On November 21st 2024, the Assemblée des Éditeurs (Assembly of Publishers) met for the first time in Paris to launch the new Alliance of French Public Scientific Publishers (Alef).

Federating scientific publishing within Higher Education and Research 

France Universités, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the French National Natural History Museum (MNHN) drove the creation of this alliance made up of 59 publishing structures committed to open science. Alef brings together university presses and publishing departments from a broad range of organisations (major establishments, French schools abroad, the ENS, UMIFREs, laboratories, etc.) that publish in all disciplines. They also have the same shared convictions and mission, namely disseminating the research results as widely as possible.

Setting up Alef was provided for in the Second National Plan for Open Science and follows on from preliminary work carried out by the mission led by Caroline Dandurand (INRAE). The mission was instigated by the MESRI’s ‘Knowledge Dissemination and Documentation Department’. The resulting structuring work was led by Xavier Leroux, vice-president for open science and publishing policy at France Universités and also supported by the National Fund for Open Science.

Alef aims to position itself nationally and in political terms as a complement to existing networks like Medici, Repères, the Observatoire de l’édition scientifique, the Committee for Open Science’s Open Scientific Publishing Expert Group and so forth. Another objective for Alef is to work collaboratively to help anticipate or drive progress on important issues by representing French scientific publishing in science, technology and medicine or the humanities and social sciences at the European level and internationally.

Ambitious missions

90 representatives responded favourably to an invitation from the founding members who drive this alliance project in political terms. The project involves the publishing structures (the scientific and editorial departments and their teams) and their home institutions.

Lively discussions took place involving publishers and the personalities present on behalf of the founding members: Xavier Leroux, president of the University of Toulon (France Universités) who chaired the meeting; Emmanuelle Jannès-Ober, deputy director of the Open Science Department (INRAE) and co-author of the 2017 Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity; Gildas Illien, Library Curator and Deputy Director General of Collections (MNHN). The members have defined their priority tasks as defining and clarifying the role of public scientific publishing, identifying its strengths and weaknesses so it can be more effectively represented and working on the sustainability of open-access print and digital publishing and how to enhance the dissemination of publications.

These priorities are being worked on by the first commissions which initially need to set up operational working groups and define their own objectives. The following topics were brought up – scientific integrity, referencing and indexing, labelling expertise, natively digital publishing, accessibility for the disabled, international dissemination, the promotion and development of a shared catalogue, multilingualism and translation, eco-responsibility, digitisation of collections, etc.

Renald Cuzacq (Franche-Comté University Press), Laure Himy-Piéri (Caen University Press), Arnaud Timbert (Septentrion University Press) and Céline Vautrin (Éditions du Collège de France) were elected to lead the work carried out by the Assembly of Publishers and carry on with this structuring work.

To find out more please contact alef@franceuniversites.fr.

For more information: the MESR’s page on scientific publishing.