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Will the World Embrace Plan S, the Radical Proposal To Mandate Open Access To Science Papers? (sciencemag.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: How far will Plan S spread? Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on. Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices.
If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley. North America isn't onboard. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the first Plan S participant outside Europe, and another private funder may follow," the report says. "But U.S. federal agencies are sticking to policies developed after a 2013 White House order to make peer-reviewed papers on work they funded freely available within 12 months of publication."
Canada also isn't ready to change their joint 2015 OA policy. "Plan S is 'a bold and aggressive approach, which is why we want to make sure we've done our homework to ensure it would have the best effect on Canadian science," says Kevin Fitzgibbons, executive director of corporate planning and policy at Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Ottawa.
Outside Europe and North America, funders gave Science mixed responses about Plan S. "India, the third biggest producer of scientific papers in the world, will 'very likely' join Plan S, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan in New Delhi, principal scientific adviser to India's government," reports Science. "But the Russian Science Foundation is not planning to join. South Africa's National Research Foundation says it 'supports Plan S in principle,' but wants to consult stakeholders before signing on. Jun Adachi of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, an adviser to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources, says that despite interest from funders and libraries, OA has yet to gain much traction in his country."
If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley. North America isn't onboard. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the first Plan S participant outside Europe, and another private funder may follow," the report says. "But U.S. federal agencies are sticking to policies developed after a 2013 White House order to make peer-reviewed papers on work they funded freely available within 12 months of publication."
Canada also isn't ready to change their joint 2015 OA policy. "Plan S is 'a bold and aggressive approach, which is why we want to make sure we've done our homework to ensure it would have the best effect on Canadian science," says Kevin Fitzgibbons, executive director of corporate planning and policy at Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Ottawa.
Outside Europe and North America, funders gave Science mixed responses about Plan S. "India, the third biggest producer of scientific papers in the world, will 'very likely' join Plan S, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan in New Delhi, principal scientific adviser to India's government," reports Science. "But the Russian Science Foundation is not planning to join. South Africa's National Research Foundation says it 'supports Plan S in principle,' but wants to consult stakeholders before signing on. Jun Adachi of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, an adviser to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources, says that despite interest from funders and libraries, OA has yet to gain much traction in his country."
In what way is it "radical"?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
don't get access to the papers.
[($)]
Europe, Canada and, as I understand it, the US already require open access to the results of government-funded research. In fields such as particle physics where we all tend to work in large, international collaborations this already means that all research is open access since even if you are not from one of these countries some of us our and have to publish in open access journals (and would want to anyway regardless of requirements).
Indeed things are now going further in Canada with new requirements being considered for open access to the data used in scientific publications too. However, the rules for this require careful consideration since sometimes the data involved can be extremely large (hundreds of petabytes) and/or extremely hard to understand without detailed knowledge of the hardware, data formats, calibration data etc. It is also not clear how useful this is. I worked on an experiment 15 years ago that went to a lot of effort to make its data easily accessible to the public. At the end of the first year of the initiative, only 5 people had accessed the data and 4 of those turned out to be members of the experiment itself who were curious about the program!
Dumbest false equivalence of the day?
According to TFS, studies done with US government grants have to be open *after a year*. Journals can curate the best of the latest new research and he funded with subscriptions from those who want full access to the newest research.
According to TFS, studies done with US government grants have to be open after a year, for example. Journals can curate and review the most interesting of the latest new research and be funded with subscriptions from those who want full access to the newest research. Those journals are signicant. Good or bad I have no opinion, but they are significant.
If it's changed to immediate open access, the paid journals pretty much go away. That's because anyone who gets a copy can post all the articles for free, eliminating any reason for anyone to subscribe. That eliminates the revenue source for the journals, and they dissapear (or maybe become full of advertising as their new revenue source).
I don't know if eliminating paid journals and the curation work they do selecting and reviewing the most interesting papers would be good or bad, but it would be a significant, and perhaps radical, change to scientific publishing.
-- Uninformed Guess follows ---
My uninformed guess about the best approach is guided by the idea that compromise, "the best of both worlds" is often best. You wouldn't want papers to be totally locked down forever behind an expensive paywall.
On the other hand, few people pay any attention to the tens of millions of free songs on MySpace because most people would rather have the labels find some *good* songs for them. They don't want to search through piles of crappy work to find something good. I would imagine research papers are similar - most people don't want to read a shit ton of crappy papers hoping to find a few that are useful an interesting. They'd rather than the journals sort through the haystack and find them some needles.
A balance would be that those who take the time to find the needles in haystack, the really good papers could fund that work by selling access for only a short time before the papers go open access. Maybe for a year.
I'm well aware that half of what I just said is foolish may be foolish. I'm an engineer, not a scientist, so I rarely need to read the very newest research - the freely available abstracts work for me, or papers that are a year old.
Bullshit, there is no "quality" of which you speak. All the journal does is provide online storage and search features.
See arXiv for an excellent example of an open access implementation that works quite well.
This Plan S initiative sounds fantastic and is something I've been harassing all and any of my science friends who come into earshot.
>> has yet to gain much traction in his country
Who the fuck wants to pay for papers. Just plop it onto some all-encompassing variant of ArXiV and let researchers data mine it to hell and back.
If China wants to keep their research private, they can always not publish in traditional ways at all, but keep access to their research limited to Chinese researchers. In that case, maybe the Chinese government would pay for the infrastructure. And publishers like Elsevier would get exactly zero money out of it.
But that is somewhat off topic. The question here is if we (in the western world) let commercial publishers control access to the results of research. Or if we make sure it gets released in some Open Access model. I'm in favor of the latter.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The quality will drop significantly as most publicly funded things do.
Hey everyone, let's play Spot The American Still Stuck In The 70s.
Forcing funding agencies to make researchers work open access will mean that
the funding agencies (or universities etc) have to pay open access fees to elsevier, springer etc.
Elsevier doesn't care which end of the process it makes its money from, but instead of milking taxpayers
via library funding to buy journals it will do so from funding agencies to publish them.
Elsevier 1, taxpayer 0.
A community managed peer review system overlayed on the arXiv (for those disciplines that use it)
seems like the best way to remove Elsevier and co from the story.
And removing these parasites is MORE important than open access.
Of course the countries that are behind would want the countries that are ahead to share.
As for China, talk is cheap. They want everybody else to show their hand while they keep their own hand hidden.
The article is accompanied by a chart of proportion of papers published now by country. China is already edging out the US in this measure, with everyone else far behind. Scientists want to publish, because their reputations hinge on it. Even if a government restricts publication, word is going to leak out across the peer network and at scientific conferences anyway.
If there is no indication now that China is keeping a lot of research to itself, moving to an open-access world is not somehow going to make them more secretive. It just lowers the friction in the scientific process, allowing everyone to share results more quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Politicians just haven't caught up to society - they're still threatening to send their thugs after people to lock them in cages for sharing science. Talk about a clash of Pre- and Post- Enlightenment cultures.
#aaronswartz #pdftribute
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Something I wrote when Slashdot was a shiny new thing: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Longer version: https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To keep their game this long. They used to add real value, by moving paper about.
But I suspect that they have overplayed their hand. They could have become the curator of all this open access papers, maybe charging for submissions to cover costs. Instead they look like going the way of newspaper classified advertisements.
Plan S... Ah yes. Plan S deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long-distance electrodes shot into the pinion pituitary glands of recent dead. Have you attempted any of this plan as yet?