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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."
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.
...there's times I really love Europe.
look everyone we can have bad dental hygiene, let Hitler kick our collective ass and also get raped by immigrants
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.
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
Access to taxpayer-funded science belongs to the public.
That's all.
Fucking shameless the way they project themselves.
"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
That's the point you parasite!
.: Semper Absurda
"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.
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!
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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."
the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
Sounds like a deal to me. So whatâ(TM)s the bad side?
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?
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.
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.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
...the whole encyclopedia publishing system.