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Nearly All Particle Physics Research To Be Open Access
ananyo writes with great news for particle physicists and those interested in the field everywhere: "The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles. After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access and the contracts will be renegotiated in 2016. The idea of all this maneuvering is to minimize the hassle for the scientists themselves and ensure that every paper is open access. The alternative is the 'author pays' model, where the researchers pay to publish. But that would require all authors to comply — a difficult rule to enforce. The new deal, however, also preserves publishers' profits — for now."
I'm shouldn't have to pay £30 for a book to learn to play guitar in this day and age, when books about the subject have existed since 1600.
tsk, tsk. Taking shots at climate science. See... this is why we must stop Anonymous Coward.
... it strikes me as unnecessarily playing ball with the journal publishers. I'd rather see OA simply enforced by the funding agencies. In my field, bioinformatics, the bulk of the funding in the US and UK comes from four sources: NIH (US government), MRC (UK government), HHMI (US private foundation), and Wellcome Trust (UK private foundation). All of them have open access policies for publications prepared with their money, and they don't much care how you do it: you can post the article in a public repository regardless of how it was published, publish in an OA journal--for which the funding agency will generally pay the publication fee--or publish in a traditional journal and make sure the publisher makes a copy freely available. You can bet the publishers grumble about that last one, but they've mostly gone along with the requirement, because the alternative is saying "we won't publish papers describing research funded by ___," and if they did that they'd cease to exist.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Great but Muslim countries must not have access to scientific publications, in any domains
Open access journals like BioMed Central, PLoS, Oxford's OA journals, etc. all prove a OA business model can be successful (and profitable) if structured well.
Also by charging authors ~$1k per publication. But keep in mind that subscription fee journals typically charge hundreds of dollars for color and extra pages (e.g. most IEEE Transactions journals charges $300 per page over 8).
.: Semper Absurda
But are they going to allow patents on certain subatomic particle arrangements? It worked for DNA. Good luck with that, lol. Sue the core of the sun!! SUE THE SUN, DAMN IT!
Why can't teachers for each subject get together every year andcoordinate the subject in textbooks?
Textbooks should be freely available to all (digitally) with NO copyright so that ALL can learn. It is insane to copyright facts, and their presentation when it is being used to educate the general populace. The *basis* of civilization is founded the core principle of sharing. Sharing goods, sharing knowledge, etc.
Joke is on them. It's all strings poeple... STRINGS!!!
If only these guys had designed the World Wide Web!
As a physicist, my reaction to this article is ... huh?
Among physicists, putting all your papers on arxiv.org has been standard since about 1999. I basically *never* need to go anywhere but arxiv for anything published in this century. The only exception I can think of is papers published in Nature, which always seem to be paywalled and not available on arxiv. I assume Nature is very stone-age and forces authors not to post on arxiv. But anyway, Nature isn't really a big venue for physics publications. I teach at a community college, so I have no access to subscription-based journals. Whenever a paper is paywalled, I need to drive to the nearest 4-year university and photocopy it. This basically only happens when I'm looking up golden oldies from decades ago.
What would be news would be if other fields besides math and physics started to do this.
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