Slashdot Mirror
All European Scientific Articles To Be Freely Accessible By 2020 (eu2016.nl)
An anonymous reader shares a report on EU2016: All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders. And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May. Under the presidency of Netherlands State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker, the EU ministers responsible for research and innovation decided unanimously to take these significant steps.Many questions remain unanswered. For instance, it is not clear whether the publishers would be forced to make their papers available for free or whether EU will only allow scientists who are happy to abide by the rules to publish papers. We should have more details on this soon.
I support the intention behind this directive. There are, however, some gray areas and some unintended consequences.
>> publications on the results of research supported by public and public-private funds
> Nothing unclear about that.
It's not that bad, but there are significant gray areas. Here are a few:
A) Most importantly, most "publications on the results of research" that they intend to cover are financed by universities. Most universities get at least some government funding, if only 5% of their budget. So figure a school is privately funded 95%, and gets 5% of of it's budget from government grants for providing certain types of education. Is the institution barred from recouping some of the costs of the research? Maybe so, maybe not.
B) This one is complicated, but I have direct experience with it and the new rule seems to ban a system which has worked extremely well. The last place I worked was an "extension" office. Funding was very interesting. We had world-class experts and facilities in the fields we covered, and we did two different but related things with our experts and facilities. Companies like Boeing or Ford would pay us to do testing and research for them. In a year, we might get $80 million dollars in contracts and have $30 million in direct costs for those contracts. We'd spend $20 million on training programs, mostly having our experts train first responders. That leaves $30 million "profit" which we'd give to the state, since it was a state agency. The state would turn around and appropriate back $10 million for our facilities expenses. So in the end, our agency received NEGATIVE $20 million from the taxpayers. We paid the tax payers, from fund received for contracts and also provided free training for first responders). We were giving money TO taxpayers, not getting money from tax payers, right? (Which is awesome, IMHO.) Well, after we gave the taxpayers $30 million, they gave us back $10 million for our facilities costs, so on paper we received taxpayer funds. Does that mean that the testing we did for the private companies would have to be open to the public for free? it would seem so. Which would suck, because Boeing and Ford aren't wouldn't keep paying us $80 million to test their new ideas if the results are immediately available to their competitors. Those contracts had been paying for our public services, such as first responder training, as well as paying a "profit" to taxpayers, but seemingly that would no longer be allowed.
C) A more common scenario, given the exact wording used, might be the following. It says "publications on ..." have to be open (not the research itself, but any publications discussing the results). So my boss asks me to write up an analysis of some new government data on cell phone use amongst college students and correlate it with our in in-house data, in order to make suggestions for our business strategy over the next 24 months. My analysis would be "on the results of" government research. Therefore we can't keep our analysis private?
the results of research which was funded
Again, it's not necessarily a bad idea, but there are some issues, some gray areas and some areas that would be affected which might not be the intent of the supporters.
Brewster Kahle. Forever.
Your data, good for a thousand years
If that's not good enough, go back to sleep for another twenty years.
Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind
Problem solved.
Not in Europe. The US system is a failure and everywhere else is doing better science.
Well, I guess after about a decade, Europe is apparently jonesing become more like the US system again...
In 2007 the US, George Bush signed the bill that required all NIH funded research to be open access. This culminated efforts starting back in 2004 voluntarily open access publicly funded research in the NIH. The NIH is the world's largest non-military funding source of research. The law requires manuscripts must be put into PubMed Central *immediately* upon acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal (not after it's published).
It appears this new policy direction in the EU is basically following the US's lead in this area (and improving on it by requiring access to data as well)...
We welcome Europe to join this open-access system that is a "failure"...