Contenu du sommaire : Accès à l'information

For those who recall the «battle for no-cost access » at the turn of the century, recent news from the infosphere will sound like an unimaginative remake. Open access, subscription, advertising, fee for service – these terms have colored the last ten years.And yet, how much has changed since the Internet bubble. Giants like Google or to a lesser degree Facebook have developed and strengthened their financial success on very narrow but very lucrative niches (advertising links) while continuing to offer increasingly powerful services free of charge – to the great mass of internet users. « They » try to « monetize » content that Internet users have created or enriched. For just a few euros a month, listen to music streaming without a device or barriers. Scientific and technical information is developing its own means to compete with traditional print media. Services are developing, some people are making money but, rather than forcing us to choose between free and paid service, many have understood that the key resides in a combination of the two. Furthermore, beyond this legitimate search for return on investment, the emerging notion of « knowledge commons?» reminds us of the importance of preserving, even of developing, a « not-for-profit » activity around information.

New information services emerge regularly, a mixture of free and cost-based services, public and private, flow and stock, etc. It is increasingly difficult to assess their economic viability. Models are being built, between institutional monopolies and short-lived innovation.

The complexity of information economics is evident. The document and its three basic dimensions of what you see, what you read and what you get out of it provide a fitting starting place to develop an efficient framework for identifying the principal ways of establishing its economic value.

« Intellectual property » extends far beyond culture to essential aspects of life for populations around the world, such as health or food. Many activists have chosen to defend society's interests against the temptations of control. Thanks to a flexible and global coordination strategy they have turned the question around : since access to knowledge for all persons is necessary, how can we make it happen?

Knowledge commons – neither public or private, but contributing to collective wealth – have shown us that knowledge, exchange, transmission and mutual enrichment can be designed and organized outside the rigid boundaries of ownership. The concept, derived from the exploitation of material goods and applied to information management is opening new perspectives.

Based on three surveys (2005, 2007 and 2010) that explored information practices and self-archiving of articles of the mathematics and computer science community in France using the libraries of the National Network of Mathematics Libraries, this article presents a comparative analysis of their results, drawing attention to changes in information retrieval behavior of researchers.