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."
I've had that problem... Randomly recently, I googled my father, and found some articles he had authored in post-doc work, with his mentor/professor and someone else who's name I did not know... I tried to access the article unfortunately the publication had only the listing of the articles of its back volumes online, and even that seemed partially incomplete... Its sad... unless I can find that article some day in the future in our things... I may never get to read the paper... its the kindof thing that can get too easily lost among one's personal things after 20 years... moving from state to state and country to country...
Gravity Sucks
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.
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.
Things like this are the best way to force open access for scientific publications.
Why is this such an important thing?
Imagine the follwing business plan:
1) Make people PAY to incorporate their computer programs into your project.
2) Make people give you their copyrights to accept their program into your project.
3) Make people contributing code to your project also debug other peoples code. For free.
4) Profit!
Who would put up with such a kwaaazy system? We scientists. Why do we put up with this exploitation? Because we have no other choice if we want to remain competitive.
However, if there is enough external pressure for the system to change, it will.
You think I'm a Krazy Krackpot? I present you with the following:
1) My lab publishes ~ 2-3 papers a year, in journals like Biochemistry and J. Biol. Chem. It costs us ~ $2,000/publication.
2) Although we PAY the pulishers money, we still give them full copyright. (Recall: we formatted, created graphics and edited the documents).
In case you are worrying about the poor publishers, remember the following:
1) Few people read printed journals these days, most download the articles in PDF format. How much can that cost?
2) The process of editing and reviewing papers is done by other scientists, such as myself - for FREE.
Let's hope the trend is towards liberating the information that is paid for by taxpayers.
I think, therefore I thought.