gold Diamond model, to emphasize the difference. The need for immediate access to validated scientific information in the field of health has thus given rise to a business model that is now at the center of structural changes in scientific communication in Health.

      In 2006, PloS (Public Library of Science), another Gold publisher, launched a range of journals under the Gold Author-Pays model using the same arguments [BAR 06],

      The potential benefits of such a change are vast. No longer will physicians have to base their practice on half-truths. Instead, everyone from patients to policy-makers can read for themselves the evidence on which crucial science and health policy decisions are made.

      However, the Gold Author-Pays model raises questions about APC funding. The inequality of researchers in terms of access to information is now transformed into inequality in relation to publishing [BOU 17c]. Even though the Open Access model advocates access to knowledge, publishers are seizing on it to make it a new source of funding for their economic model. This is confirmed by the fact that the policies of some countries with a tradition of research and publication, such as the UK, officially opt for Gold Open Access as a strategic policy for the dissemination of scientific publications and provide, as a corollary, grants that allow researchers to publish according to this Gold Author-Pays model [FIN 12]. Since then, the major historical groups of scientific publishing (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, etc.), the Gold publishers (PloS, Copernicus, etc.) and the international databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, etc.) have set out to work on the development of Gold journals and their indexing, and thus on their economic valuation.

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