French version

The collective group SavoirsCom1 is joining its forces with the movement questioning the practices of Refdoc, a service of INIST, a movement that was initiated by Olivier Ertzscheid. Refdoc doesn’t respect the will of the creative community (in this case, scholarly authors) by distributing the authors’work commercially, without their consent, and without links to free online versions. Refdoc being a service of INIST, a department of CNRS, this policy is all the more difficult to understand that many documents are freely available in open access (OA) repositories such as HAL, an OA repository managed by CNRS.

The service Refdoc is presently a blow to the founding principles of the collective group Savoir Com1, as stated in its manifesto: In the perspective of an open science beyond the academic circles, open access to scholarly publications must prevail over the commercial appropriation of the results of public research.

By omitting to request the authors’ approval before selling their articles, the practices of Refdoc represent an illegitimate enclosure of scholarly articles whereas they should be common goods for knowledge.

The collective group SavoirCom1 offers to all authors whose work is available in Refdoc:

• To require the withdrawal of your documents

• To join our group of angry authors

We ask all authors whose work is sold by Refdoc without their consent to require the withdrawal of their work. If some of your articles are sold in this database, here is a request form for their withdrawal. We’ll send it for you at <infoclient@inist.fr>. Please don’t forget to add the list of your articles and to sign this email before sending it to us. After receiving it, we’ll send you a confirmation email with a copy of the message that was sent.

The collective group SavoirsCom1 also requires:

• That INIST, a department of CNRS, systematically mentions in Refdoc the links to a free online version of the article when available.
• That INIST, a department of CNRS, respects the outputs of past legal actions stating twice that the practice of reselling articles without the authors’ consent is illegal (decision of 27 May 2011 and appeal).
• That INIST, through its service Refdoc, respects the will of authors by stopping the commercial reuse of their articles without their consent.
• That INIST, through its service Refdoc, takes into account the requirements above, thus getting in line with the practices and efforts of CNRS to promote open access to scientific research (like it does with HAL).

If you share the ideas expressed above, please indicate your name below, to join the community of researchers sharing the same ideas. If you wish to, we’ll inform you about our
action step by step. A confirmation email will be sent, please don’t forget to validate it !