Information Practices and Knowledge in Health. Группа авторов

damages resulting from the development of the Gold Author-Pays model. One of the major characteristics of the phenomenon is that these journals use the Gold Open Access model and solicit authors, asking them to submit articles that they publish on their site without any form of peer review. A predatory journal therefore simply cashes in on the APCs without adding any value – notably scientific (no peer review process) – or any editorial improvement to the manuscript. A recent article proposes a definition that is already a collectively accepted reference [GRU 19]:

      Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.

The phenomenon, which was in its infancy in the early 2010s, has grown to an estimated 14,000 predatory journals¹¹. They present a significant risk to the field of Health, more so than for any other field. The largest number of these “predatory offers” occurs in the field of Health [GRU 19]. Predatory journals within this field therefore add to the phenomenon of Fake Science [HOP 19] and contribute to the complex, nebulous and dubious world of bio-medical information on the Web. The community of health researchers is aware of the danger this represents and is mobilized to denounce it. The extensive literature on the subject, published in medical journals, bears witness to this [CAM 18].

The most recent research on this new subject reveals that Open Access might be a mechanism by which external actors penetrate and gain a foothold in the scientific communication and publishing scene, and build legitimacy [COB 18; SIL 20]. They also highlight the capacity of Open Access to implement hybridization and thus increase the complexity of publication models, whose intelligibility contributes to the reliability of the information they convey [DIL 18].

1.5. The place and weight of funding agencies in the OA environment

      Changes in scientific communication in the digital era and in Open Access have broadened the spectrum of stakeholders, thereby influencing the definition and scope of dissemination models. In Health, in particular, research funding agencies, which historically did not intervene in the definition of scientific information dissemination models, have joined the Open Access equation. Today, they carry a lot of weight, as do publishers, libraries and learned societies.

      Funding agencies very quickly began paying attention to the rise of Open Access. The most important among them introduced recommendations in the 2000s; these were directed at funded researchers and stipulated that published results be made available in Open Access. For example, the Wellcome Trust, one of the best endowed agencies in the world, adopted a mandate for Open Access in October 2006 [WAL 06]. Researchers receiving funding were required to provide open access to the results of their research.

      The recommendations, clearly in favor of access to and visibility of funded research, are part of a management logic that finds its functional counterpart in the identification of these results in international databases, such as PubMed, Web of Science (WOS) or Scopus. Publications (mainly articles) are therefore not only “units of knowledge” but also “accounting units” [GIN 18] on which economic mechanisms of return on investment (ROI) are based.

Researchers previously invited to publish their results in “excellence” journals adapted and learned to archive their articles in thematic or institutional repositories [FRY 11]. Publishers have also adapted their Open Access policies to allow authors to deposit different versions of their papers (preprint, postprint author, postprint editor) according to specific deadlines and conditions (e.g. Sherpa Romeo).

      Open Access journals (based on the Gold Author-Pays model) that appeared in the field of Health were a rapid success with authors who met all the expectations of research assessment: publication of articles in an Open Access journal, guaranteeing the visibility of research results. The authors had no difficulty justifying payment of the APCs from their research budget to the funding agencies. The latter even made it clear in their calls for projects that publication expenses (including APCs) were eligible for funding.

      In Health, where research is based on a dual dynamic of collaboration and international competition, the financial stakes are huge; Open Access is therefore at the heart of the strategies of funding agencies (public and private) to give visibility and recognition to the research they have funded. This strategy has therefore been integrative of the various channels of Open Access, while at the same time driving momentum towards new avenues.

1.6. Plan S, a “radicalization”¹² of Open Access in Health?

The role of funding agencies took on a particular dimension in September 2018 with the announcement of an international coalition of 13 agencies (including the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche – ANR, French National Research Agency) encouraging researchers to publish in Gold Open Access journals [ELS 18]. The launch of Plan S at the initiative of Science Europe – the association of research funding agencies of the member states – reflects the desire to reinvent the methods of scientific communication by prioritizing the publication of research results from public grants in scientific journals or platforms that respect a number of founding principles of Open Science¹³.

The announcement was like a thunderclap in the sky of scientific publishing because it took the funding agencies out of the prescriptive role of Open Access dissemination to put them (with the very first draft of Plan S) in the position of favoring one model (Gold and a fortiori Gold Author-Pays) over another (Green representing the Open Archives)

Decried, criticized or welcomed, Plan S is still being debated, two years after its announcement. It is not unanimously supported in all fields¹⁴, for obvious reasons of funding mechanisms. However, not all fields rely on project-based research. Furthermore, it has recently been shown [LAR 18] that the funding criterion does not necessarily enter into the researcher’s publication strategy: as soon as authors have the funds to pay for the APC, they prefer to publish in Gold Open Access journals. A fortiori, in Health, where the overwhelming majority of research is project-based, Plan S acts as a catalyst for a restructuring of the scientific communication model around the imperative of access.

The Plan S coalition has been joined by new members including the influential Wellcome Trust; this new policy applies from January 1, 2021¹⁵. Today, the coalition includes powerful and important public and private funding agencies, who now feel they have a say in how science is communicated and disseminated. In addition to national funding agencies, four private international funding agencies are also associated with Plan S. All four fund Health research: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization, TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, and ASAP (Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s). Some of them do not hesitate in their support for experimental Open Access publishing projects that challenge the journal model in favor of the stand-alone article. In doing so, they contribute to a shared reflection on the sustainability or obsolescence of the journal model, with regard to the new requirements for media visibility of validated science [BOU 19a]. As the STM 2018 report [JOH 18] points out,

      Strictly speaking, open access is a property of the written outputs of a specific research project, rather than the publication that hosts such outputs. In other words, it is a property of an article rather than a journal, or of an individual monograph rather than a book series.

But above all, what justifies fears about Plan S is the fact that, while it builds its justification on a rhetoric that borrows from the arguments of Open Access, it undeniably introduces market regulation mechanisms to steer the publication strategy of researchers. The management logic