Letter to international societies

The purpose of this thread is to write a letter to international societies (IUTAM, EUROMECH,...) to raise awareness among the communities in Mechanics about epi-journal publications. All of you are invited to comments and interesting points.

For Overlay Journals in Mechanics

PROBLEM
How is all this possible? Tomorrow, researchers will have to pay in order to publish! The Gold Open Access model with Article Processing Charge (APC) seems to expand slowly in our community. This publication process uses a business model based on individual articles for which their authors pay a specific fee for publication [1].

PUBLIC FINANCES
It will however have dramatic consequences on universities' and research institutes' budgets, and more generally on public finances. For instance in France, CNRS currently spends about M€15/year in library resources, amount that would nicely reach M€95/year in case Gold Access with APC becomes the preferred avenue for publishing (see [2]). Moreover, the H2020 program, which enforces open access, has the harmful effect of promoting this model since APC are eligible expenses to be listed in proposals. This situation is not sustainable. A completely free open access for the authors and readers is a viable alternative.

OPEN ACCESS AND EPI-JOURNALS
As our colleagues in mathematics have already understood, Overlay Journals (also called Epi-journals or Diamond Open Access) are the way to go! Overlay journals are purely open access electronic journals solely fed by articles that are deposited on open archives (arXiv, HAL, engrXiv...) and not already published elsewhere. The review procedure, undertaken by the editorial team of the overlay journal together with designated reviewers, is of high quality (see [3] for more details). This virtuous framework involves a minimal cost to society and taxpayers while publications (and possibly attendant data) are always openly accessible on the long term. Technical challenges are minimal since appropriate platforms already exist. As an example, Episciences.org [4] provides a technical support for peer-reviewing activities which are supervised by editorial boards. To summarize, epi-journals add value to open archives by assigning a scientific caution to the accepted papers. Other benefits of free open access are summarized in Figure 1 (see below).

Existing examples of such overlay-journals are available at the episciences.org project webpage supported by the CCSD, or http://www.emis.de/journals/.

AND THE MECHANICS COMMUNITY?
It is now critical that the mechanics community thinks about a full open access model to publish the outcomes of research, and more specifically about the creation of Overlay Journals in various subfields of Mechanics. Lately, this question generated a strong interest as it is witnessed by the fruitful discussion on Loomio, an online tool increasing transparency and inclusion, to reach decisions (see [5] to get invited).

NEXT STEPS AND QUESTIONS TO THE SOCIETY
An international editorial team should now be created. It is highly recommended that Scientific Societies (EUROMECH, IUTAM...) get involved in the process to support these novel ideas and wind of change able to completely redraw the arcane of publishing.

We would like the point of view of the society on the following questions:

Would the society position itself as a proponent of alternative publication processes based on epi-journals?
Would the society be able to support an initiative for creating an epi-journal in Mechanics?
Would the society be able to suggest members to the editorial board of the epi-journal to be created?
Would the society be willing to help implement the launch of the such a journal by encouraging the submission of papers after international conferences and workshop administered by the society?

On behalf of the Loomio members supporting overlay journal in mechanics [5],
Vincent Acary, INRIA, France
Mathias Legrand, McGill Uninversity, Canada

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_processing_charge
[2] http://www.cnrs.fr/dist/z-outils/documents/Distinfo2/DISTetude_4.pdf
[3] http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/articles and its announcement by Nature https://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-launches-arxiv-overlay-journal-1.18351
[4] https://www.episciences.org/?lang=en
[5]
https://www.loomio.org/invitations/aa0a97be9a80ba509623

More details are given in the following manifest.
https://www.loomio.org/d/qiepDOA2/manifest-for-an-epi-journal-