3 December 2020
SMAI’s application for funding from the Fonds national pour la science ouverte (FNSO) has been successful. SMAI and EDP Sciences can therefore press ahead with plans to transition the maths journals* they publish in partnership to open access under the Subscribe to Open model with the necessary financial support to give this initiative the best possible chance of success.
The FNSO launched its first call for projects in December 2019 with a view to funding open science publishing including “editorial projects which contribute to consolidating the French open science publishing ecosystem”. In total, 105 projects were submitted of which 22 were successful after consideration by an international jury supported by more than 50 experts.
“We are so pleased that our submission has been successful,” commented Amandine Véber, Secrétaire générale adjointe aux publications, SMAI. “This is a real boost to our work to promote fair open access, anchored in a long-standing collaboration between SMAI and EDP Sciences, and it confirms its importance. Working closely with our colleagues at EDP Sciences, we will use the funds to promote the transition to open access for our journals under a relatively new, but increasingly accepted collaborative model in which mathematical libraries play an essential role.”
“If S2O is supported, there will be no fees to publish articles in full open access with a CC-BY licence in the journals participating in the initiative next year. This innovative open access model is viewed by many as a ‘game-changer’ in open access publishing,” commented Anne Ruimy, Senior Publisher, EDP Sciences. “The mathematics community is particularly supportive of open science and we are keen to do all we can to support both maths and open science in a fair and sustainable way.”
According to Frédérique Vidal, Minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation and the minister in charge of FNSO, “The creation of a national fund for open science constitutes a major element of the national plan for open science which I launched in Lille in July 2018. The results from this first call for tenders on open science contribute fully to support the pillar of scientific publishing, to which I committed.”
Following the success of the first round, the FNSO has already announced a further call for projects for open science publishing in 2020 and another with a focus on research data in 2021. EDP Sciences is fully committed to open access and open science and foresees these areas being the focus of much of its work for many years to come in conjunction with its academic partners.
* The journals are: ESAIM: Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis, ESAIM: Control, Optimisation and Calculus of Variations, ESAIM: Probability and Statistics, RAIRO – Operations Research and Mathematical Modelling of Natural Phenomena (MMNP). A pilot project has already allowed MMNP to successfully transition to open access in 2020. A sixth maths journal published by EDP Sciences, RAIRO – Theoretical Informatics and Applications, will also transition to S2O next year although it is not part of the SMAI portfolio and is not covered by this funding.