EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
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It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.
I'm not sure if there are any more details available yet, but I would worry about this turning into even more of a gravy train for publishers. I can't see for example the Dutch government being in any hurry to introduce any legislation that will threaten Elsevier's viability.
Nonetheless it is still a positive step that scientific findings look like becoming more readily accessible for the general public.
Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.
> It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.
No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
That's why we also need to get rid of bibliometrics for evaluating researchers for their career. Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.
I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.
What the funding bodies can do, however, is limit the amount of money in a grant that can be spent on publishing costs. That's far easier.
> No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
There is a big inertia, but currently the system makes big journals just as financially attractive as small journals or free places to publish because there's no upfront cost. If big journals cost a lot of money and small/free journals don't, then there's actually a force pushing towards cheaper options. It changes the customer to one that has more control (the funding body).
There are interesting initiatives like the Wellcome Trust's project: http://wellcomeopenresearch.org/
I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".
> Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.
I think this comes from the fact that the metadata around publications is unfortunately often not available in a decent form, and the people who actually have the data that's necessary for analysing these kinds of things is publishers, so anyone who wants to do certain types of analysis will benefit from either being in or partnering with a publisher.
[disclaimer, working with article and grant data is what I do at Digital Science]
That of course depends on one's subjective notion of "good". There are multiple ways of doing it. I like the one you suggest if the amount we are talking about is a round zero.
> I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".
If the members of a journal's scientific board decide they want to go full real open access (with no costs for readers nor authors), they have to abandon to name of the journal and the associated impact factor and reputation that they build together with their work over the years, because the publisher owns the journal even though it is the board members who did all the work (as part of their job as researchers, paid by the state or a uni for example, not by the publisher).
That's one of the reseaons why the movement for open access and the movement against the use of bibliometrics should unite.
Thanks for the disclaimer.
But your point is very true - at some point we need the top publishers to be thrown out of business and for new ones to emerge AND the new publishers need to maintain costs which reflect true costs rather than the current 'what can we get away with?' prices they charge. Strangely, competition will be really good for this situation but it will not be so great for the researchers. (It would be like determining the quality of a webpage when no website has a PageRank higher than 3). Isn't that why there is so much hair pulling over this issue amongst researchers?
Isn't this ruling going to at least help a little in the sense that the researches now have a legal reason to push back on publishers who charge the exorbitant rates, plus as the sibling comment says, introduces a bit more transparency into the process?
I am interested in getting your thoughts on how to kickstart more competition amongst publishers.
Here in the UK we already have an open-access requirement for RCUK and EPSRC grants, but it can be met by uploading a preprint to an institution- or subject-specific repository (such as arXiv) and including a link to it in your report back to the grant sponsor.
Last time I published in a journal, I got a "special offer" of $1200 instead of $2000 to make it open access. I politely rejected the offer - it's already online for $0, just hosted by the university itself.
However you shouldn't feel stupid. The wording is, as English often is, confusing to those without context.
Edit: oh my, three+ comments at the same time.
– "normal" publishing (behind a paywall) is free for authors,
– the open access option was set arbitrarily to $2000 by the publisher, and they decided to offer a discount at $1200 instead.
(For conferences with proceeedings, even normal publishing is not free - part of the conference fee is to pay the publisher.)
The goal is for all public scientific research to be available to the public for free, not to smash middle-men. If your goal is to smash middle-men, you'll be smashing all day and all night for the rest of your life, and middle-men are generally better at smashing than you are.
Also, if you look at your job, you may be a middle-man yourself. Most upper middle-class people are.
In the UK, 'green route' or self-archiving means that, after a moratorium, you can put your paper on your institution's website. The moratorium could be three years, so it's still highly restrictive and locks in commercial publishers' profits.
My view is that a 'knowledge commons' system could easily work. Wikipedia apparently spends $50 million in total. I believe a similar amount of funding would easily support an academic publishing ecosystem in which publishing and reading are free.
I present some more detail here: https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/designing-knowledge-commons-t...
Basically, our government currently forces us to commit copyright infringement or to end our careers and funding by not publishing in established journals.
In the good old spirit of our country, nobody does anything and the open access servers remain empty until the higher authorities get a basic grasp of the publishing reality. People are used to incompetent bosses around here.
Explained in a very simple way:
- Researchers do the heavy work, carrying out the research and writing up the articles: they don't get a cent from publishers (sometimes they even have to pay to publish).
- Reviewers, since of the most knowledgeable researchers in the area, take their time and knowledge to check what the researchers did: they also don't get a cent from publishers.
- Publishers, get all the work already done and charge money - stupid amounts of money like 30eur per article - to let other researchers see the works.
Researchers have nothing to lose by cutting the publisher. We are not wasting any money - on the contrary - for demanding free access.
Seriously, people should stop commenting themes they simply don't have a clue about.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community embraces this with gusto. The parallel with OSS is interesting - somewhat in the same spirit as the programming community embraced open source, I think the benefit of open access is that the researcher evaluates the tradeoff between 'capturing value' vs 'making a difference', without worrying about the external factor of 'what does this external entity, which provided very little in terms of constructive input when the work was being done, allow me to do (with regards to publishing openly)?'.
But then again, I could be completely wrong, especially in domains like the physical sciences where I don't know how the incentives align. I hope it works out well, and that soon this is the just the norm in all countries.
[1] http://blogoftheisotopes.blogspot.in/2012/01/elsevier-backla...
Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).
To see this in action: Many OSS software projects have trouble attracting quality contributions because they are simply not well known. To the community as a whole, the cost of soliciting contributions is not merely the difficulty of modifying the software, but in addition the promotion of the project itself to the point where the only costs have to do with making said modifications.
I could have worded it better (maybe cost of the review + credentialing process), but I think this is going to be the pain point in open access, just like even folks here on HN say that OSS sometimes resembles the wild west.
In the research domain, solving these problems would actually be even harder (in my view). How do you know if you found the best paper, or just the paper which is the best match for your keywords? At least Google has a feedback mechanism - someone stays a long time on a given webpage if it is very relevant to what they are looking for. This is not a good metric obviously, it might happen on a research paper simply because it is too obscure :-)
You would be surprised at how easily a winners win situation happens in research. The citation based search would reinforce it. And while the gaming may not be search engine focused, I think getting the best papers via algorithmic methods can omit the crown jewels through less insidious (but quite common) issues such as citation graphs which orient in the direction of the flow of funding.
But you say, maybe winners win for a reason. This is only personal experience, but the single most profound, creative paper I ever read during my years of research was written by a lone wolf (i.e. no collaborators) in a somewhat unknown institution who turned out to be a sort of one hit wonder. This person's h-index may very well have been exactly 1 at that time. I honestly think algorithmic methods of searching for literature would have skipped past that paper.
You could make the case, though, that a thorough literature survey should be as exhaustive as possible and not omit ANYTHING. Well, very few people are that thorough - and even when they are, there is a tendency of reading papers from the most popular authors first. I am just glad I did my work before the days of Google Scholar becoming the de facto starting point, and I did not have the bias of a pre-ranked list.
I think that is the actual fear: I was able to find this crown jewel precisely because the publishing process at that period was more centralized (although quite likely also less competitive), and that paper was eventually published at a pre-eminent conference - which is how it came to my attention. With a search-engine driven open access, I think this lone wolf would have had a harder time getting that fantastic piece of work in front of a big audience because many of the common signals would have been too weak.
With all that said, when open access becomes more pervasive, great search technology will be a big part of the cost reduction and I definitely look forward to that.
Another factor may be that most research (at least in CS) gets presented at conferences, gets published in conference proceedings first, and then journal publications are mostly an afterthought, and in many cases are skipped entirely. Organizing a conference with open-access proceedings may not be as cheap and easy as setting up a web-site and getting a few well-known names to serve as reviewers...
Publishers just coast on their current name, and are in a winner takes all market where the best authors will try to publish at the most famous journals. They are purely rent seekers, and won't go out without some external intervention.
In fact, even though I started the Elsevier bashing in this thread :-) - until we find out what the replacement system looks like I think we may not even completely see all the costs involved. I don't think the existence of the internet is suddenly going to turn the research publication process into a very resource efficient system.
Besides, research publication does have hight costs. But nearly all of that cost is not beared by publishers.
This is a valid point, but why should the commercial publisher reap all the benefit of this authority and brand value? The brand value was built by researchers publishing high quality work and doing high quality reviews.
Further, why couldn't just the same thing happen with non-commercial free open access journals?
Even today, every single piece of publication already has multiple choices: a) be uploaded as an unreviewed PDF on the authors' websites - this grants the paper absolutely no credibility obviously, except it may have been written by a respected authority - and definitely you get no benefit as a researcher b) be sent for review, become subjected to copyright, but on most occasions where an unformatted (i.e. preprint) can be uploaded on the website with the express understanding that no one would ever cite that version because it is possible for content to change from that version to the final print version and c) be sent for 'stamping' as the authorized final version, at which point the trouble usually starts.
As you progress along each step, you are basically getting additional benefits - they are somewhat intangible, but for researchers these benefits do translate directly into the currency that they care about - acknowledgment of their work as a part of the citation graph (which then translates into career benefits). So no, the commercial publisher does not "reap all the benefit of this authority and brand value". The commercial publisher does reap all the tangible monetary benefits of course.
Very few authors would willingly submit themselves to the painful process of paper review if they felt someone else was getting ALL the benefits.
Your question could be phrased as whether the publishers get an unfair share of the benefits - yes they do. And do they use some strong arm tactics to preserve their ability to get gobs of money for effectively very little work - yes they do.
And "couldn't just the same thing happen with non-commercial free open access journals?" I think it will, I just feel the road will be quite bumpy until we get there.
I will assume for a bit that the vast majority of participants in the review system are academics. So, one of the main reasons the publishing process moves at glacial speeds is because many reviewers are time constrained academics. Nothing in the open access process will change that fact, but many people will be affected by the shift to open access - suddenly you don't even have an organization that can be held nominally accountable for speeding it up. Academics very rarely like being told what to do, and at the slightest sign of dissent against their handling of the review process, are more likely to stop contributing their efforts towards organizing because the rewards are not very tangible.
The OSS ecosystem faces similar issues and still gets a lot of work done at impressive speed - but remember that usually the top contributors in OSS have immediate positive feedback in terms of the adoption of the software (at least) but often much more tangible benefits such as acknowledgement of their efforts in public and VISIBLE forums, sometimes even employment. Very little of this is true for participants in the review process.
As I said, I expect the road to be bumpy.
Indeed, and that's a strange situation.
I submit that it is immoral to review for a for-profit journal without receiving appropriate compensation[1]. Doing so and then complaining about the extortionist behavior of the established publishers is also hypocritical and/or stupid.
Attempts to boycott a publisher or two have happened before, but they are useless. Scientists are hurting themselves by not publishing in the high ranking journals or by not reading them. Boycotting their exploitative review process, however, would hit them where it hurts and cost very little.
[1] Uncompensated review services for any non-traditional journal are equally immoral, but that's another topic.
I assume that 50 years ago the cost of getting information out to people was quite significant. printing, distribution, logistics... a single researcher wouldn't be able to deal with lots and lots of publishing institutions efficiently, and a single institution (except for the largest ones) wouldn't be able to publish efficiently. at my uni school, they had 2 geometry professors, and they perhaps published something every few years. no need for the school to publish its own geometry journal. middle-men such as Elsevier emerged to provide a useful service, achieving efficiencies of scale on both ends, providing a publishing channel for smaller schools and a discovery service for researchers. kind of the same as why travel agents existed. it was too difficult for a single person to deal with all the hotels and airlines in the world, and they didn't even know where to go and ask about that stuff.
Today, the cost of getting the information out to people being insignificant, they are an obstacle instead of being an enabler, adding very little value to what people can do directly. On the other hand, as long as they can keep the effective monopoly going, they can milk the market. Travel agents didn't have a chokehold on a market, and got easily disrupted by web sites. Elsevier requires regulators to step in.
Launching a new journal is a non-trivial process, you have to convince people to publish in it, you have to convince peer reviewers that it's worth their effort, etc. You have to have a marketing and sales teams that gets it into the hands and minds of researchers/libraries/etc. Then follows several decades of brand building before you make any real money. Many journals don't make it and die and publishers have to swallow the losses.
In practice OA has other solutions (author pays) to fund this, but it's far from a free lunch.
I wonder if the US will follow suits when/if this happens. Any thoughts?
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Edit: maybe it would be better to link to the original source instead [http://futurism.com/eu-announces-that-all-european-scientifi...].
"Ultimately, this decision comes as a result of a meeting by the Competitiveness Council,which includes the ministers of Science, Innovation, Trade, and Industry."
EU science, being what it is, needs to be more competitive. One way to become competitive in the face American or even Japanese competition is to take the open source/free software route and make research freely available. This makes the research more accessible, unburdens relatively poor European universities from having to pay expensive journal memberships, increases the ability of EU institutions to collaborate, and allows the EU to attract collaborators from abroad by removing financial thresholds. And because science in the US has stronger ties to industry, it plays an important role in determining the economic prowess of the US. Poor entrepreneurs can also benefit from the move. The EU is likely aiming in a similar direction (though I personally know members of European academia who dislike the collaboration between academia and industry).
For-profit publishers will probably appreciate this: it means that, while European institutions will probably still pay subscription fees (to read foreign research), they will now also have to pay extortionate open-access fees when publishing. In addition to paying researchers to produce and peer-review the research...
This is a really bad model as it makes money part of an equation which should only be governed by scientific concerns: should this paper be published or not?
Now, researchers is poor countries may be able to access existing research but they won't be able to publish their findings…
And even thought it kind of solve the problem of mass access to scientific publications, it doesn't deal with the fact that a lot of public money is going in the pockets of private academic publishers for no good reasons. With this model, research is still paid for at least 3 times (for doing it, reviewing it, and now publishing it instead of accessing it) by universities and research institutions, while publishers are making an awful lot money for hosting PDFs. This money which could be used to do more research, as only a tiny part of it would be necessary to support the necessary arXiv-like infrastructure.
Well they definitely can publish, but they will have to pay a decent amount to publish in a big journal. Grants will include money for this purpose.
edit - I'm not sure why this was downvoted. There are free places you can publish work, and grants that require open access include money for publishing costs, certainly the grants my wife has worked on included open access publishing money.
> they definitely can publish, but they will have to pay a decent amount to publish in a big journal
Yeah, okay.
This is exactly what I'm saying this system is wrong. The decision to publish a given paper in a big, notorious journal should only be based on the scientific qualities and contribution of the paper. Not on the money (grants or not) that their authors have.
And by the way, grants, and generally speaking project-based funding, are not a good way to distribute money for research. It is okay to fund big experiment requiring a lot of money on project-based grants, but it is totally poisonous to need grants for daily operations (paying people's salaries and publishing being typical daily operations). Research can't work long term if even the basic necessities for a lab to just exist depends on grant money attributed with respect to current trends and other random factors.
"Will this paper increase my impact factor or not?" It now becomes literally necessary to spend money to increase the metric used to determine if you get any money.
The current issue of Science says about five disciplines are trying to imitate the physics arXiv. There is much resistance in some sectors.
Edit: a few of the links on the wiki page still link to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
They also have a Facebook page and an onion route.
The intention sounds good, but it seems like there is still a lot of detail to be worked out.
Consider, for example, somebody thinking of creating a startup doing research on what the bleeding edge of a field is. Or a former student considering re-entering academic research checking up on how the field has progressed since they left it. Or simply an independent researcher trying to understand if what they've created is novel and publishable.
Here is another link from his blog: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
And under the section called "A regret: Not pushing for open-access" he says:
"My hope is that tenure will provide me opportunities to steadily shift computer science and medicine toward high-quality, high-impact open access venues.
The reason I feel especially ashamed over my behavior is that in the course of my research for my son, I have used my privilege as an academic to punch through paywalls with impunity to reach medical papers.
In a damning irony, even this paper is behind a paywall.
I realize that few patients or parents have the ability to do what I did, and they never will, until all of academic medicine goes open access.
In computer science, academic paywalls stifle.
In medicine, academic paywalls kill."
I suppose the main point still stands.
Everyone was already paying for them before. The money that used to be collected on the sale of articles has never gone to finance the scientists making the work.
So if the team is funded partially by some European organization(s) it would apply to them, otherwise not.
What most likely will happen is that there will be a geoblocked EU repository/ies which will provide free access to research material.
Also it's important to note that only research which has been funded with public funds is applicable for this and depending on under which "Open Access" model they'll end up operating under there might be some additional restrictions.
I'd be absolutely amazed if this happens.
The current common setups for funding bodies which already require open access are:
1. Can't go behind a paywall, so money is included in the grant for publishing costs.
2. Can go behind a paywall, but a copy must be made available somewhere else (not as common).
I have no idea why they'd go about building a geoblocked repository, that sounds expensive and I cannot see what problem it actually solves.
If it's going to target institutions/grant recipients then the only thing they need to do is allocate funds to pay for Open Access which is a bit silly and it doesn't solve the issue, if anything it can make it even worse because publishers could then squeeze authors for even more money because now the public is the one who pays the ransom.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/06/european-commission-free...
Direction is as important as order, so a criticism of "not first" must be more nuanced.
This should be effective today, while giving a few month grace period at most.
The same people who demand this open access also advocate research evaluation criteria that mostly count the number of publications in top journals owned by Springer, Elsevier, etc.
I would say that fingerprinting is still useful, to knowthat the original information hasn't been tampered with.
Why do we need publishers again?
You mean similar to the timing for the abolishment if roaming costs?
Clearly the term "America" either disambiguates to a continent or a country, and most assume the country.
"Europe," on the other hand, really is a continent, so the term has a completely different meaning than the EU, although it would be reasonable for the two to be synonymous eventually, they clearly are not currently.
Anyway, it seems reasonable to use the term America as shorthand, instead of U.S.A., as it's pretty obvious what you mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas
"The Americas, also collectively called America"... In many languages America is the continent.
The wikipedia link to America, redirects to the United States of America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America
And in the description of the United States of America: The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_(disambiguation)
"America is a short-form name for the United States of America."
This cost will be paid by scientists, rather than by the readers. In other words, the papers will be free to read, but won't be free to publish.
I know as a fact that smaller research groups struggle to pay current publishing fees, and as a matter of fact the EU decision will increase them, making the situation worse.
Publishers now don't even do editorial service. They give you a template you must follow and the actual (free) reviewers tell you if you write good english or not.
Whenever I published an article most often I got my references corrected, some grammar errors where spotted during the publishing process (I am not a native English speaker), also my articles are professionally typeset.
Maybe we work in different fields, don't assume your point of view automatically extends to every field of science.
Journals have no linguistic editing, no proofreading, and the typesetting is outsourced to India - at least Springer does so, as I know from personal interaction with the typesetters. Articles must be delivered more or less camera-ready according to the journal style. Editorial boards and all editors, as well as as reviewers work for free.
If you have a research group that actually pays for being published, then that's called "grey literature" or even worse, just plain self-publication, and it's worth nothing. It can even have a negative impact on your CV.
The most prestigious journals have a publication fee. I know for sure that Nature Communications has a pretty hefty fee, more than 5000$, google it. And, trust me, publishing there has a pretty positive impact on your CV.
The same concept applies to all open-access journals, including the most prestigious ones.
You may want to revise your definition of "grey literature".
The publication fee for Nature you mention is for open access, not for publishing. Open access fees are very expensive everywhere.
And no, my definition of grey literature is completely fine. Don't come to my university.
As you may or may not know, on Nature Communications (and on many other journals of Nature Publishing Group) you can only publish open-access, so that's effectively a fee you have to pay to publish on Nature Communications.
You pay, you get your paper published. You don't pay it, your paper is not published.
As you see, your definition of grey literature includes one of the most prestigious journals in the physical sciences. Time to revise it! Better late than never!
> Don't come to my university.
If I do I hope that at least your colleagues will be able to see beyond their nose, and will know that what's standard in humanities may not be standard in other fields.
> Open access fees are very expensive everywhere.
Which is exactly my point. The EU announces that all papers will be free to read, so open access? Someone must pay. The price will be paid by research groups, smaller ones may not be able to sustain it.
So in effect you have EU citizens paying for research to be done, but have to double-dip on the papers or artefacts that come out as a result of the research.
This initiative is designed to make publicly funded research.....public, and not held behind a paywall provided by a private entity.
However, free newspapers and travel sounds good to me.
If all/most resources were free it would then be just a matter of deciding which were worth spending your time on.
There doesn't really seem to be much negative, other than current business models fading away. However, I don't think most people would care much if all businesses did close and were replaced with a different economic model. (Not that I have one in mind, just that I don't think we need to be attached to the current business model)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
:)