back to article EU wants open science publication by 2020

Bet on furious lobbying to prevent this: the European Union's Competitiveness Council has recommended all scientific papers be made “open access” by 2020. The Dutch presidency of the EU has issued this media release explaining what's on the table. “From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's eminently reasonable

    That's the way it should be anyway - that's the whole point of the word "public".

    The fact that some have made a business out of reselling content paid for by others is not an argument IMHO. There is no way to defend the sometimes absolutely abhorrently high fees well, not anymore now hosting costs so little) and as this gets in the way of re-using such research is yet another reason that I'd agree with this.

    However ...

    Someone will have to pay for managing and hosting this data. Who will pay that bill?

    1. Tomato42
      Boffin

      Re: That's eminently reasonable

      > Someone will have to pay for managing and hosting this data. Who will pay that bill?

      you mean who pays for arxiv.org? Cornell University Library. In all honesty, hosting one such site is probably cheaper than subscribing to 2 or 3 journals in only one of the fields covered by arxiv (yes, subscriptions have outrageous prices)

      1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

        Re: That's eminently reasonable

        There are many open access journals already, where the author pays for a publication, which should contribute to the costs of running such a site. Fees vary wildly, I must say. Many classical journals are also offering the option of open access, and often allow the author to have a copy on his or her website, typically with a statement that this has been made available only for research and education purposes, and with clear copyright statement.

        Making data sets (and code) publicly available is also a trend we already see in science. Very handy for those who which to replicate results.

        I think the move by the EU makes sense.

        1. GrumpenKraut

          Re: That's eminently reasonable

          > Fees vary wildly, ...

          Yes, and many are free of charge.

          As peer reviewing is unpaid anyway, costs are pretty much running a server and (importantly!) making sure the material can not disappear under any circumstances.

          1. Roq D. Kasba

            Re: That's eminently reasonable

            Hosting and data costs? Of a load of text files? Fuck it I'll pay for it myself and work an extra hour each week, if that's really an issue ;-)

            I'd suggest some kind of peer replication though, something like bit torrent, the cost of having access to a paper is paying to host a copy. Certainly within private networks like JANET (UK) the cost will be measured in several dozens of pounds extra, with savings of upto £10k/year/title from those cheeky fucked at Elsevier

        2. Steve Knox
          Facepalm

          Re: That's eminently reasonable

          Many classical journals ... often allow the author to have a copy on his or her website...

          That seems a reasonable concession to the person who created the work in the first place.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: That's eminently reasonable

        you mean who pays for arxiv.org? Cornell University Library. In all honesty, hosting one such site is probably cheaper than subscribing to 2 or 3 journals in only one of the fields covered by arxiv (yes, subscriptions have outrageous prices)

        That's fine if the Uni can do that, and your argument holds water in that it'll be less costly anyway. I just didn't want to discount the fact that all that good stuff *does* have to live somewhere, that's all.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: That's eminently reasonable

          I just didn't want to discount the fact that all that good stuff *does* have to live somewhere, that's all.

          Well the EU press release doesn't actually define what "open access" really means in practical terms and what measures would satisfy the requirement!

          Hence I suggest a publication could satisfy the demand in a number of ways:

          1. The author is permitted to host a copy of the paper on their microsite hosted on their research establishment's website. Otherwise everything is as at present.

          2. After a post-publication closed period the paper is freely available for a year (aside: choose a number) before it gets pulled from the website - this already seems to happen a lot with conference papers (I'm ignoring the academic worth of such papers here, just making an observation).

          So I would agree the big question is about where and how papers will be retained and open access maintained over the decades; I can see that existing publishers will continue to demand a fee from authors for the long-term hosting of their paper, but because there will be a significant reduction in reproduction/access fee's, these hosting fee's are likely to be higher.

    2. Mpeler
      Paris Hilton

      Re: That's eminently reasonable

      No wonder Springer Verlag is suing the adblockers. Their "revenue streams" are going to dry up.

      Sniff, sniff. Not. I wonder how little of that money makes it through the paywalls, for research already paid for by the public, in one way or another?

      I can see them recovering storage and admin costs (basically IT CODB), but the electronic extortion they currently commit needs to stop.

      Could also be the paywalls are means to control what we see? Paris wants to know...

  2. dan1980

    The results of research should be freely available to the group that paid for the research to be done.

    If tax payers fund research then they should be able to view that without paying again.

    1. GrumpenKraut
      Megaphone

      > The results of research should be freely available to the group that paid for the research to be done.

      Yes, and especially: The results of all research funded by the public should IMMEDIATELY be freely available to EVERYONE.

      1. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
        Headmaster

        Principally, yes...

        However:

        It's actually been long-standing and, I find, quite reasonable practise that give the principal investigator and affiliated researchers exclusive right for 1-2 years.

        The reason is so they can get first pick at results, get their papers out, prepare for the Nobel acceptance speech, etc.

        Then the data becomes public - if it was funded by the public.

        Elsevier is simply a leech that interposed itself here - and if they Wiki article can be believed with less than ethical means. To hell with them, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

        I've worked closely with scientists in the Antarctic - they are often down there for long periods of time collecting their data. If they had to make it available immediately, while they're still "stuck" down on the Ice, they would come back to others having published the all-important papers, while they froze their butts off.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Principally, yes...

          Elsevier is simply a leech

          A leech that makes about £2bn a year from publishing scientific journals, with an operating margin of 37%. And that's after their corporate expenses - gross margin is about double that, showing how little it costs them to make so much, on account of the fact that they don't contribute to the research that they profit from.

          As the article says, expect much lobbying, along with whining that free publication will cause the Earth to stop turning, contribute to climate change etc etc.

          I think its clear that the day of commercial scientific journal is coming to a well deserved (and belated) close. So long, Elsevier, go find another market to exploit.

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Re: Principally, yes...

            Then again, do you really want Daily Mail journos interpreting raw data from, say, a study on the link between cancer and mass immigration? They wouldn't understand the phrase "not statistically significant" if you bludgeoned them into unconsciousness with a hard-backed copy of Greene and d'Oliveira.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Principally, yes...

              Then again, do you really want Daily Mail journos interpreting raw data from, say, a study on the link between cancer and mass immigration?

              Definitely, because they'll do that exactly *once* before they'll be written into the ground by all the other journos who would have open access to the exact same data.

              The Daily Fail doesn't need much in the way of credibility (proven by what they write about), but being utterly wrong is painful enough to be worth avoiding.

              1. billse10

                Re: Principally, yes...

                "but being utterly wrong is painful enough to be worth avoiding."

                Never stopped Fleet St before, though, did it ....

              2. TRT Silver badge

                Re: Principally, yes...

                "before they'll be written into the ground by all the other journos" which the Daily Fail readership will never get to see. Heck ~85% of the Daily Fail readership even claim to never watch anything from the BBC ever!

            2. keithpeter Silver badge
              Coat

              Re: Principally, yes...

              "Greene and d'Oliveira"

              Armitage et al in my case. Good, heavy, 850 page volume published by Wiley. Plenty of momentum.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Principally, yes...

          "I've worked closely with scientists in the Antarctic - they are often down there for long periods of time collecting their data. If they had to make it available immediately, while they're still "stuck" down on the Ice, they would come back to others having published the all-important papers, while they froze their butts off."

          It doesn't seem to me that the request is that data be made available as soon as it's collected. It seems to me that the published paper is what's being asked to made public as soon as practically possible. So your chilly Antarctic friends should have nothing to worry about.

      2. GrumpenKraut

        Lame clarification of my post: I meant that the papers (not the data!) should be public immediately and to everyone. I am well aware of the problem with opening data before the papers are out.

        The data should be out to verify/reproduce the published results.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Yes, and especially: The results of all research funded by the public should IMMEDIATELY be freely available to EVERYONE."

        This assumes that the subject of the research itself is also publicly available (or publicly funded), which I suppose in science it very often is. Don't forget, however, that the humanities have also jumped on this 'open data/open culture' bandwagon, and they do quite a lot of research on stuff which is subject to copyright. Now, the authors of this research are most welcome to make their papers freely available, but when it comes to publishing the data they've researched, well, copyright restrictions become problematic, and in many cases those copyright restrictions are right and proper.

        So it's not necessarily as simple as all that, despite data mining exceptions and the rest.

    2. Semper Bersabee

      Already happening...

      "If tax payers fund research then they should be able to view that without paying again."

      Actually that is happening in the UK anyway - researchers have to publish open access in order to be assessed for public funding under the next REF assessment (Research Excellence Framework). The Research Councils are also moving from encouraging open access to mandating it as part of their funding conditions (some like the medical research council are more advanced than the arts or social sciences). And it is already a condition of EU Horizon 2020 funding and many medical charities (Wellcome, CRUK etc).

      The challenge is replicating the peer reviewed quality assurance of journals and funding the skills and infrastructure to properly curate and store. Under the current system the UK alone produces about 150k articles every year and the world wide total is somewhere around 3 million articles a year (and growing at around 3-5% pa) and all articles are not equal...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Already happening...

        "Actually that is happening in the UK anyway - researchers have to publish open access in order to be assessed for public funding under the next REF assessment (Research Excellence Framework). The Research Councils are also moving from encouraging open access to mandating it as part of their funding conditions"

        Hang on, did our government do something good when i wasnt looking? Bl**dy hell ...

        oh, wait - was it a holiday at the time, and all the politicians were away yet again?

        1. I_am_Chris

          Re: Already happening...

          "Hang on, did our government do something good when i wasnt looking? Bl**dy hell .."

          Don't worry. The Wellcome Trust started it and uk gov followed suit once it became stonkingly obvious it was the right thing to do.

  3. ratfox

    In some fields, it's almost de facto the case already. Everybody and their uncle put their article on arXiv.org before even sending it for review to a publication, and more often than not, the journal allows them to leave it there. In the first place, just the review process can take a year, and then another until the paper is actually published. Researchers generally want to make sure to put their name on the result as soon as possible before anybody else can.

    Having open publications is really very important though. If the institution where you worked lacked the funds to subscribe to the top publications, it could be a real pain just to figure out what the most recent results in the field were. Even as the author, you could miss on the precious references to your paper if it wasn't accessible. I remember reading about a paper that might have been relevant to mine, but when I learnt I needed to pay 50 bucks for a copy, I simply didn't bother.

    1. find users who cut cat tail

      > ...when I learnt I needed to pay 50 bucks for a copy, I simply didn't bother.

      There are dubious Russian servers, friends at institutions that happen to have access, ...

      But it is sad that we have to resort to such measures. Especially for finding out what has already been done and is known in some area (as opposed to getting a couple of crucial papers) it is absolutely terrible. Paying 40 [€£$] for a paper you spend a couple of minutes with before concluding it is not relevant/interesting... Seriously?

      1. GrumpenKraut
        Pirate

        > There are dubious Russian servers, ...

        So booksc (dot) org is dubious?

        Some people say[weasel words] it is quite useful[citation needed].

    2. Robert Helpmann??
      Childcatcher

      In some fields, it's almost de facto the case already.

      This brings up my question which is why is this restricted to scientific articles? Wouldn't it make at least as much sense to stipulate this for all papers coming out of publicly funded academia?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Murica to follow suit in ...

    Never.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Murica to follow suit in ...

      It doesn't have to. The American authors will just use an EU server.

      1. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: Murica to follow suit in ...

        If the EU practices joined up government, it will as the OA requirement will be in TTIP...

  5. frank ly

    Legal workaround?

    I can understand that an author who was desperate/keen to have a paper published would sign the copyright away to Elsevier, etc. However, I'm sure the contactual agreement would not say that they couldn't do any more research in that field again. So, if an author wants any previous papers to be made public, all they'd need to do is "repeat the research" one weekend and produce a very similar (but not identically worded) paper on Monday morning.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Legal workaround?

      all they'd need to do is "repeat the research" one weekend and produce a very similar (but not identically worded) paper on Monday morning

      What you propose constitutes rather serious research misconduct: you do not publish essentially the same results more than once.

    2. GrumpenKraut
      Boffin

      Re: Legal workaround?

      > ...all they'd need to do is "repeat the research" one weekend...

      Science: you may want to read about it.

    3. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Legal workaround?

      "I can understand that an author who was desperate/keen to have a paper published would sign the copyright away to Elsevier, etc"

      There are already journals which will publish anything as long as you pay them.

      Elsevier is a major leech and their business model needs not only discouraging, but outlawing.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Legal workaround?

        "There are already journals which will publish anything as long as you pay them."

        err ... and journos/newspaper editors too ..

  6. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Short-term protection

    The original copyright term was 14 years, utility models are still as short as six years. If the research institute wants to publish for profit, let them, but it goes public after something like 4-5 years.

    1. DavCrav

      Re: Short-term protection

      "If the research institute wants to publish for profit, let them, but it goes public after something like 4-5 years."

      They don't profit. The way the academic publishing world works is:

      0) (Depends on field) Researcher gets grant for research,

      1) Researcher writes paper.

      2) Researcher submits paper for free to a journal. Journals are ranked based on prestige, so that 'better' journals are often those with long histories and were bought by for-profit publishers in the past who then have been putting the prices for subscribing up.

      3) Handling editor gives paper a look over for free, decides on who is a good referee.

      4) Sends paper to referee who looks at it for free, says whether the results look good, look correct, are good enough for the journal.

      5) Paper is accepted by journal.

      6) Journals adds page numbers and its title to the top, then puts the pdf on its website.

      7) Libraries at research institutions that the researchers from stage 1 work for hand over thousands to access these papers.

      8) Trebles all round at journal's board room.

      The new model (open access)

      0) (Depends on field) Researcher gets grant for research,

      1) Researcher writes paper.

      2) Researcher submits paper for free to a journal. Journals are ranked based on prestige, so that 'better' journals are often those with long histories and were bought by for-profit publishers in the past who then have been putting the prices for subscribing up.

      3) Handling editor gives paper a look over for free, decides on who is a good referee.

      4) Sends paper to referee who looks at it for free, says whether the results look good, look correct, are good enough for the journal.

      5) Paper is accepted by journal.

      5a) NOT HERE BEFORE: researcher hands over thousands to publisher for open access.

      6) Journals adds page numbers and its title to the top, then puts the pdf on its website.

      7) MODIFIED: Libraries at research institutions that the researchers from stage 1 work for hand over thousands to access these papers, because not all the papers in the journal are open access so they still have to do this.

      8) Quadruples all round at journal's board room.

      Note that 7 still happens because unless everyone is open access journals still have to be bought. Also note that it's not clear whether stage 5a is preferable to 7, in the sense that it might well cost institutions more under the hybrid model.

      How it should work:

      0) (Depends on field) Researcher gets grant for research,

      1) Researcher writes paper.

      2) Researcher places paper on preprint server, such as the arXiv.

      3) Handling editors for that area of the arXiv look at paper, decide if it warrants being quality controlled. Note that the paper would still be there, but only some papers would be assessed in this model.

      4) Handling editors send paper to a few referees, one for peer review and a few others for a quality score.

      5) Refereeing process works as before, with changes made to paper.

      6) Paper gets given quality score, which can be used on CVs and promotion committees in the same way as impact factor and h-indices and other metric bullshit is used now.

      7) Nobody pays for anything.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Short-term protection

        0) (Depends on field) Researcher gets grant for research,

        1) Researcher writes paper.

        You appear to miss a few minor steps here:

        0.(0)1 Researcher (or more realistically her/his postdocs and students) performs the research

        ...

        0.9(9) Researcher performs the research

        1. TRT Silver badge

          Re: Short-term protection

          Also... more metrics bullshit? Really? That's a good thing?

          I quite like the gatekeeper approach, for that you need funds, for that you need subscriptions. On top of that, there are still printed journals and this requires a lot of money to achieve. Agreed the current model is too expensive, but the possible deviousness of publishing houses... I hate to think what they'll come up with.

          1. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: Short-term protection

            " On top of that, there are still printed journals and this requires a lot of money to achieve."

            In the department that I work in, NOBODY bothers with the printed journals. Everything is accessed online apart from the really old stuff which hasn't been digitised yet.

            Printed stuff comes in, gets filed in the library and ends up with enough dust on top to show it was never touched since filing. It's easier to search and crossreference online and once you've done that downloading the PDF is only one more step.

            1. TRT Silver badge

              Re: Short-term protection

              Don't tell the advertisers that. They think the latest issue of Nature sits handsomely in every fashionable reading room in every university.

      2. bed

        Re: Short-term protection

        I think you missed out a step between 0 and 1...

        0.5) Does some research

  7. Mage Silver badge

    on the results of publicly funded research

    Stuff in Uni and State funded only or all papers?

    1. Anonymous Curd

      Re: on the results of publicly funded research

      Research where a component of the funding is public. Given that the overwhelming majority of european universities and research institutions are publicly owned and operated, this amounts to all european research, unless the people commissioning the research want to defray the costs of running the buildings/support staff etc. Which could still happen.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: on the results of publicly funded research

        Just because an institution is publicly funded doesn't mean that all the research is publicly funded.

      2. Semper Bersabee

        Re: on the results of publicly funded research

        In the UK at least, universities are not publicly owned/operated - they are independent charities. Similarly for most (but not all) research institutions. There are very few publicly owned research institutions left, most were closed or sold off during the 80s/90s.

        They are dependent however on public funding for most of their research. Industrial research is a relatively small component. The only exception maybe some areas of medical research where the huge medical research charities (Wellcome, Cancer Research, etc) outspend the gov contribution, although normally (hopefully) in complementary rather than competitive ways.

        1. Anonymous Curd

          Re: on the results of publicly funded research

          You're right. I did mean to put "funded" in there somewhere too. Point still stands. Even in the rare cases the people commissioning the research aren't already publicly funded (a research council, for example) or are re-distributing at least public funding (most charities), it's going to be very hard to argue the public sector didn't fund at least some of the research given its pervasiveness across the sector.

  8. Efros

    Should have always been the case

    I foresee, however, a massive legal challenge to this. Elsevier won't go into the night quietly.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Should have always been the case

      was thinking same thing.

      Part of me says there should be a challenge - politicians and civil servants should not allowed to simply take away an entire business model. On the other hand, a far stronger part of me says that it should never have been able to become a business model in the first place .... so no matter what the challenge, the outcome should be free publication of data for which the public paid anyway, so why once the means became available/obvious why has it taken so long for this to happen? {to try to pre-empt downvotes, I'm saying this is a good thing, but like almost everything, it's not entirely 100% black and white}

  9. jake Silver badge

    “all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available."

    This has been pretty much reality since the advent of Usenet. Or before ...

  10. bbsimonbb

    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.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Egregious Scam Ending ?

      "And the biggest suckers are the clever hard-working researchers, who accept to do all their peer reviewing for free. "

      They've been wising up for years. The reality if that if they don't peer-review for free, they don't get their own articles published.

      Blackmail? You could say that.

  11. Innocent-Bystander*

    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...

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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.

    1. John Bailey

      Re: 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"

      1) Elsevier is unable to forbid authors "self-archiving", and has not been able to stop it for years - https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/sharing

      FTFY

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

      So they can get a second dip. Or am I misjudging them, and they are offering this as a free for all to access service?

  13. a_yank_lurker

    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.

  14. cortland

    Good!

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

  15. A K Stiles

    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...

  16. StevanHarnad

    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.

  17. I_am_Chris

    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.

  18. Adrian Midgley 1

    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.

  19. steward
    Facepalm

    Well, I guess...

    If the Netherlands don't go through with, um, Netherexit like they're threatening to, Elsevier can find a friendlier home in the UK.

    That's assuming that by 2020 the UK doesn't do BrRevolvingDoor and re-enter the EU...

  20. Baldy50

    Shame!

    Aaron Swartz would have been in favour of this move.

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