Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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!
So, just to understand, do you have some problem with (a) People giving free money to scientists attaching strings to that money, (b) Those strings being to make information more freely available, with all the obvious societal (and capitalistic) benefits, or (c) The decrease in power/prestige of paid journals, leading to tenure track academics not have to sell off their rights for nothing to avoid the "perish" option.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
As a researcher, from my point of view, funding agencies have way more influence on which journal I choose to publish in. In my environment, there are three groups of journals: Class 1 (Nature, Science, but also high-quality lesser-known journals such as Electrochimica Acta), Class 2 (not so good, but still legit, like Journal of Power Sources and most scientific journals), and unclassified junk (the kind of journals that spam researcher promising "fast peer review" and "open access", for a fee of course). Which journal you publish in directly affects your funding, and it's the researchers who produce the content.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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!
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Elsevier and the other companies are not paying researchers or research assistants. It's the actual funding authorities who are paying those salaries who are clamping down on for-profit publishers.
The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers. Actually, it provides no financial benefit to researchers, and they have to pay to access the research of others so it's a financial negative. They provide a service in curating, storing and indexing the papers as well as (obviously) publishing them. But their role is not necessarily as important as it was previously because it's cheaper and easier to publish these days.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
I think most of the points you make are inaccurate.
"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."
The libraries negotiate bulk rates with the power of an medium size institution (which is most Universities) against two or three very large publishers. In general, they get a "big deal" which means that they do not actually choose the journals. The publishers large do this.
"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. "
In the UK, open access fees are generally paid by the institution directly these days (that is a change from the past). Most often this is managed by the library, so you broadly the same people making these decisions as before.
"The vast majority of open access journals are scams."
Difficult to know whether this is true or not, but counting journals is not a good thing. There are a significant number of OA journals publishing high quality work. One big scam is the hybrid journal, where you pay for the article to be OA, but you library still pays for a subscription to the journal. The new annoucement rules this out, so this is an advance.
"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."
Largely untrue also. Computing science has plenty of pay and hybrid journals, often with very high article charges. Many of these are associated with conferences, as publication in computing is largely via conference which have interesting business models in their own right.
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.