EU wants open science publication by 2020

Egregious Scam Ending ?

Academic journal pricing is a long running egregious scam that tells you everything you needed to know about the sincerity, and the worth, of the founding tenets of our crappy thatcherist era. If it was ever about improving competitivity, would we ever have seen develop such a horrendous drag on a vital function in a modern economy? It was always about delivering fat wads of unearned (mostly public) booty into already well-stuffed pockets, and this the academic journals have done marvelously. And the biggest suckers are the clever hard-working researchers, who accept to do all their peer reviewing for free. You couldn't make it up.

Should have always been this way

I was quite shocked when I went back for my masters to find that publicly funded research results were locked behind what seemed like an impenetrable wall.

This would be a great step in the right direction indeed.

Next step: textbook pricing. If my employer hadn't been picking up the tab on my textbooks I would have gotten multiple breakdowns by now over $200+ books...

Elsevier and open access

1) Elsevier does support authors "self-archiving", and had done for years - https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/sharing

2) Elsevier just bought SSRN, which is such a site.

Bravo

I would go further, all scientific papers and research should be freely available. To achieve this will require some major changes in how scientific publishing is done. As one noted, running servers is not particularly expensive, peer review and editorial review is done for free. So the major cost is will be running a smallish server farmer.

Good!

Let's have all European and American regulatory standards made available for free as well.

Institutional and subject repositories

Many (most?) UK / EU universities also have some form of institutional repository in which the researchers should (for a varying level of mandate) put copies of their work for it to then be freely available to all - generally the version deposited is requested to be the last one the author tweaked - i.e. Author writes paper, submits paper to journal. Journal farms out peer-review to other academics in the discipline, author takes feedback from peer-review and tweaks paper so that journal will accept it - THIS VERSION should go in repository - journal fiddles with the font / layout / adds headers, page numbers etc...

The journals charge mightily for the finished version, or charge the author (or their institution / research funder) mightily to be open access in the finished version. They also tend to implement various embargoes for the author's last version as part of the agreement to publish the shiny version in the journal, and the institutions can't afford to be sued for copyright breach by the publishers, unlike e.g. sci-hub, who essentially have no money anyway... There's a debate as to the value of the publisher step, but whilst academic career progression is contingent upon being published in 'excellent' journals, most academics won't stop trying to publish in those (blooming expensive) journals. Without the excellent research to publish, the journals won't stay 'excellent' for very long, but who wants to risk their career in the meantime? They call it academic freedom to publish in the journal of choice, but it seems more like publisher freedom to charge what they want.

If research funders insisted that outputs of their funded research had to be publicly available from peer-review day zero, no embargoes, no gross author fees to be paid, the quality of the expensive, locked-down journals would vanish quite rapidly. Researchers bringing in the research funding will be in demand from the institutions, so career progression would be based on your ability to do good research, rather than just about getting your research published in Nature.

It just needs somebody to make the first brave move to break the current stalemate...

IMMEDIATE OA IN EU BY 2020?

The means are still somewhat vague but the determination to reach the goal of having all scientific articles freely accessible (OA) immediately by 2020 is welcome. The goal is definitely reachable, and well worth reaching — in fact it’s long overdue.

It would be helpful, however, if the means of reaching the goal were made much more explicit, and with equal determination:

1. The EU can only ensure that its own scientific article output is OA by 2020. The EU cannot ensure that the scientific article output from the rest of the world (which is also the scientific article output to the EU) is OA by 2020 too. But if the EU adopts the right means for providing its own output, there is a good chance that it will be matched by the rest of the world too.

2. The right means for the EU to make all of its own scientific article output OA by 2020 is to require that it be deposited in the institutional repository of the author(s) of the article. This is called “Green OA.” The deposit should be made immediately upon acceptance for publication (because if the 2019 scientific article output is deposited in 2021, that is certainly not OA in 2020).

3. The deposit need not be the published version of the article; it need only be the final, peer-reviewed, accepted version.

4. The plan mentions Green OA, Gold OA (paying to publish in an OA journal) and hybrid combinations of the two. The EU is welcome to spend whatever funds it finds worthwhile to spend to pay for Gold OA, as long as immediate Green OA is required for all EU scientific article output. The rest of the world will match the EU’s provision of Green OA, but it is much less likely that the rest of the world will match the EU’s expenditure on Gold OA.

No gold OA

This needs to be thought through properly. The publishers are currently pushing up prices for gold OA, so instead of making money on the subscriptions they now make money by charging to publish.

Any new rules need to enforce green OA where copyright is retained by the authors and can be made freely available upon publication.

Charging over 2k to publish a pdf document is extortion.

So the UK[1] needs to start doing that. 2019 or 2021?

now we are sovereign (See in dictionary: between sober and sozzled) and have to duplicate work.

[1] Or England & Wales, after the Scottish anti-exit and taking back the country.

Shame!

Aaron Swartz would have been in favour of this move.