Open Scientific Publishing Expert Group
Publications College

May 2023 (translated in November 2024)

To implement recommendations for open access to academic books and chapters resulting from funded projects in its commitments to open science, the French National Research Agency turned to the Committee for Open Science to benefit from its expertise. A working group was then set up between the Open Scientific Publishing
Expert Group and the Publications College. This document sets out a series of recommendations formulated by the group. These are intended for higher education and research institutes, as well as for actors in scientific publishing.

Overview

These recommendations apply to peer-reviewed academic books and chapters.

• Eligibility for funding of open access publication fees should be restricted to peerreviewed academic books that are entirely open access or to chapters in such books.

• Request that the accepted author manuscript (AAM) be submitted to an open access repository at the same time as it is made available in open access by the publisher.

• Prioritise immediate open access to academic books that received dedicated funding for open access or within one year of publication. 

• Subject the eligibility of funding for open access to a set of criteria: peer review, Creative Commons licence, CrossRef DOI, formats.

• Rely on existing infrastructures and platforms (open access repository, publishing platforms) to disseminate open access academic books. 

• Restrict funding for open access to the costs associated with the format(s) made available in open access. 

• State the name(s) of the funder(s) in the metadata and in the preliminary pages of academic books.

• Declare open access funding in the OpenAPC section dedicated to academic books

• Ensure transparency in the assessment of editing and publishing costs based on specificity and complexity of academic books, using, for example, an average cost per page.

• Consider the time needed to write, peer-review, edit, and publish an academic book in the project funding. A dedicated fund for open access would dissociate the time required for editing and publishing from the research time. 

• Specify each party’s obligations in the publishing contract and the benefits provided by the academic publisher: peer review, publishing, distribution, and promotion.

• Ask the academic publisher to describe in detail and if possible in a standardised format, the procedures used to evaluate the manuscripts and the people involved.

• Publish academic books in a structured format that ensures their readability, durability, reusability and their accessibility for the disabled. 

• Make sure that an ISBN is attributed to each version of academic book (PDF, HTML, ePub, etc.) as well as a persistent identifier (CrossRef DOI, URI, etc.). 

• Apply a Creative Commons licence for open access academic books, in line with the recommendations available at https://creativecommons.org/. The licence should be agreed upon by both the author and the publisher, comply with the terms of the contract, and be stipulated in the contract. (8)