Two major research funders to bar grantees from publishing in hybrid journals | Hacker News Reader

Two major research funders to bar grantees from publishing in hybrid journals

sciencemag.org

186 pointssohkamyung51 comments

I just read Wellcome's announcement [1], which has this interesting bit:

> We will no longer cover the cost of OA publishing in subscription journals (‘hybrid OA’). We previously supported this model, but no longer believe that it supports a transition to full OA.

Whereas Plan S, IIRC, explicitly stated that research funded by them could not be published in hybrid journals, Wellcome merely states that they will not cover the cost - implying that well-resourced researchers are still allowed to use other funds to publish there?

Another interesting part of their OA policy is that they require organisations they fund to commit to DORA, i.e. to work towards not judging researchers on the names of the journals they publish in, but on the inherent quality of their work. In my opinion, this is the largest problem that is currently holding back the transition to open access and many other problems in science. (Disclaimer: I work on a project that hopes to solve this problem as well.)

[1] https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/wellcome-updating-its-open-acces...

For academia outsiders, like me: DORA is the San francisco Declaration on Research Assessment [https://sfdora.org/]

Currently, for "hybrid" journals, the researcher must pay a publishing fee, typically on the order of $2000-$3000. I have an independent postdoctoral fellowship, which means I have some funding, but not enough for it to make sense to pay. These fees essentially lock me out of open access publishing.

Of course, I could simply choose to publish only in open access journals (running the risk of career consequences). I hope changes like this will lead to increasingly prestigious fully open access journals. However, I have found the most practical option to be posting my papers on arXiv.

I don't know what field you're in, but in my field, nobody pays to publish, and everyone just puts pre-prints on their websites and everyone seems totally happy with that. Is pre-prints on websites or arXiv not an option for you for some reason?

The final sentence of GP's comment actually mentioned arXiv being most practical.

Yes I meant with a pre-print - it sounded like they meant putting them on arXiv instead of trying to publish in a journal at all?

Arxiv is not open to all fields.

I was responding to a comment asking whether arXiv was an option in response to someone saying arXiv was most practical, so I'm sure that person's field is welcomed on arXiv.

Because in most fields, preprints count for nothing. Not for priority, and certainly not for tenure decisions and the like. In fields like biology and chemistry an actual journal article is required (at least at present; there are attempts at preprint sites for biology at least but only enthusiasts use them at present). And publishing in a journal costs money one way or another. Either you expect your audience to have a journal subscription (which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year meaning that only large universities may subscribe), or you have to pay the costs of publishing your article yourself so that it is available for free. Neither are great options, but for most non-physics/math fields, those are the options.

Note that Plan S also states that the funders aim to push for academics to be recognised for the value of their research, not the name of the journal it was published in. Wellcome explicitly added to its requirements [1] that organisations they fund must also sign the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment, meaning that they should commit to this.

(Disclaimer: I work on a project that also has this goal.)

[1] https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/wellcome-updating-its-open-acces...

Note that this money goes to the journal editors; the major effort in publishing is reviewing which is a volunteer job.

> reviewing which is a volunteer job

No it's one of your paid professional responsibilities as part of your job, if you work in academic or industrial research, which is almost all reviewers.

Is that paid for by the journal out of the publishing fee?

No it's not. That doesn't make it 'volunteer' work for the researcher. You can count it as part of the fee the institution pays to the journal if you want, and I can understand not liking it, but it's not volunteer work.

When I was a referee (physics), it was most definitely not considered part of my job. I did it entirely voluntarily, was not paid for it, and no-one at my institution cared whether I chose to do it or not.

> and no-one at my institution cared whether I chose to do it or not

Are you speaking as a grad student, or faculty? Because if you don't review, sit on an organizing committee, or otherwise participate in the academic process in your field, you're not going to make it very far in your career. Our disciplines are smaller than you think, and people take notice, especially in your own department. Are you sure you don't have a reputation?

Thanks for your viewpoint. It is so different from the one that I saw (which field are you from btw?)

Both times I was asked to become a referee for a journal (during phd and then postdoc), it was because someone I knew was fed up of doing it, and wanted to pass it on to someone else. I volunteered because, like you, I knew someone ought to do it and felt that I should 'give something back' - especially because I liked the journals and had published in them. It was a (minor) distraction from my research (a couple of days every few months). The definite impression that I got from my colleagues (including more senior ones) was that it had little or no relevance to my career, compared to publications. It is not impossible that I misread the situation, but I doubt it. I would prefer the situation that you describe.

Interestingly, an economist I worked with (they tend to have a very slow review process) told me about an economics journal where you had to sign up to referee 1 paper for every paper you submitted, and pay a bond to ensure you did it. Just how one would expect rational economists to do it :)

I don't consider reviewing to be volunteer work, like say, running an after school club at the local middle school to teach kids how to program. I wouldn't list reviewing under the "service" section of my CV, but rather the "professional development" section. The reason being is that as an academic, I expect and require someone to step up and review my work when it comes time to publish it. If I don't want to pay for that work, then I better be willing to do it for free when someone asks me. You see, I'm getting something in return, so I don't think reviewing a paper is a very selfless thing to do.

Not very editors are well-paid either. Most of this money goes to publishing companies.

A pre-print is what it is: a version you put online before actually publishing your paper in a conference or a journal. In no field whatsoever an online pre-print is considered equivalent or sufficient compared to a peer-reviewed publication. I wonder which field you are talking about. We're talking about pay to publish here, not pay to read.

The pre-print loophole is exploited by people who publish in IEEE (electrical engineering) and ACM (computer science) which require assigining exclusive rights to the final article but not the final pre-print. After the final article is accepted but before publication a new clone is put up on their personal website with the name “final pre-print”.

It’s understood in these two fields in these two journals that IF the article was published, the “final pre-print” is identicle and is a “pre-print” in name only for licensing circumvention reasons.

Don’t know about other fields. But CS and EE are particularly prickly about this issue. See for instance Matt Blaze’s discussion: http://www.mattblaze.org/blog/copywrongs

For similar reasons Guinea Worm Wrap-up, the main publication about global progress on the eradication of Guinea Worm (a parasitic worm, like not a microbe, not virus, an actual worm, that bursts out of people's legs if they're infected - disgusting and, of course, painful) has a bit of text at the end that says this:

Inclusion of information in the Guinea Worm Wrap-Up does not constitute “publication” of that information.

>pre-prints on their websites

People don't realize how inadequate this is long-term. Hundreds of years from now when scholars look back at the early 21st century, it's going to look like the dark ages.

the Internet Archive may prevent this from happening, despite retroactive robots.txt declarations and other such nonsense

You can publish in the conferences and journals, which maintain the archives and (I think?) still physically print and deposit in libraries of record.

But still also put the pre-print on your website.

Institutions with pro-OA policies will either require their employees to shove stuff into their own archive, or they'll automatically crawl their staff's sites to add to the archives. Those archives are usually controlled by the same department as the university's library, people who already have some idea about preserving things for "hundreds of years from now".

In the UK the funding mechanism for (some?) academic research hinges on publication data so there's a rationale for bean counters to ensure the archive is properly funded - if you build this Open Access archive you get the data for your funding paperwork as an output. So this creates an incentive even in fields where Open Access is not normal.

(e.g. big swathes of Physics are OA, same in Computer Science, but for all I know Paleontology is a desert for open access)

In Physics, I was told that pre-prints were only useful if you had no other way to access the canonical version of the paper (in my university, we didn't have access to a bunch of large journals and there's no way I'm paying hundreds of dollars for papers for a summer research project). In my experience, pre-prints often have different information than that actual published version (though I made sure any papers I co-authored would have identical versions in both).

I obviously found this quite concerning, given that I also work in the world of free software and I know how much of a benefit public access has in a field as opaque as software (let alone something as important to human development as science). But it is the reality, because there is still a view that pre-prints are only meant to be a place to stash away your first drafts of a paper and that the actual journal is where the real paper is stored. Luckily the journal I submitted to (MNRAS) didn't care about submitting pre-prints to arXiv (some do).

(Don't get me started on the fact that some journals still require you to pay them for papers written in the early 1900s. The authors are long-dead, and you've made more than enough commission on Feynman's papers on positrons.)

My perception is that CS is the only field which has generally normalized and accepted pre-prints in lieu of formally peer-reviewed articles. I can say that in my field (Health Sciences), biorXiv is the most applicable pre-print site, but in my experience, none of my colleagues have heard of it.

An important but as-yet rather underspecified part of the Plan S is to find different reward structures that remove the pressure to publish in "prestigious" journals and move to a system that mainly focuses on the quality of research. It will be interesting to see what they come up with here, and whether that will be successful.

(Disclaimer: I am working on a project that hopes to improve the prestige for open access publications and preprints.)

I think all of this is generally a step in the right direction but am worried about where it is leading, for two reasons:

1. My experience with the frontiers of open access science in my field have been concerning, in that it seems to feed even more off of the social media hype-TED-talk branch of academics that I see as just as much a problem. That is, with traditional closed publishing, you have lack of access to the public and lack of transparency which seems unacceptable, but with very open access platform things can turn into a petty social media popularity contest. Yes, you get your stuff out, but the dynamics can be very different and feel more like a glorified flamewar ala reddit or old-style USENET groups.

Related to this, I think the way peer review plays out in different fields is very different. So, arXiv stuff might seem normal in comp sci, math, stats, but if you ever want to see uptake of that in an applied field, it had better have a rubber stamp of peer review or no one will touch it.

2. Unfortunately, at many universities, at least in the US and the UK, the pressure and nonsense has moved (increased?) from publishing from prestigious journals into grants. That is, the power structures underlying this all are indirect costs (in the US) subsidizing universities. The problems with this are problems in the way grant monies are allocated and awarded, the kind of "slush fund" quality of the indirect costs that afford universities profits, and the vast inequities across disciplines and topic areas in terms of what requires funding and what is popular at any given time (some research, for example, just requires less money to conduct; this should be a good thing for research funding, but is a bad thing from the university perspective because there's less indirect money to siphon off of).

The reason why I bring this up here is because I think the publishing problem and grant problem are kind of linked, but in a way that makes the open access issue kind of missing the target in terms of where the big problems with academics currently are. I worry, for example, that if you move to a model where everyone just publishes whatever anywhere, it turns academics into a giant flamewar, decreases the value of good research per se even more relative to grant receipts (because it's all fuzzy anyway and everyone can post anything to arXiv), etc.

I definitely think academic publishing needs to become totally open. But my current sense is that there isn't a good infrastructure to replace it in many fields, especially the biomedical fields, and pathologies in those areas will just sort of rip what's left of its integrity apart.

Don't publishers like plos provide a hardship exemption precisely for folks like you?

Is there any reason not to do what DJB does?

https://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html - basically he puts his papers in public domain and then publishes them both on his site and on a normal journal.

Not that I disagree with the strategy, but DJB also has no career risk. The way you know that is that I am not in his field and I know what the abbreviation stands for.

Some journals will not accept a paper that they do not have exclusivity on.

Bravo, this is a huge deal, more to likely follow, it rather seems a secular shift is inevitable at least in some manner. One wonders where this will end and what it will mean for classical publishing. In my experience, incumbent industries are more powerful than we'd imagine, and I'll bet that rather than witnessing classical publishing overturned, we'll just arrive at some kind of new equilibrium.

Agreed, I hope this helps ends the period of time where research funds were funneled to publishing houses by the billions instead of being used for their intended purpose, which is to do research. The time where they provided a useful service is long over. There are enough reputable open access channels now to be able to stop depending on closed access.

I expect the next few years, most universities will stop paying the likes of Elsevier except maybe on a case by case basis for access to older articles outside of the scope of these rules.

Elsevier has revenues of $2.5 billion and profits of around $1 billion. Double that to include other for-profit journals and you're still looking at only $2 billion.

While that's certainly a significant sum of money, it is but a small fraction of science expenditures: The US (federal) government alone spends around $150 billion p. a.

The fact that the latter has shrunk by about a third over the last decades (in terms of % of GDP) leads to my point: It seems that the issue of publishing is easily grasped and evokes some sort of deep-seated notions of fairness (or lack therefore). In turn, it gets a far larger share of our collective attention and outrage than warranted by the numbers alone.

The numbers regarding Elsevier's revenue vs profit also point to another often-neglected fact: being for-profit journals and having the luxury of not having to pay authors or reviewers does not mean that nothing of value is added by Elsevier. That misconception is why it often takes people by surprise to learn that Open Access journals need to collect hefty fees from authors.

Even Elsevier's profits may not entirely represent saving to be easily realised. Because nothing says that they manage to capture 100% of the value they are adding. In fact, it's very unlikely that they do, considering nobody has ever managed to pull of such a remarkable feat of capitalism. And the problems of switching to open access journals we have seen ever since the idea came up 10+ years ago illustrate this point rather well: We can collective groan whenever publications in Nature and Science are used as a proxy for research accomplishment. But the insistence of smart people to use them as such, when (trust me here) they have heard arguments against that practice myriad times, points at the fact that such proxies are needed, and that none better have yet emerged.

Any expectation of reducing costs by switching to open access should probably be discarded.

The benefit to be gained is something different, and the movement's name hints at it. In economic terms, it's the "deadweight loss" of the general public being priced out of this market (and the less-general public that happens to work at a research institute not able to afford every single journal subscription).

This is the age-old conundrum of copyright: We'd love to let you read this, and we understand that you can't afford its current price. But if we do, anybody would claim the new, lower, price. And the new price/volume equilibrium would not cover the costs of production.

Moving to open access is therefore not much different than suggestions for a "cultural flat-rate" or a tax-funded creative industry. It's going to be interesting how it turns out.

> points at the fact that such proxies are needed, and that none better have yet emerged.

Yes, I feel that this is the core issue: we keep relying on journal brand names as some sort of proxy for a vague notion of "academic excellence". That is what is driving these prices up disproportionately, and which results in publishers like Elsevier being able to capture so much money merely (or at least primarily) for being the owners of those brand names, rather than for actual value they are adding. This fundamental unfairness is what gets people riled up, and what also feels like an "easy" way to increase funding for research, even if "just" by less than one perfect of US federal spending. (Which still is significant.)

Of course, there is also the hope that by lowering the barrier to contribute to the scientific process, we can increase the pace with which we do research.

> But the insistence of smart people to use them as such, when (trust me here) they have heard arguments against that practice myriad times, points at the fact that such proxies are needed, and that none better have yet emerged.

No. It points to a coordination/collective action problem. Everyone knows that they should switch away from Elsevier, and if everyone did, we'd be better off, but every single author, by switching, would incur only the costs, and no benefits. Your argument above neglects this.

It is tempting to say that the status quo is optimal, because otherwise it would not be the status quo, but it doesn't fly here. And I find Elsevier etc. above-market returns on equity, and capturing more than 1% of public science expenditure, without adding much, quite scandalous.

EDIT to add: Sometimes, the coordination problem can be solved. For example, in 2003, nestor of CS Don Knuth managed to pull everyone from Elsevier's Journal of Algorithms over to a new journal, after writing a bitter letter complaining about their pricing:

> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf

2 billion is a lot of research money. You can do a ton of interesting stuff with that. And that's just Elsevier. You are right that universities have a lot of other inefficiencies. E.g. admin cost relative to actual staff or students is kind of ridiculous in a lot of places.

I'm sure publishers have cost. But looking at the core business of reviewing and editing, that is actually mostly outsourced to researchers. I did quite a bit of that myself when I was still publishing. Payments did not factor into this. It was more a quid pro quo kind of thing.

Open access has already provided enough of an alternative that scores of universities and research funds insist on using that. I'm not seeing that trend reverse. This will stop being optional in most places. Whether Elsevier likes this or not, they'll have to adapt to this. Whether they survive or not is entirely their problem.

Open access is of course not free either but it doesn't involve university libraries paying subscription fees. Typically, many open access journals expect a compensation for publishing. Typically those fees are proportional to the cost of publishing. Universities pay for their output; which is much more reasonable. Think of it as a marketing budget for their research. Also, you can compare open access journals on their merits, reputation, and price and make a more informative choice about how to allocate your publishing budgets.

I doubt the likes of Elsevier will be able to get anywhere near the revenues they have been leaching for decades if they adopt open access. That kind of is the main point. I think this is also the reason they are resisting this. That business model collapses with open access.

Wellcome and the Gates Foundation have long been on the forefront of the transition to Open Access, and it's good (and luckily unsurprising) to see them join the front ranks here as well.

Note that the original consortium has already expanded from the initial 11 as well Wikipedia currently lists 14.

So , they 'll switch some of their major journals to open-access-only and everyone will publish there. The publishing fee remains, and honestly i don't see the progress to better peer review, like for example, publishing of the reviews along with the manuscript

The main reason for this is that the goal of Plan S is not to improve the peer review system; its goal is to make more research openly accessible, and to limit the costs of doing so (it also involves a cap on publishing fees, though an exact amount has not been specified, and apparently Wellcome will not adhere to that part of the plan).

scihub does that already tbh. And arxiv/biorxiv

Sure, but Sci-Hub is not a sustainable long-term solution, still relies on the traditional paywalled publishing system, and doesn't legally make works available under an open license. arXiv and other preprint servers are limited in their reach.

We're certainly not in Open Access utopia yet, and anything that brings that closer should be commended, in my opinion, not criticised for not achieving other goals such as improving the system of peer review.

I don't know. Open access has been advocated for 15+ years, but scihub has the most impact in everyday work. At this point i think we should push for governmental intervention that retroactively abolishes the copyrights for all existing publicly-funded works or otherwise mandates the creation of publicly-accessible copies.

Yes, Sci-Hub has been a great boon. It's still not a sustainable long-term solution though, and not only do we need to abolish copyright for existing published work (whose copyright will already eventually -but only after far too long a time- expire), but also make sure that future published work will become immediately available to access and re-use. That's what this is about. (Note that Plan S was initiated by governmental organisations, so there's the governmental intervention for you.)

There are a few journals out there doing open peer review. Perhaps one of the most notable in the context of this article is Wellcome Open Research. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/

elifesciences does it now

https://elifesciences.org/articles/36545

I have a couple questions due to lack of background and/or perspective in these matters:

  - What is the new business model that is forced upon these scientific journals?

  - Also, would this move influence the quality of content in the published papers?

- There is no new business model enforced; that's up to the journals to figure out. However, the currently dominant model is an author-pays model, where authors pay a publishing fee ("Article Processing Charges", APCs) rather than readers paying a subscription fee. These funders explicitly free up funds to pay those fees, although this plan does include a stipulation to put a cap on those fees, since they tend to rise uncontrollably. (Although according to this article, Wellcome Trust will not be applying this cap, but will keep an eye on these fees itself.)

- There is nothing in these plans that should affect the quality of the content. Open Access journals can maintain exactly the same system of peer review as their subscription-based equivalents.

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