Co-building Open Science: Portrait of the University Library as a Publisher

Located in Lyon, France, the Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University is home to 30 000 students in law, management and humanities, around 600 academic staff and 18 research units. A dedicated research support team was implemented within the University library in 2015, to promote open access to their results. In 2017, answering to requests expressed by researchers to be helped in their online publishing, the library launched an in-house incubator for open access journals in social sciences and humanities. Staff from the research units was offered an open access standard-compliant publishing platform, technical and editorial assistance, training for publications, and program to have the backlog of issues addressed.

The journal incubator raison d’être is to allow the University’s research to be available on an open access basis, to reinforce good open access journal publishing practices among research units and to improve the overall visibility of the research produced by Jean Moulin Lyon 3 researchers. The project quickly gathered momentum: two other higher educational institutions have approached the library to see if they could publish on the platform, thus expanding its role beyond the limits of its parent institution. The project played an instrumental role in forming, in late 2018, a network of French incubators and publishing platforms in social sciences and humanities. Named REPÈRES, the network promotes sharing good practices among public-funded open access publishers. The Jean Moulin Lyon 3 library project is a contribution to bibliodiversity since it supports an open access model and the use of vernacular languages (French in the case at hand). The project also reinforces the intertwining of academic and library staff for the common goal of scientific publishing. Thus, the library becomes a full participant of the scientific process.

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