Retrospective of Dissemin and thoughts on the open access movement

At the end of this year, we’ll be discontinuing Dissemin, a web platform designed to help researchers upload their articles to open repositories. I want to take the time to reflect a bit on this journey and what I learned in the process.

Dissemin started at École normale supérieure around 2015, when a bunch of us were motivated to try and do our bit to open up access to scientific publications. The open access movement wasn’t a new thing then, even at ENS. Marie Farge, a researcher at the geosciences department of ENS, had been campaigning for open access for quite some time, and Pablo Rauzy, a fellow computer science student a few years before me, had written a very helpful page in French on the topic and gave many talks on the matter. As I read my first scientific articles and also tried to write some, I discovered the problem of lack of access and got in touch with Marie and Pablo. I also discovered the open access movement online, through many different resources such as those of Richard Poynder, Peter Suber and of course the film The Internet’s Own Boy about Aaron Swartz’s work, which I found very impressive and inspiring.

One thing that the open access movement had been advocating for was that universities and other research institutions should adopt “open access mandates”, which ask the researchers in those institutions to make their articles openly accessible. The idea was that beyond exercising some form of authority on researchers, such mandates would actually help them get better terms from the publishers they submit their articles to (because publishers need to comply if they want to stay in business). So we somehow set out to adopt such a policy at ENS. Patricia Mirabile and I got elected as student representatives on the scientific council of ENS and after some back and forth managed to get the ENS to adopt such a policy. Hurray! Well, except that nobody would actually care (or even know of) that policy, so we didn’t expect a lot of change from that. Normally, institutions which adopt such mandates have some sort of team from the university library which takes care of spreading the gospel among researchers and helping them leverage the policy for their own articles. Because the mandate came from a student initiative, we didn’t have that.

So, that’s where the initial interest in a web platform came: what if we had a website which could list the publications of researchers at ENS and give an overview of the state of their openness? And perhaps even ease the process of uploading them to open repositories? I started working on such a platform and was quickly joined by amazing teammates who were really kind not to be put off by my pretty dire lack of experience and the effect it had on the initial code base. It was pretty disastrous. I will spare you the software engineering lessons learned, because there are way too many and they aren’t particularly original. I just assumed I knew a lot of things which I really didn’t. We also shifted focus away from providing this service to just one institution (ENS) to making a platform that would work for any researcher, which was in a sense much more ambitious, but it also sidestepped the tricky problem of delimiting what ENS’ research output was. And we founded a non-profit association to host the platform and continue its development.

Despite our generous efforts, it never really got anywhere in terms of usage. Some people did upload some articles through Dissemin into open archives, but the numbers weren’t exactly impressive. To me, there were two main problems, which lead me to stopping work on the project in 2017.

The first problem was the premise of the open access movement, that all academic papers should be made accessible. To me, it felt self-evident: it is in the interest of society and of the researchers themselves to have the result of their work distributed as broadly as possible, so that we can all learn from their findings. My very brief attempt at being a researcher myself convinced me that unfortunately, articles are rarely written to be read. They are instead written to be reviewed and accepted for publication (which should indeed imply a few people reading it in the process, yes, but that’s a pretty small readership). In other words, the main motivation for researchers is often to get the recognition and validation of their work, not so much to tell the world about what they did. Communication can happen through papers, but also though a lot of other means: talks, blog posts, courses, popular science magazines, podcasts… whereas papers are the primary token for career progress. Many PhD programmes have explicit requirements about the number of papers (and perhaps the rankings of the journals they appear in) needed to obtain a degree, for instance. And that’s fair: of course, it’s a dumb productivity metric, but all productivity metrics are. My conclusion is that it’s perhaps not worth campaigning to make all papers accessible, if they are not meant to be read in the first place. If a researcher cares about being read, they have many options.

The second problem, specific to Dissemin, is that it wasn’t designed to cater for any actual user need. The motivation to build this platform was our outrage at the lack of access, and the urge to do something about it. My mental model for who would use Dissemin was very blurry: a researcher, encouraged by their institution, would go on the platform to check which of their articles weren’t accessible, and upload those to open repositories. But that’s a really bizarre use case: it would be a platform they would be constrained to use by their hierarchy. They wouldn’t spontaneously need the platform or see any immediate benefit. So it’s no surprise it wasn’t used much.

On top of that, the landscape evolved since we first started working on this project. The French national open repository, HAL, improved its deposit process so that people don’t have to input so much metadata on their own. One of the selling points of Dissemin was that researchers wouldn’t have to enter again the metadata of their articles to upload them, as that metadata was already fetched from our data sources. But having this done by the repository itself has obvious advantages over running an additional platform like Dissemin, which adds confusion for users. Also, gold open access became more of a norm, reducing the need for self archiving.

In any case, I really don’t regret working on this project. I had a great time and made great friends. And I learned that throwing an app at a social problem isn’t necessarily the best approach.