What is a scientific book in french-speaking countries?: Focus on Switzerland
Creators: name: Epron, Benoît
name: Mermet, Marion
name: Ferry, Adèle
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: scientific books
monographs
open science policies
OPERAS2024

description: The term “book” now covers a wide range of formats (monographs, reports, conference proceedings, symposia, etc.). In addition to the issues of typologisation and the circulation of knowledge, the question of formats has to do with the development of Open Access and research funding policies, in which scientific works play a special role.

Little discussed in the reflections of the 2000s, they now constitute a specific subject of study due to the particular construction of this market. Often a unique document, in the sense that it is not part of a series of publications, scientific books are not always part of highly structured and stabilised publishing practices. In the humanities and social sciences, for example, there is sometimes a fine line between works aimed at a scientific readership and those aimed at a wider public.

It is therefore essential to identify the criteria used to consider a work to be scientific and covered by policies to encourage Open Access.

As part of the reflections initiated within the Observatoire de l’édition scientifique, a research project has been carried out by a group of students from the Master’s degree in Information Science at the HEG in Geneva. The aim is to develop a proposed naming typology for scientific works based on a combination of several methodological approaches.

Initially, the work focuses on an analysis of the policies in place in several French-speaking countries to support Open Science. This analysis was based on the institutional and legal texts that set out the framework for financial support for open access publishing for what they consider to be scientific works. It also made it possible to identify shared criteria and specific features depending on the country, the players in the publishing chain and the discipline.

In order to clarify this analysis in relation to existing practices, one of the tasks of the project is to process the data available on several institutional repositories, academic library catalogues and platforms for making Open Access works available.

The aim is, firstly, to identify the classification trees in which the works are distributed, in order to obtain an overview of the different forms adopted or accepted by the platforms. A first stage of data analysis to build up a corpus of publications and check whether the same title is identified in the same way from one platform to another. For this approach, books are cross-identified using their ISBN.

Secondly, processing the data from the platforms analysed makes it possible to assess existing practices by quantifying the volumes of documents identified in the various categories of works, by discipline (hard sciences, humanities, etc.) and by country. It is thus possible to highlight the formats favoured by the various academic communities and to observe the efficiency of the support policies put in place.

This study demonstrates the complexity of defining criteria and the strong impact they can have on the digital editorial chain.