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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."
Author pays is a problem. It's worse than reader pays.
In the conventional model, libraries, with professional, highly educated, librarians, basically decide which journals are legit and which are scams. The libraries negotiate bulk rates with the power of large institutions.
In the "open access" model, each individual author, many of whom see an invitation to submit to a journal in their email and assume it's legit (seriously), have to decide which journals are good, and then hand over thousands of dollars per paper. That system is ripe for abuse, and IS abused, on a large scale. The vast majority of open access journals are scams.
Yes, physics, and some other disciplines, have had it right for a long time, but it is NOT this new open access model. You submit to arxiv, which operates efficiently and is funded by grants (costs a few bucks a paper), and anybody who wants to reads your paper there. You *then* submit to some closed-access journal. Much of computer science dispenses with the extra step and just has nobody-pays journals that operate on grants at the couple-of-bucks-a-paper level.