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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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of reasonable models for scientific publishing other than "reader pays". For instance, "author pays" can work well, so that the cost of publishing the results is part of the research grant. All publicly funded research results should be available to the public. We should just ignore the chicken-littles and their broken business models. The physics community has had arXiv.org for decades, and yet the world continues to turn.
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!
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.