Slashdot Mirror
Wellcome Trust to Require Open-Access Publishing
Lars Arvestad writes "The Wellcome Trust, one of the worlds largest research funding agencies, will require results from research funded by the Trust to be available in public repositories six months after publication. The Trust's policy advisor Robert Terry writes in
an article in PLoS Biology that the Trust plans to start its own public access repository where authors are expected to deposit their published works. The repository is modeled after NLM's PubMed Central and is called UKPMC. Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays. This contrasts the recent IEEE report (Slashdot story last week) where it was claimed that some universities will face higher costs using author-pays."
BMC has waivers for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.
There's been a lot of discussion at Lambda the Ultimate about the relationship of publishing and scientific organsiations like the ACM to the interests of the theoretically switched-on hacker community. See, eg. this thread on Journals and Papers.
If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to try looking at Caltech's online archives to see if the articles are there. If it isn't already online I can also try getting a scan of them, although that might take a little longer.
If you don't want to post the article info here, feel free to email it to neuronexmachina, at gmail dot com.
Nice Troll... I'll bite.
From their "About Us" page:
The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health.
Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £10 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.
As a privately endowed charity, we are independent from governments, from industry and from donors.
The governing document of the Wellcome Trust is its constitution. This represents an updated version of the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, through which the Wellcome Trust was established in 1936. Ultimate responsibility for our activities lies with our Board of Governors.
So please let's put a myth about this journal to rest. As first stated in an editorial in 1997, and since then in our Guide to Authors, if scientists wish to display drafts of their research papers on an established preprint server before or during submission to Nature or any Nature journal, that's fine by us.
Reality or nothing.
"The only way to achieve this is that research is registered before it is carried out, and only allowed to proceed if the results will be published, regardless of the 'success' or 'failure' of the research."
I don't think this will work quite the way you want it to.
I can see what you are trying to achieve and broadly agree. But registered with who? For what? If I find and interesting side alley not directly related to what the project was registered as can I still publish it? Ever?
If universities weren't wedded to bureaucracy and academics didn't go on power trips something like this might work.
The current system might suck, and your proposal might mitigate some of that for public health research, but as a long time watcher of bureaucratic power games - regsiter to publish is an open invitation to petty minded power junkies to push their own agendas - "Oh we can't register and hence legitimise research that might involve <???> becuase we might get sued". No registration,no funding, no research.
Very sad yes.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
For biology, this arcane system is a leftover from the early 70's when this was the only way to make money on biological research (Genentech, the first biotech was founded in '76). Only journals (and a few suppliers) used to earn money on biology research.
It is interesting to note that taxpayers pay for (most) research which is then published in journals. The journals then retain the copyrights to the research. As someone else pointed out, publishing in JBC costs $2000 (I can verify this personally). The best part is, the NIH paid me to do research, and then paid again for someone else to take the copyright to this taxpayer-funded research. Amazing!
There has already been an initiative from the NIH that NIH-supported research be freely accessible after 6 months.
For a directory of Open Access journals go to: http://www.doaj.org/