Gates Foundation research can’t be published in top journals
nature.com
nature.com
The foundation, which is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, stipulates that the researchers whom it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data sets immediately upon publication. And papers must be published under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse — including for commercial purposes.
But some journals do not offer this kind of open-access (OA) publishing. Many of them allow papers to be made free to read after an embargo period, usually of around six months, and let authors upload accepted manuscripts online. But neither policy meets the Gates Foundation’s requirements. And so, for papers submitted from the start of 2017, a few top journals are currently off limits to Gates-funded academics.
“We are having ongoing and fruitful discussions with these publishers,” says Dick Wilder, associate general counsel with the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. Wilder adds that the Gates Foundation does not plan to allow exceptions to its policy.
I greatly applaud the gates foundation.
In some fields arXiv may have improved matters, but most fields still rely on journals.
For example, if I knew that Leonard Susskind read a paper and cited, shared, liked, or bookmarked it, then that could easily replace my fundamental need of having the paper stamped by a trusted authority. If scientists could share, cite, and discuss papers on an open source platform (like Facebook, but for Academia), I believe that we wouldn't need these gatekeepers anymore, and they would become obsolete. The real authority has always been the scientists who are doing good, promising research, not some contrived group of scientists who are solely reviewing papers for the sake of assessing their quality.
An (possibly flawed) analogy: do need CNN/ABC/FOX when we have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to propagate news?
Nature and Science are high profile, but due to ridiculous space constraints, I groan whenever a seminal paper is published there. If there is meat to the article, it's in the supplement, which forces a really awkward way of reading articles.
Cell is somewhat better.
But ideally the community would abandon Nature and Science as being the gold standard of publication. Field-specific journals that allow science to be published sensibly would be much better. When was the last time that a molecular biologist benefited from having a physicist brush past their highly technical article on epigenetics because it happened to be in Science? The benefit of these cross-field journals are somewhat limited, IMHO.
Complete isolation between disciplines doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. Cross-pollination can be useful in surprising ways.
Further, the point of science isn't to advance the careers of scientists, it's to increase human knowledge and capability. Collecting and distributing research from many disciplines furthers that purpose better than isolating disciplines.
However my point is that Science and Nature do nothing to little to support cross-pollination. And that their main purpose as being the "high profile" journals is that they serve to advance the careers of those that get their paper published there.
Wire Transfer Letters because you must wire-transfer them the page charges for your paper that was generated by a Markov chain before they print it, and because the sketchy publisher sits far away in a country known for sketchy dealings. OMICS Publishers, we are looking at you!
Can someone enlighten the audience about what happened to Beall's List?! Another suit?
[1] Pergamon was founded in 1951
Trying to track this down. People are taking cache copies right now, ready to put up at a second's notice (or just do so anyway).
And Peter Suber has a good analysis here https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV
Disgusting. Hope they come crashing down sooner rather than later.
The ROE of academic publishers is abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.
In this case, scientists do almost all of the work (write, typeset (mostly), referee) for free (or nominal amounts), so expenses are low.
The publishers charge libraries inordinate amounts for subscriptions (dollars per page).
And scientist need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles, it is hard for competitors to enter.
Well, propose an alternate system that stands a chance of being adopted then.
Conferences play a large role, and automated tools like arxiv-sanity.com and Google Scholar (for mapping citations) help. Even Twitter is important, if a major figure tweets about a paper, many people will read it. Conferences are experimenting with models to reduce the lag time from submissions and trying different systems for selecting papers.
We'll see where it goes.
If hacker news did not have a voting system/flagging system/banning system it would just be a giant cesspool of links and comments submitted by bots.
I love the example of the New England Journal of Medicine finding that paying $5 was worse than not paying, as potential reviewers found it insulting.
As to other activities, yes, I think companies behind journals typically pay people to do administrative functions for the journal, and the editor may or may not be paid (for Nature, I believe the editor is paid). However, it is possible to replicate the traditional review structure in a completely free OA journal with volunteered resources; in computer graphics, I think JCGT does this: http://jcgt.org/about.html
If something that sounds interesting was published in Nature/Science around 2000, I will usually just skip it. I already know the methods section will be crap and I will be unable to figure out what process generated the data (at least in the case of biomed). When I needed to dig through that stuff and try to make sense of what was going on in detail, that was an awful nightmare. And that was an editorial policy... now they at least let authors put the required info into supplements.
I think that was the era of "peak peer review", the idea has been losing clout ever since (mostly due to the internet).
Now that nobody (or close to nobody) can publish in Nature some other open access journal will be the number one.
Without the need for printing papers the amount of people actually needed to run a journal drops to a few admin people (research and peer review is still paid for by others) and somebody to keep the website running. This can easily be paid for by a few universities (Harward is sitting on billions and they have an interest in solving this problem).
I seethe in anger every time something I'm looking into ends in a IEEE or other journal who militantly police arXiv preprints.
The day we bury the last for-profit closed access journal will be a momentous day in the history of science.
But in fact, the publishing companies receive money from both the researcher and the reader. They charge the researcher up to $1,500 to publish the article, and then they extract money from the readers by charging a subscription fee to their institution (which constitute a large portion of the library budget).
Not even the editors or reviewers receive any financial compensation -- they often volunteer their time for the peer-review process.
The entire procedure and profit extraction is a disgrace.
Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway.
Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.
I hope this sets the stage for all grant funding sources to institute similar requirements, and we'll get even more absurd clickbait headlines as a result.
"The year is 2017. You can run Linux on Windows, .Net, Visual Studio and powershell in Linux and Bill Gates is the champion of open access in scientific journals. Oh and- .Net and the C# compiler are open-source.".
What the hell is happening with the world? :)
If the NIH could avoid the politics, they would require that all NIH-funded research be published in open-access journals (now there is a requirement one year after publication) that it be made available.
Elsevier's revenues last year were about 20 billion, almost the same as the entire NIH budget.
Alternatively, if academics and their supporters organised and made their case a priority...
But it's difficult–generally, advancing your career enough to actually stay in academia requires that you publish in non open-access journals. Doubly so in medicine.
This is something which really has to come from the funding agencies and foundations in order to be effective.
Yes. A great deal of science and engineering funding comes from the U.S. government, which ultimately is derived from the taxpayers. If taxpayers demanded access to the research they've already funded, rather than having to pay an arbitrary third-party middleman an exorbitant fee, things might change very rapidly.
Unfortunately, this is pretty low on the average citizen's list of issues. There won't be a march on Washington for open access journals any time soon.
Publishing in a top journal like science or nature is primarily for getting the social capital of having gone through a difficult selection process. People need to get paid to see if the science done in the paper was good, whether it was plagiarized, peer-review, etc etc. Simply.. more selective = more effort = more cost.
Also _I_ review for these journal _for free_ with ridiculous timeline (review that for tomorrow), and _I_ also have to find a place to host the dataset and code, potentially pay for it. And when I pay $3k for a paper to be Open Access and it still cost $35 to read I'm wondering where is this money going to ?
If the journal were to offer the kind of services and actual guaranties that you mention, then I would be fine to pay more.
But that's far from being the case, and even in top journals you end up having to send corrections for changes made by clueless editors. During my PhD we had to complain as the final version of our paper "A 1mW IR laser..." was changed to "A laser (model 1mW-IR)..." without or consent, or even writing to us.
And you know what, even if it was the journal fault we ended up paying for the correction.
I'm sure you'd agree that there is value to curation. Who pays for that, and how, is the question.
It would be great that movement like this one send a signal to publishers that in the 21st century we are waiting from them more than what they are currently doing. I'm all for publisher like Nature to change and show what _can_ be done. First acknowledging this (like this article) is a great step. And some people in these journals are doing an extraordinary job internally[1]. Just hoping this could shake things and wake up some people in management.
[1] is one example http://www.nature.com/news/interactive-notebooks-sharing-the...
On one hand, such a deal would send a powerful signal. On the other hand, it does feel like it compromises the spirit of supporting open access.
Well ... of course. But how about access to the research? Because that's what this is all about: the science. We don't need access to "journals," we need access to scientific research.
However I may have a solution that suits the organization's need for funds which they need to continue to do their valuable work and also satisfies funders and that is to publish a totally unrefined version in a bulk WikiLeaks manner and then publish their properly edited and refined article within their magazine.
Not a very knowledgeable guy on the topic, but this could be a great way to retain the primary value and also satisfy other stakeholders.
To those who think their role as gatekeepers is no longer valid, I have to wonder what planet you are on that you don't think independent journals that compete are not a valid vehicle for ensuring claims are at least minimally justifiable AND that paying those professionals to do that kind of work is somehow wrong. Such a silly way of thinking.
I think you'd seriously have to show your working there, in detail. Nobody who does that work is paid, AIUI. The publisher probably does a bang-up job of the typesetting ...
Same with up/down votes. It can be a Brownian random walk.