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For Academic Publishing, Princeton Goes Open Access By Default
First time accepted submitter crazyvas writes "Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers (except if a waiver is requested). The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication. Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications."
I've never quite understood how paying to read other people's research encourages good science.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I'm currently applying for grad schools - and nothing is more frustrating than finding all of a professor's research "hidden" behind pay-journals... what a step in the right direction.
The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.
This of course applies only to grants that were awarded starting a couple years ago. However renewed grants are subject to this as well, and of course any new grants are automatically subject to this.
Hence contrary to the summary,
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've had to sign over the copyright for each of the papers I've published. Fortunately, I'm usually allowed to disseminate my work for educational purposes, so I can post my papers on my personal webpage. However, there are plenty of publications that do not allow this and you've got to fork over the big bucks just to read a single article. While my university has the resources to maintain subscriptions to all the big journals and conference proceedings in my field, plenty of others aren't so lucky.
If other schools follow Princeton, this will certainly level the playing field. Maybe it will get more people interested in research since they won't have to be associated with a major university to read the state of the art.
Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.
The publishers are lying here to protect their cash cow. What maintains quality is the peer review system (which the journals do not pay for). The transfer of copyright to the publisher allows them to hold Universities to ransom - universities cannot function without access to the literature (present and past), and the costs of online access to journals have been spiraling over the past few years at a time when the publishers' actual costs are going down. After all, they don't pay for the research to be carried out, nor do they pay the academic editors or the reviewers, nor do they even need to typeset the document now that everyone submits a machine-readable copy.
For all we know, Princeton may have studied the Wasabi Fire Alarm, years before that chap who got the igNoble for it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Private academic publishers do extremely little for the exclusive copyright that they demand. Academics write the papers. Other academics peer-review them. Academics volunteer as editors and publicists. In most cases, none of these people are paid by the publisher for their work.
Increasingly, academic publications are digital only, meaning that literally the only service being provided by the publishers is to put the papers on a web site, behind a paywall.
Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.
Princeton on its own won't be enough to change the system, but hopefully a few other big names will follow, and tip the balance.
Definitely time someone with a bit of clout stood up to the scientific publishers. Their business model made a bit of sense in the days when things had to be typeset, printed and distributed, but with modern electronic distribution it is little better than a Mafia-style extortion racket. I'd love to know what they actually do for their money - researchers do the research, write the paper, review the paper and (at least in my field) act as journal editors. And they do these at no cost to the publisher because they are either publically or industrially funded. That the publisher is able to take the copyright and then charge the people who actually funded it to read it, is an ongoing disgrace and (i think) should be an embarrassment to an industry/community which generally prides itself on its open-ness and its "freedom".
what so long to do this? Next, self publish without the journals in the way.
Hence contrary to the summary,
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You make a good point for federally funded research. What about research funded by the several states?
As someone working in academia who knows the journal business well and is also a frequent anonymous peer-reviewer for an A-tier journal, I wholeheartedly welcome this decision. The publishers earn insane amounts of money for journals, yet practically all the work is done by unpaid volunteers. It's like a money milking machine and tremendously hinders research -- especially in poorer countries, because research institutions very often cannot pay for all subscriptions and have to make tough choices. At my working place in a not so rich country we cannot get access to many important journals and I frequently have to ask colleagues to send me some manuscript (which is embarasing, to say the least).
Before someone starts ranting about high-risk business, low volumes, they don't really make money etc. let me assure you that the majority of journals require authors to typeset the manuscript themselves, practically never pay for linguistic editing and do no editing in addition to what the voluntary peer-reviewers suggest to the author, and the rest of the typesetting is done as cheaply as possible (e.g. Springer commonly outsources to India -- fine for me, I like Indians and their country). Basically, the publishers do nothing - no proof reading, sometimes they don't even run a spell-checker, and make shitloads of money. One journal article USD $35 -- you get the picture!
This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications.
However for some time now all work funded by new and renewed grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are required to be published in publicly accessible journals. It has been this way now for over two years, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has implemented a similar policy for work they fund.
So while it is nice to see Princeton, as an academic institution, take a similar stance, it is mostly redundant as the vast majority of taxpayer-funded research - at least that funded by US taxpayers - is already covered by the policies of the two largest funding agencies.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yeah, I am in complete agreement with the above posters. I've had the same experience as well with my research as well, and it's very frustrating to be subjected to this sort of system. To be honest I'm waiting for the nail in the coffin to come for ALL taxpayer research and completely do away with this system. Those journals are just leaches on the academic system, and nothing more. Since the government has oversight of which research ideas are worthy of funding, I don't see why they can't be in charge of determining whether the results from that funding is worthy of publication.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
http://www.torrents.net/torrent/1602488/JSTOR_01_PhilTrans/
From the fine article, it looks like Harvard is already among those supporting Open Access. So it's not just Princeton. I think there are quite a few others now. It's time for a list to be made, to show which universities are the leaders.
However, open access may be going more discipline by discipline rather than institution by institution. Arxiv and PLoS have been big for years for certain fields.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Long before the internet, the IEEE and ACM were publishing journals at far lower prices (e.g. $30-$40/year in today's dollars for an individual subscription) than the for-profit publishers, and in many areas these journals were of higher quality than the corresponding for-profit ones. The same distinction in ease of access and quality continues to this day; in fact, the increased digital access to articles in journals published by non-profit societies seems to have made them more competitive (for high-quality submissions) vis-a-vis for-profit ones, rather than less. This would seem to poke holes in a number of the arguments advanced by the for-profit publishers to justify their business model.
While open access journals do encourage the dissemination of ideas, they are by no means without a cost to the researcher who produces the work. While open-access journals may be free to read, they are not free to publish in. On average, open access journals cost around $1500 per article. That's $1500 the researcher has to pay out of their grant and the taxpayer is paying for out of their pocket. While I'm all for open access journals, as a researcher myself, I know how difficult it can be to pay these exorbitant fees from the grant money I was awarded to do research. It comes down to whether or not I want to do an experiment or publish a paper, and I shouldn't have to make that choice. Having the option to publish in a traditional journal frees up much of my research funds for doing what it was intended for: research. These journals have good intentions, but the tax payer is paying for them in the end. Personally, I have very mixed feeling when it comes to open access journals. I publish in them when I can, but if it means sacrificing an experiment, you can bet I'll pay. Until the publication fees drop, I don't see widespread adoption.
Right, because every scientific paper, written up in Microsoft Word, w/ inconsistent formatting and font usage, never edited or corrected by anyone but the author, and low-res RGB graphics is instantly and automatically ready to print on a printing press, or to convert to a nice ePub which will re-flow and be readable.
Also, no publisher has ever even considered something like ``The Article of the Future'' --- http://www.articleofthefuture.com/
While there are exceptions (arxiv.org comes to mind), for the most part, raw author manuscripts are _not_ pleasant to read or work w/.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Frankly speaking, the quality of published papers out of academia is just awful. It is better to keep most of that badly written make-work grad student drivel out of search results for those of us with actual work to do. Our academic system has become so overrun with the need to simply output ever increasing amounts of paper, paper that NOBODY will ever read, and that NOBODY should even try to read.
The university system is sick, and stuck in the past. At least keep all these crap papers and crap thesis' out of the public's way, they are a net negative value more times than now. Better yet, keep all your puppy mill PhD's out of my lab. These morons can't even hold the soldering iron by the right end... Worse yet, management still hires and feels obligates to respect their opinion, leading to more messes for real engineers to fix.
End rant...
Right, because every scientific paper, written up in Microsoft Word, w/ inconsistent formatting and font usage, never edited or corrected by anyone but the author, and low-res RGB graphics is instantly and automatically ready to print on a printing press, or to convert to a nice ePub which will re-flow and be readable.
Also, no publisher has ever even considered something like ``The Article of the Future'' --- http://www.articleofthefuture.com/
While there are exceptions (arxiv.org comes to mind), for the most part, raw author manuscripts are _not_ pleasant to read or work w/.
Fair point, but I'm guessing that authors who provide well formatted papers to a journal don't get discounts...
You're correct that NIH requires that articles be freely available. But there's a one-year lag, which is completely unjustified. Why shouldn't the people, who paid for it, get access right away? The journal didn't pay to do the research, so keeping it from the people who DID pay for it is absurd. But the one-year lag, while unjustifiable, is better than we had before and better than many other places, so for the moment I'll give it a pass.
More importantly right now, most US government research is NOT freely available, but is still stuck behind a paywall. The government funds a ton of unclassified research, but you can't see a lot of it precisely because they are held for ransom behind various paywalls. It's an obsolete system, and it's time to abolish it. If the people paid for the research, then they should get the results, without being charged again. They ALREADY paid for it.
Is a waver to that rule going to be granted to any conference proceeding published by Princeton University Press? Or are they going to make all their conference proceedings open access as well?
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Is it really, or is it an IP grab in disguise?
I've worked at universities before. They typically claim a share in any discovery made using university resources (50-50 is the usual contractual split, the upside is they also have to pay for the patent lawyers). I don't hear anything about dropping these clauses from contracts. Is this really about open access, or is it a way for the university to hang on to that IP for itself?
You wrote:
>Fair point, but I'm guessing that authors who provide well formatted papers to a journal don't get discounts...
No, but authors who create nice, clean manuscripts get invited to write follow-on papers more frequently.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The publishing industry is an easy target but those who have attempted to create a better model are now finding that it costs real money to publish a journal. When Open Access publishing first emerged at the turn of the millenium, it was estimated that it would cost perhaps $1000 to peer-review, format and archive an average article, and then make it freely available online, theoretically in perpetuity. Since computer servers are dirt-cheap, there are no printing presses, postage or paywalls to pay for, and most peer reviewers are volunteers, it certainly seemed to make sense, and scientists were mostly enthusiastic about the prospect. But it turned out to be more costly than expected. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals were launched with much fanfare on such an open-access model in 2003. But now their charges are approaching $3000 per article, and instead of it coming out of University overhead (via library subscriptions) it is coming straight out of the grants of individual scientists. Where all that money goes I can't say, but the journals claim that it still doesn't cover their full editorial and technical costs. It's great that taxpayers can freely access online the work they paid for, but for scientists the old days of print journal subscriptions suddenly don't look so bad.
Even more surprising is the absence of earlier versions of published articles that have been presented in conferences, distributed to peers, and the like. I keep expecting to find "working papers" versions of published articles on the websites of academics but rarely can find them. (I'm an ex-political-scientist, so my interests tend to that field or to related social sciences like economics. Perhaps it's different in the other sciences?)
It is not :/
The academic web sphere is littered with broken links, links to defunct research projects, themselves also littered with broken links to previous publications at best (and at worst, with no mention of any prior work at all.) In general (purely personal observation of mine), many academic researchers don't give a rat's ass when it comes to making their older research accessible to the masses. The focus is entirely on what they work on right now and on their current funding.
Sad indeed because the later does not preclude the former. It would be nice if universities in general provided some sort of database containing every publication, thesis, dissertation, technical report and presentation, by department. After all, all of that content was created by taxes, and, in general, should be made available to the tax-paying population.
This varies from discipline to discipline of course. In general, I provide "camera-ready" proofs. The page layout, incidentally, is usually contracted out to third parties to do, and this cannot account for the cost of academic publishing, either OA or toll access. More over, we have to ask about why articles are being prepared for the "printing press" or pointless formats like epub, when they should be prepared web ready. If we take the latter approach, you discover that, actually, it takes around 15 minutes to get an article written in Word to the point where Word will translate to HTML or publish to a CMS.
I know this because I have actually done it, and timed it.
If it is a government supported institution the professor got paid for it and it should be in the public domain. If the institution is private, then the policy of the institution should hold the rights to anything created by the professor - just like the rest of the private sector. This nonsense of private publishers taking ownership of publicly created works is upside down. It just makes sense that if the work was funded with public monies, even in salary, then it should be open for all. The fact that other public institutions have to pay an outrageous sum to get access through the publishers for this data is crazy. Some of these publishers are even asking for upwards of 50% (or more) royalty on the works. And the author sometimes gets the same amount - so they are effectively double dipping into the cost of goods! (Pay me a salary and pay me for my content.) Good for Princeton.
Audi, vide, tace, si tu vis vivere
I was a graduate student at Princeton, and our group submitted several papers to various journals. At no time did we need nor did we seek permission from the University to submit these papers. Once all the authors agreed, someone in the group e-mailed the article to the editor for the journal in question, and all further correspondence was between the journal and the authors; the University was not involved at all, and pretty much all correspondence was done by e-mail. So how, exactly, does enforcement work? Does the administration read through all journals and look for professors with a Princeton address and then check to see if they signed the copyright over to the journal, and fire them if they broke the rules? Seriously, I don't know how this would be workable.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I'm a Princeton graduate student (and somewhat shocked I got this news via slashdot.) My scientific papers are in LaTeX, properly formatted using custom journal templates, use high quality vector graphics, and are well edited and corrected.
Thanks.
right
forkin'
on
!
See http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Faculty-Adopts/40447 for Harvard adoption. See http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/mit-faculty-open-access-policy-faq/ for MIT adoption.
LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON'S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html
1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.
2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.
4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.
5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.
6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.
7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.
8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.
[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...]
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship