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

Re:Why can there not be profit?

[rtb61]

How about much simpler example from say the US perspective. How about the library of congress creates a scientific journal publishing site, you know buys one less F35 flying pig and they review and publish scientific articles (fraud and you will be straight on the hook for prosecution), all 100% available to the general public. This along with other things the Library of Congress should be doing in the digital age. Things like an anonymous public forum of record with properly registered users, a matter of public record of public opinion, no more lying about what public opinion is. Even a FOSS distribution centre as part of public publishing. With content creation much easier and publishing being even easier again and of course advertising being of little or no value, government publishing as a public service, a real library of congress becomes well, the sane thing to do.

Around the world, governments of all strips can build and run, their government digital publishing public service, for the benefit of all citizens accessing the service and indirectly promoting those who publish on it. FOSS of course becomes quite interesting when hosted by a Government publishers and how that connects into Universities and Industry as well as with direct access by the public.

A balance of cost versus savings, in this case savings to the public would far outweigh cost to the public.

Re:OA

[Aighearach]

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!

Peer review with paywalls breeds corruption

[DanDD]

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.