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."
In the last year, I've had several incidents where I needed to access old articles from the Nature, the ACM, and IEEE. (old = 2, 4, and 33 years old respectively). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING more infuriating than not being able to access these when you need them. Bugmenot helps some, but not always.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places. Of course, this model places a lot more importance on the integrity of the participants, but this is not a new problem for scientists. We have disreputable scientists and disreputable journals now.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Depending on what the cost is, this could lock out the less well-funded scientific research.
I can see the 'published research' model being misused by the drug companies in that all they have to do is spam the repository with studies saying the cigarettes and cellphones aren't that bad for you, drowning out the studies which say otherwise.
Was there something wrong with MN or A&A, neither of whom charge authors?
The economic benefits you point out are also a conflict of interest, pressuring the journals into publication of mediocre, questionable, or down right shams. It's not going to affect all submission and all journals, but if it affects even a small percent, it shifts the bell curve. Over time, that is enough harm.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Something along these lines is inevitable. Historically, journals provided certain services to academics that made their lives easier - professional document preparation, distribution, and quality control. To do this they relied on an equal relationship with the community - peer review involves a hell of a lot of work on the part of academics, which is "unpaid" (though certainly part of the job). Technology has completely changed this balance - we can prepare and publish our own documents; we can distribute them amongst our peers for review. The position of journals now is merely brokers of reputation, but we can figure that out for ourselves too. They are basically parasites these days, and while they are fighting all the way, the power does not lie with them. Still, they're being a little more graceful than the entertainment industry, I'm yet to see a scientist sued for distributing pdf's of their work.
The scientific publishing industry isn't bending over backwards to make anyone happy (except their accountants of course).
Your idea is cute and all, but they stick it to both authors and readers.
Readers have to pay exhorbitant fees, as much as $40 for 5 days of access to a single article (that's just my discipline). The only way to get affordable access to these discplines is for libraries to band together and get big group package deals.
And authors have to pay to publish their own papers, which are already prepared according to strict formatting guidelines. Their reviewers aren't paid either.
So publishing houses are getting cash from both ends and in this era of paper-less publication have fewer and fewer BrickNMortar costs per issue sold.
The inevitable change in scientific peer-reviewed publishing will have a major impact on professional scientific organizations such as The American Chemical Society, American Association of Immunology, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology - just to name a few.
These non-profit organizations enjoy significant cash flow and influence in their field from the current system.
Many of these organizations are mired in bureaucracy and petty internal politics. I predict history will repeat itself and they will act like the RIAA, the movie industry and other large organizations, and attempt (and fail) to avoid fundamental change when it stares them in the face.
This is sad because if one of the major professional scientific societies led the way, eventually everyone would eventually benefit.