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Wellcome Trust to Require Open-Access Publishing

Posted by timothy on from the wellcome-idea dept.

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."

7 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Good for them! by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
    1. Re:Good for them! by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It really is irritating, and more and more people are becoming aware of the problem. In stark contrast to "the rest" of the world's information, much of 20th century science is locked up. People are only going to tolerate this for so long. If the copyright holders won't make it accessible, maybe we should give the rights to someone who will. That could be a type of trust (which would compensate the original rightsholders), or it could be everyone (put it in the public domain). People are willing to pay for this information. They won't pay $40 per article or whatever BS some of these publishing houses are demanding. Make it available or face a revolt.

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      In Soviet America the banks rob you!
    2. Re:Good for them! by sabot99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The world's information is not "locked up" - they're called "books." Most human knowledge is still in this form, believe it or not. I'm noticing more of this Google-myopia nowadays: if it can't be found in a search engine, then it either doesn't exist or isn't worth knowing.

  2. Re:Author pays or user pays? by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    In Soviet America the banks rob you!
  3. Author pays? by lachlan76 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Depending on what the cost is, this could lock out the less well-funded scientific research.

  4. Hopefully the author pays thing isn't like sci fi by ABeowulfCluster · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Hopefully the author pays thing isn't run like the crooked 'we will publish you' sci fi ripoffs out there.

    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.

  5. Inevitable by DrJAKing · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.