Re: Persee in danger. Please support it.

[jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca]

This sounds to me like the official excuse. The local university, 
duly supported by a fair amount of money from the French 
government, has harboured this project for the last eight years. 
The sudden change in tone cannot be entirely attributed to the 
new forms of autonomy for French universities. In fact, this 
newly-gained autonomy would be a good basis to support a 
programme that could easily bring fame and visibility to an 
autonomous institution. Furthermore, it was not planned at the 
national level (I was an active observer of that phase at the 
time), but the government reacted to the fact that some French 
schoalrly journals were thinking of using JSTOR for retroactive 
digitization. Jean-Noel Tronc convened a meeting in the offices 
of the Prime Minister (that was Jospin at the time, and Tronc was 
his scientific adviser). I sat on that meeting in Matignon. The 
result was a national contest to devolve the project to the best 
institution. Rennes applied, and so did INIST if I remember 
correctly, and perhaps other institutions as well. Lyons won 
because it looked like the most promising berth for a 
digitization project funded by the government. Lyons' choice was 
decided in part on local skills, and on the fact that, because of 
a fire in the library, the university was already involved in 
rebuilding its collections digitally. All this was in 2003.

The need to find viable financing for such problems is obvious. 
However, note that I am using the word 'viable', not sustainable. 
Sustainability involves a degree of self-sufficiency which often 
rests on some market mechanism that allows for the persistence of 
an endeavour. Seen from this perspective, scientific research is 
not sustainable, but it has been highly viable for the last three 
centuries because governments have generally understood the 
importance of this kind of pre-competitive investment to support 
a vibrant industrial scene and a cutting-edge army. It is my 
belief that projects such as  retrospective digitization of 
journals do not have to be sustainable, but can still be viable 
through some intelligent combination of governmental and 
para-governmental funds. Let us remember that JSTOR, for example, 
locks up behind its digitized data bases of articles a number of 
texts that are now in the public domain.

Looking for new economic models is fine, so long as we are not 
looking artificially to recreate pseudo-market conditions as if 
markets were the alpha and the omega of the world. Many human 
activities, including some very costly ones (e.g. wars) are not 
market-driven. Why should retrospective digitization be?

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le dimanche 13 mars 2011 a 10:30 -0400, Annaig Mahe a ecrit :

> As much as I have understood from the outside, the University of
> Lyon 2 has argued that it is not for a local university to
> support a national program. This situation arises in a new
> context for the French Universities where they now each have to
> plan for their budgets autonomously and locally where before it
> was planned at a national level. Until then, the University
> received a budget dedicated to Persee from the Ministry of Higher
> Education and gave some more support mainly in the form of
> infrastructure. It is now asking for Persee to be wholly
> supported at a national level, which might eventually be done by
> the CNRS (the French national research institution, already in
> charge of the national platform for Open Access, HAL).
>
> The logic seems quite sensible, on a sole economic analysis but,
> according to Persee, the decision has been taken very suddenly
> and without previous discussion, thus putting the whole project
> in danger. The support from the University is supposed to cease
> in May, and no viable solution has been proposed yet. The
> petition might help for the best solution to be found, the main
> risk in the end being for the Persee team to be dismantled and
> thus losing a precious expertise.
>
> This awkward situation has yet one advantage:  to raise awareness
> on the necessity to find sustainable economic models for such
> useful Open Access initiatives, as this has been recently shown
> by the new economic model for ArXiv or by another French
> initiative, OpenEdition/Revues.org which has very recently
> proposed a new economic model for the libraries, Freemium (a
> combination of free access for the users and premium fee services
> for the libraries).
>
> Annaig Mahe
> lecturer,
> Urfist de Paris