Open Access

The results of a survey conducted in 2017 show a good predisposition of the UNIL academic community towards Open Access, highlighting a desire to democratize knowledge and a concern for budgetary savings.

Given the richness and variety of UNIL's disciplinary fields, a unique approach to Open Access that favours one path over another is not topical. Concerned to guarantee its researchers their academic freedom, UNIL wants to develop a mixed and pragmatic approach where the golden and green paths coexist and complement each other. Thus, researchers will choose the journal best suited to their research on scientific criteria, and they will then be able to choose which path to follow to make their publication freely accessible.

This mixed strategy requires in particular the development of SERVAL (SERveur Académique Lausannois), which is the institutional repository of UNIL and the CHUV. Over the past two years, SERVAL has been optimized to become a tool focused on the needs of researchers and the current challenges of Open Access publication: internationalization of Lausanne research, visibility of scientific work, citations of UNIL researchers, exhaustive list of publications funded by UNIL, etc.

As for the publication of monographs, the path has yet to be paved. UNIL will develop its policy in partnership with the research community and stakeholders, including publishers, historical partners in the promotion of scientific research.

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

• Supporting its researchers and communicating the opportunities offered by Open Access ;
• The training of its community in new complementary modes of scientific publication in order to promote bibliodiversity ;
• The development of technical infrastructures and the provision of tools for publishing journals in Open Access ;
• The consideration, in the evaluation of researchers, of their efforts to raise their visibility (deposit on the SERVAL institutional server) and access their scientific results.

This reasonable and thoughtful approach must make it possible to meet the challenges of the OA and scientific communication at the beginning of the 21st century.