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."

Comments

the voice from Springer

[dhammabum]

A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals, said the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."

uh, that would be the point...

Re:the voice from Springer

[ChromeAeonuim]

"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system"

Translating that from weasel to English, what they mean is 'it undermines our sweet, sweet profit machine built on the backs of the taxpayers."

There's plenty wrong with the publishing system, from the publish or perish madness to walling off publicly funded research so that the public cannot access what they paid for. Good on the EU for taking steps to remove needless barriers. And for American research, there's still Sci-Hub.

Re:OA

[ChromeAeonuim]

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.