French Project Promotes Open Access

The Centre for Direct Scientific Communication, a unit within the French government’s National Centre for Scientific Research, is planning to launch a series of open-access journals in the coming months using unpublished content from preprint servers such as Cornell University’s arXiv and the French equivalent, HAL. Editorial boards of these epijournals, as they are called, will organize the peer review of the articles, and the journals will provide links to the peer-reviewed work on the preprint servers. The idea is to provide an alternative platform for peer reviewing research articles, eliminating the need for commercial publishers. Authors will retain copyright on their work, and they will not be asked to sign restrictive agreements. The initiative is funded by the French government to add value to preprint servers and to implement free access to electronic versions of peer-reviewed research articles. The ­Episciences.org​ project will start with journals in mathematics, but it is expected to eventually host journals in all scientific fields.