Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
The quality will drop significantly as most publicly funded things do.
Hey everyone, let's play Spot The American Still Stuck In The 70s.
You are assuming that the revenue stream goes into peer-review and quality control. But this not how the system works: Peer view and quality control is done by volunteers. And there are open access journals which have high standards and are highly regarded. The reason the existing system still persists is *only* due to momentum. Publishing in journals such as nature, science, and many similar is very prestigious and therefor this is what people try to do. But that this is mostly due to momentum can be seen in mathematics: Many editors and complete editorial boards quit in protest to the high cost of Elsevier journals and founded new journals as replacement: Now often these replacement journals took over. Sadly,scientists in other fields are not as smart and organized.
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.
Just plop it onto some all-encompassing variant of ArXiV and let researchers data mine it to hell and back. ... that would make data mining probably more universal, too.
It would be actually interesting to define some meta data standards, how to publish the actual data. E.g. for time series etc. (probably that exists already)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Scientists in other fields have much higher costs on the whole than mathematics. They means they need grants for equipment, supplies, technicians and so on. That comes from the fnuding bodies. The more impact your work has the more you lkely you are to get funded.
And publishing in high profile journals is a good way to get that impact.
Funding is clearly the lifeblood of any university. Getting funding is why major universities create research consortiums to improve their chances of getting it.
Publishing in prestigious journals is key to getting and maintaining a reputation. However, major universities have the resources and infrastructure in place to publish their own journals, and many already do. Right now, the costs of publishing in paywalled journals is insignificant compared to the benefits; the question is do universities want to wrest control of their research papers from the publishers? They already provide the academic resources (reviewers, editorial boards) so the most important part of ensuring quality exists; what needs to happen is for universities to decide their own publications are as valuable, or more, for tenure decisions as the current pay for play ones. Academia has the ability to significantly reduce the power of those journals, the question is do they want to?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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)
what needs to happen is for universities to decide their own publications are as valuable, or more, for tenure decisions as the current pay for play ones.
Tenure? What tenure? If it's not already dead then it's certainly on life support these days. Besides, until the external sources of funding get with the program, it won't change. Let's say a university does that it's great except now any academic who follows through now has their career tied to that university and that one alone.
Basically you are casually stating that other people should damage their careers over this. Perhaps they should but they won't, because that's not how people work.
While I agree overall, I think you missed my point. University research consortiums currently exist to improve member organizations ability to attract grant money. If those universities wanted, they have the resources, academic talent and prestige to create journals every bit as prestigious as the current pay ones. As you point out, many of their staff already peer review and sit on editorial boards of the pay journals. Many of them already publish a number of respected journals.
There would be no damage to careers since the journals would be as respected as the pay ones, since they have the same peer reviewers and editorial boards as the paid ones had; they are simply replacing the publisher with their own resources.
Personally, I think it is simply easier to live with the current system and bemoan its shortcomings than to actually change it to one with more open access. You probably couldn't get a bunch universities to agree on the journal's name, let alone how to setup the administrative portion to actually publish it.
Ultimately, changing the rules to allow the original authors to make the paper available after a short time period or even from day 1 and retain copyright, may be the only realistic solution.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.