Open Access Talks

Join us after lunch for two enlightening talks about Open Access. Two EPFL researchers will share their experience and insights regarding Open Access.

12:45pm : Welcome coffee and cakes

1pm : First talk by Guillaume Anciaux - “What about Diamond Open Access?”

Diamond Open Access is a scholarly publishing model characterized by journals and platforms that do not impose fees nor on authors neither on readers. These journals typically operate as community-driven, academically-led, and academically-owned initiatives. While this approach does not eliminate publishing costs entirely, it places a strong emphasis on achieving fairness (FAIR principles). Several frameworks are available to facilitate this approach, where the minimum is to manage content storage and visibility. An alternative strategy to reduce the workload for editors of such journals is the adoption of an Overlay journal approach, which curates and selects content from freely accessible online repositories, such as preprints. In this setup, editorial boards supervise the peer review process to ensure high-quality content and rely on institutional storage repositories like ArXiv, HAL, and Zenodo for data retention. To illustrate the advantages and challenges of this model compared to traditional scientific journal approaches, we will use the Journal of Theoretical Computation and Applied Mechanics (JTCAM) as an example. JTCAM's commitment to open reviews, meticulous copy-editing, and its innovative approach to reviewing datasets will be discussed in detail.

1:30pm: Second talk by Talk by Dimitri Van de Ville - “The Story of NeuroImage: Downfall and Revival”

In April 2023, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, witnessed the mass resignation of all editors from its flagship journals NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports, following a profound disagreement with the high open-access publication fees. A month later, the editors launched a new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with non-profit publisher MIT Press, intended to replace NeuroImage as the field’s leading journal. The exodus had major reverberations in the community, was largely covered by the press, and profoundly impacted the course of NeuroImage. The revival as Imaging Neuroscience was established in record time. The journal was officially launched at the Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping in July 2023. It receives enthusiastic support from the community in terms of number of submissions and reviewer commitments. I will highlight some ins and outs of this intriguing saga, which has been hailed by The Chronicle of Higher Education as a “high-profile move ... in the long-unfolding battle over who pays and who benefits in the academic-publishing world.”