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European Science Funders Ban Grantees From Publishing In Paywalled Journals (sciencemag.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about $8.8 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee. The move means grantees from these 11 funders -- which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics -- will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model. Not everyone is pleased by the decision. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals, said the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system." A spokesperson for AAAS, Science's publisher, added: "Implementing such a plan, in our view, would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom."
...there's times I really love Europe.
Nothing says come to business with us like "do it our way or leave".
uh, that would be the point...
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
"If everything has to be OA then there will be no profit and there will be no reason for those things to exist"
Open Access, yeah lucky we don't have such an idea in software...... oh wait.
I remember my first job at a University coming across these publication paywalls. I was astounded why all of these universities submitted to these publishers, even though the universities were the ones creating the content. And I think by now we all know how useful the "peer review" works with most of these journals. How many times have we seen joke papers written by a simple algorithm happily published in supposedly reputable journals?
I can imagine an open access site that curates journals to read, that you pay for access to the list - you could have found and read any of the journals out in the open, the service is that someone has read through many in a field and narrowed down the interesting ones.
Look around you at the internet. So much content is free now, yet there are also a lot of people making money...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The people doing the work aren't making any profit anyway. The funding comes from taxes, and the scientists aren't getting paid if someone buys a copy of their paper, they just do it because they have to publish in those journals if they want a job (which is a whole different issue). This is not at all like books or other written works, where the authors are the ones being paid.
The only ones who makes money, and therefore stands to lose, are the journals. In the past they did provide a valuable service, but in the digital age they're just trying to cling onto an antiquated business model and shove it down the rest of the world's throat. Well, screw them. Sorry about your business model, but that's the way it goes. Their time has come and gone, now it is time to open up science to the people who paid for it in the first place. It's absurd that tax dollars should go to producing documents that the tax payers then have to pay $40 to read.
I see no long term downside to this.
Ever hear of a public library?
Scientist expect to be able to access the bulk of research papers because it's integral to science itself. The paywalling of such papers makes the majority of them inaccessible to scientists and the public. Nobody, especially the average scientist/researcher, has the near unlimited funds that would be needed to search out data from the wide array of papers and publications out there. And yet, the sharing of information and collaboration of knowledge is a vital process to the enrichment of science itself.
The paywalls are massive detriment to the progress of science and humanity. Fuck the fees!
Access to taxpayer-funded science belongs to the public.
That's all.
I'm not sure, I was taught that the whole modern "scientific method" was based on Newton, et al., rejecting the publishers as gatekeepers and publishing through the newsletters of their local Philosophic Societies. The main thing that was supposedly holding back Natural Philosophy (what science was called then) was the gatekeepers! It worked fine for a long time. At first the "Journals" were just a type of group publishing, just a like a Philosophic Society newsletter. But once they started assigning a system of Peers as gatekeepers, the whole thing was instantly a farce; the same thing that open publishing had already replaced once!
Peer review was valuable, historically, because it was done by your peers, accomplished through open access. Naming a class of Very Important People as Peers does not in any way achieve the same thing.
I guess I agree publishing companies provided a valuable service in the past, I'm just saying, the time when that was true was pre-Newton!
Fucking shameless the way they project themselves.
Like the spying slants which have taken over yours?
"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
That's the point you parasite!
.: Semper Absurda
> The people doing the work aren't making any profit anyway. The funding comes from taxes, and the scientists aren't getting paid if someone buys a copy of their paper,
Excuse me, please. What? Salaries paid to research staff come from that funding. Simply because funding comes from taxes does not by some curious substantiation not exist as "profit". And publication is critical to getting more funding, or to getting hired in education or getting tenure.
"Implementing such a plan, in our view, would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom."
No, it would disrupt for-profit scholary communications which have been ripping off the taxpayers for a very long time. It's only a disservice to the for-profit organizations that have been ripping off the taxpayers, and it won't impinge upon academic freedom. In fact, it'll make it more robust.
This is a huge thing. As often, Germany is conspicuously missing. This is unfortunate.
Germany: wake up. Just clinging to some perceived current advantage at the cost of your neighbors won't cut it in the long run.
Mwahahahaa, because Galileo Galilei was adamant his research had to be profitable. And Marie Curie, the billions she expected to earn from X-rays.... Give me a break, no incentive... I know loads of scientist and the majority of them don't do their work for the money.
"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
No, it potentially undermines the whole commercial research publishing system.
While the internet is not a good peer review forum, some kind of quality control has to be active. These can also be bad, as they may introduce censorship of opposing and controversial ideas.
Now all we need is for the granting agencies to ban the use of student labor outside of training grants. Let's clean up that accounting sinkhole and maybe we can start creating some career paths for professional scientists that don't assume a cold-war economy.
The World Wide Web as we know it today was created by researchers to combat the broken and corrupt publication process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.[27] To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.[28]
The fact that any pay-to-read peer-review journals still exist today is a testament to the holding power of corrupt institutions.
Please understand, the peer review journal publication system is only part of the problem, and probably a small part. The tenure system and "publish or perish" culture of research institutions is another major part of the problem.
So much of what is published in peer reviewed journals is absolute shit. Big words, pretty graphs, drivel so esoteric that few attempts to reproduce are ever made.
I can't find an online reference at the moment, so I'll just re-tell the story briefly:
In 1987 Dr. Paul Chu and associates discover the first high-temperature superconductor that worked above the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77K. This was the holy grail of material science, and a big deal. If the results were simply published, the months long peer review process would have introduced too many chances for someone to steal their research and publish first. Peer reviewers often paid, under the table of course, to be peer reviewers - this way they could see what was going on in their field before anyone else. And this is exactly what happened.
Chu submitted a paper for publication on the discovery of the first high temperature superconductor, knowing full and well that the peer review process would take a few months and in that time someone would likely try to take credit for his discovery. He also knew that minor typographical corrections could be submitted as little as a few days before the publication date. So, his originally submitted paper claimed to have discovered YbCuO, was this magical unicorn of high Tc. And sure enough, about a month later an Italian journal published a paper claiming to have discovered high Tc superconductivity in YbCuO. The graphs and data looked strangely familiar.
Chu was no idiot, so he actually made the 'wrong' superconductor and verified that it did not work. So, months later, and right before the publication date, he submitted a minor correction to change 'Yb', ytterbium, to just 'Y', yttrium.
The journal was caught red handed. They had employed a peer reviewer who stole data, but there was little they could do. The 'corrected' publication was submitted. And Paul Chu faced some difficulties in getting that journal to accept any more of his publications. End story.
Publishing a paper on a server that records the date and the MD5SUM of the file should be all it takes. Instead of peer review, a measure of value of a publication could be as simple as counting how many times a publication is referenced. Might take years, but, it would better than the bullshit going on with paywalled journals.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
As long as you don't give the paywalled journal an exclusive copyright to your work (i.e. you're allowed to publish the work elsewhere, or release it on your website for free).
So this really should be a ban on journal exclusivity, not a ban on paywalled journals. That is, full control of copyright should remain with the authors.
This is great news. I am an academic researcher and I fully support it. I've been working at two good small research institutes. Neither has journal subscritpions. Sci-hub works but is unstable and technically illegal. Getting the gorilla-sized funding agencies force the open model will finally get the journals to update. Never mind the screams from Nature, the established businesses always say this... then they adapt, quickly!
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Pretty sure there is plenty of profit in taking in a 4 figure sum amount of money in order to have some magic eyes(who are already getting funding as well from other sources!) look it through and put something on a website in addition to printing it on paper and sending it to people where it gets further peer review.
Some open access papers manage to do it for under 30 bucks.
Actual peer review starts after it's published anyways.
the real reason they have been able to churn profits with them is the back catalog of papers, which are essential if you intend to publish anything in them, due to being referenced and being able to reference are the most important things ever, rather than explaining the process or proof from start to finish.
basically they have been getting paid twice already while holding the data as hostage.
Sure, there is a "need" for the journals but that's due to tradition more than anything and more than anything a tradition of your funding being tied to publishing in those journals - they are only used for scoring points in a system that the journals have had control over.
Like, can someone explain to me why a solidly done paper just published on an university webserver doesn't have the same impact? I mean, if it's like an actual new scientific discovery worth anyone getting their socks twisted over with properly documented steps to reproduce it, how is it any less solid than if it was published in Nature?
if someone came up with a cold fusion that _actually_ worked(fat chance) then what difference would it be where it was published or how many other papers it referenced to?
Somehow I can find better information on youtube on plating plastics with copper than on the scientific journals? so what gives, are they already going the way of the dodo. They seem just to be a points system now in order to gain access to proper laboratories later with those points to make discoveries you vaguely patent(not publish properly, mind you. modern patents are shit for reproducing the device or process, on purpose no less) later.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The quality control is other scientists checking out work way more quickly than before. Sort of agile interactive science. Dr. Mcculloch's Quantized Inertia says Inertia is unrah radiation [universe generated radio waves. People are sending him those WTF datasets for him to look at. Folks are testing assorted EMDRIVE thrusters,Jump drives, zero point, no dark shit. Has explanation for cold fusion & using some lenr data. Folks bypassing barriers using more direct communications. Agile with smartest people on planet.
QI hasn't had even the cost one rocket launch yet spent on it
https://twitter.com/memcculloch
https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/
https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2017/12/low-energy-nuclear-reactions-qi-1.html
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Elsevier and the other companies are not paying researchers or research assistants. It's the actual funding authorities who are paying those salaries who are clamping down on for-profit publishers.
The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers. Actually, it provides no financial benefit to researchers, and they have to pay to access the research of others so it's a financial negative. They provide a service in curating, storing and indexing the papers as well as (obviously) publishing them. But their role is not necessarily as important as it was previously because it's cheaper and easier to publish these days.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
All the reviewers, which do the main work, are working without pay anyways. The publishers (like Springer) are just greedy without bounds and without providing significant value. It is high time this stops.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals, said the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
Good. Was about time that not potentially but effectively somethinge were done to undermine the whole research publishing system and make it accesible to everyone and all who also are already paying big bucks to create the content.
A spokesperson for AAAS, Science's publisher, added: "Implementing such a plan, in our view, would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom."
Cry me a river. In our view, you are full of BS. What disrupts scholarly communications, and are a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom is the actual predatory research publishing system.
"A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals, said the plan potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
Their (funding) money, their rules.
In fact, that billions of funding, which usually pay for the reasearcher's salaries, are quite a bit of money.
> The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have left out a critical step. It is critical at review time for research staff. The number of publications is a critical factor for research personnel, even as co-authors or contributors. So yes, there is a fiscal benefit to the authors of content in paid-for publications.
As somebody living in Europe, I do not understand that this is not done by some EU official website now.
Publish the paper to e.g. https://sciencepapers.europa.e... and have it available for all to see. Bit like patents.
Make up a licence that allows reproduction, but with some limitations. e.g. the conclusion should not be changed.
As a taxpayer, I would not mind paying for it. It concentrates the papers to one place, instead of scattering them all over. It will also make searching for papers a lot easier and searching in those papers as well.
A bit like a patent office (with obvious differences as well) website for free.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
Sounds like a deal to me. So whatâ(TM)s the bad side?
What said this particular business needs to exist?
There are about nine million species on earth. Only one of them uses a monetary system and they keep fucking everything up for themselves because they insist that their tiny pieces of paper are somehow more important than a hospitable environment. The rest of the world does just fine without such idiocy.
There are plenty of ways to profit off of open access.
You can do sell consulting services, sell physical distributions, offer support services.
Or am I talking about open source software? Is there a difference between publications vs software?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You are correct at the moment. But the review is important for one reason - funding. If the funding authorities have made a decision that they require OA, then they will not punish research groups for not publishing in journals that do not conform to their standard.
I expect what they will do is drastically downgrade the ratings of the journals that do not conform, so that if Nature was #1 ranked, but its publishing rules do not support OA, then they will be downgraded to #3 or even be a negative. So funding will not be dependent on publication in those journals and that incentive is removed.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Oddly, researchers will pay thousands to have their paper considered for a journal. That's more than enough to keep a website running, staff paid, and even off payment to those who do the peer reviews. Sadly, add a $ in front of numbers and most scientists become idiots... if they don't outright run away.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Why should private publishing companies be allowed to charge huge fees to see the results of work that was, for the most part, publicly funded?
The people doing the research are getting profit. The people paying them are specifying where the work be published. The only entities getting "no profit" are the gatekeepers who add nothing of value.
If everything has to be OA then there will be no profit and there will be no reason for those things to exist.
Excactly. Then the leeches who provide no value and do nothing but rent seek will finally go out of business.
Why not just put these papers in a public blockchain so they can reference each other correctly?
Hey, that's totally fine. If commercial scientists want to forgo taxpayer funding and keep their papers semi-hidden behind gatekeepers to help prohibit their discoveries from joining humanity's store of knowledge, they are still free to do that. You can still hoard your proprietary knowledge.
It's only the ones whose research is so bereft of commercial applications that they have to go begging the public for money, that should be forced to share their findings with the people who paid for it.
TANSTAAFL. Seems like you're right: the world does run on money. And if you take someone else's money, they're going to want you to pay for it somehow.
Change or die.
The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers. Actually, it provides no financial benefit to researchers, and they have to pay to access the research of others so it's a financial negative.
Not entirely true, see orzetto's comment above:
As a researcher, from my point of view, funding agencies have way more influence on which journal I choose to publish in. In my environment, there are three groups of journals: Class 1 (Nature, Science, but also high-quality lesser-known journals such as Electrochimica Acta), Class 2 (not so good, but still legit, like Journal of Power Sources and most scientific journals), and unclassified junk (the kind of journals that spam researcher promising "fast peer review" and "open access", for a fee of course). Which journal you publish in directly affects your funding, and it's the researchers who produce the content.
The number of publications and quality of journals also impacts tenure - so opportunities for corruption are abundant.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
OA benefits the consumer in the short term. If everything has to be OA then there will be no profit and there will be no reason for those things to exist. Before anyone questions it, yes, currently the world still runs on monetary gains.
That's absurd. Many Open Access journals still make money because they charge the publisher of the article, not the reader. The modern journal business model with paywalls is completely backwards. You mean Nature owns your research? Fuck that.
OA Journals are extremely useful in science industry, because it allows for peer review yet you can then share with customers. It's a great way to develop say a tech note on how to use a system, have it vetted by others through peer review, then share it freely with customers to give them a more efficient way to do things. And in academia, it allows you to get credit more quickly and advances the field much more rapidly, rather than have your work delayed 6 to 12 months on the embargo before anyone can read it. More importantly it ensures the project you worked on for 10 months doesn't get one -upped by an embargoed paper; you'll at least know someone beat you to it and you can move to the next project.
So no, it's a great system. Nature, Science, Cell, they're holding you back. Move on.
Publications usually cost fees for the researcher. In OA it is obvious why, those fees pay for running the OA publication system.
But publishers charge authors for non-open access too. http://cofactorscience.com/blog/author-charges has some examples, although that list is 6 years old by now.
In that case, the publishers collect money from author AND subscriber. We might as well put the money into financing OA and make the results free to access.
Of course, traditional publishers will lose out that way. Sucks to be them, they got too greedy and here comes the backlash...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Actually all science used to be published in open access journals run by various scientific societies. This is how journals starts: members wrote letters detailing discoveries which were collected and published as a news letter. As the volume of material and the size of the society grew so did the expense of publishing them since printing used to require considerable resources,
As a result, societies spun off their newsletters to publishers who had the resources needed for large circulations and they then charged people for copies to cover their printing costs. However, in the modern world printing is cheap and easy and frankly not even necessary anymore. Hence the original reason for paid journals has gone away and so I think it is very likely that, over time, we are going to end up reverting to the original scientific-society lead model since paid publishing no longer necessary.
Please do not confuse the two.
The EU is merely the area rules by the North Atlantic fascists, aka neocons, to override the sovereignity of nations with their profit "needs". .... Which backfired due to way too many *actual* nationalist morons dogpiling onto their bandwagon.
(Profit, as in the money they did not actually earn, and the part of the income they did not work for. Also know as theft or robbery.)
The same people who created
the TTIP/CETA/NAFTA/... as successors in the same spirit. And who created parties like the Tea Party, AfD, UKIP, to attempt to discredit opponents.
A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals
If you hadn't engaged in blatant and absurd profiteering, this might not be happening. You've made your bed; now, be a good boy and lie in it.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Not to mention T-shirts, hats, lunchboxes...
I think so. For one, I've heard of consultants who install, configure and customize software to fit users' needs but I've never heard of any doing that for publications. Secondly, there aren't multiple versions of each scientific paper that don't quite work the same.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Requiring QA" would be a much more complex standard requiring quality evaluations of those quality evaluations. It would be unenforceable in practice, and could be abused to infringe politically on publishers and authors by rejecting their "QA". I think we'll find that ut is far simpler and more even handed, to simply refuse to fund research published in paid journals.
...the whole encyclopedia publishing system.
I am using "OA" as Open Access, where you seem to have misread it as QA.
You are right that it does provide a handy rule of thumb, but the funding authorities will have to figure that out - after all, they have to allocate their funding.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Oh, dear. You're quite right, and my analysis was confused. I've never seen "Open Access" written as a as the abbreviation.