Open Access

The results of a survey conducted in 2017 show that UNIL's academic community is well disposed towards Open Access, highlighting a desire to democratise knowledge and a concern for budget savings.

Given the richness and variety of UNIL's disciplinary fields, a one-size-fits-all approach to Open Access that favours one path over another is not an option. In order to guarantee its researchers their academic freedom, UNIL wants to develop a mixed and pragmatic approach where the golden path and the green path coexist and complement each other. In this way, researchers will choose the journal best suited to their research on the basis of scientific criteria, and they will then be able to choose which route to take to make their publication freely accessible.

This mixed strategy requires, in particular, the development of SERVAL (SERveur Académique Lausannois), the institutional repository of the UNIL and the CHUV. Over the last two years, SERVAL has been optimised to become a tool geared towards the needs of researchers and the current challenges in terms of Open Access publication: internationalisation of Lausanne research, raising the profile of scientific work, citations of UNIL researchers, exhaustive list of publications funded by UNIL, etc. As for monograph publications, there is still a long way to go.

As far as the publication of monographs is concerned, there is still some way to go. UNIL will develop its policy in partnership with the research community and stakeholders, including publishers, who have long been partners in the promotion of scientific research.

Solutions acceptable to all parties will still have to be found, taking into account the requirements of funding bodies, the national strategy, the needs of researchers and the institutional challenges of a public university, which has a duty to shine beyond cantonal and national borders through the quality of its research and teaching.

• Supporting its researchers and communicating the opportunities offered by Open Access;
• Training its community in new, complementary methods of scientific publication in order to promote bibliodiversity;
• Developing technical infrastructures and providing tools for publishing Open Access journals;
• Taking into account, in the evaluation of researchers, their efforts to make their work more visible (deposit on the SERVAL institutional server) and to provide access to their scientific results.

This reasonable and well-considered approach should enable us to meet the challenges of OA and scientific communication at the beginning of the 21st century.