Springer Nature open access agreement and Elsevier update
evcp.berkeley.edu
evcp.berkeley.edu
>While broad-based open access publishing in the most well-known Nature subscription journals is not initially included, the deal commits Springer Nature and UC to a Nature open science pilot in 2021 and to the development of plans for a transformative agreement for all of the Nature journals to be implemented in 2022.
So for now this does seem not include Nature and likely neither the field specific Nature... (physics, photonics, materials...) journals. Which are the ones that are clearly interesting. This seems very similar to the typical deals from Elsevier, Springer... to include only sell bundles of journals with their high profile journals with lots of journals that nobody wants. Just in this case it's we include open access on all these journals that nobody cares about, but not in the view journals that everyone cares about.
>Under the agreement, all articles with a UC corresponding author published in more than 2,700 of Springer Nature’s journals will be open access by default, with the UC Libraries paying a portion of the open access fee on behalf of all authors. Authors without available research funds for the remainder of the publishing fee can request that the Library cover the entire amount. Authors may also choose to opt out of open access publishing if they wish.
However, this seems to be severely limiting. So basically all research projects have to redirect funds to cover part of the "open access fees" or they have the dubious option to "opt out". The library only being willing to pay on case-by-case base means that there will be hidden disincentives in place.
Essentially that means that projects that are not willing to pay money to SpringerNature will be at a disadvantage.
I wonder which mechanisms were implemented to prevent them from arbitrarily increasing open access fees? This is conspicuously absent from the article.
Yes, the cost of publishing results, as well as review, editing, etc, should be incorporated into the research budget (researchers can of course choose other means of sharing their findings than through publication). In an open access model, the publishing costs are offset by money saved in not paying for access to other articles the research project needs. I would hope that opting out means that projects have to pay fees on articles they'd otherwise get for free through this agreement, rather than riding on everyone else doing their bit.
One would imagine the fee schedule is set in the agreement UCB reached with Springer (presumably the agreement will be published at some point...)
So, only the most widely-distributed papers will be "open access", and then only if the authors cough up an "open access fee"? Doesn't sound very open to me.
I agree. Authors with limited fundings will have trouble getting their papers open access. The UC library claims that they may cover the fee, but hopefully this process will be simple. Otherwise, the papers most widely circulated might come from a smaller circle of authors with more access to funding, i.e. a net loss in scientific diversity of thought.
Outside of narrow fields, it was often the case that you would need to cough up an amount in the thousands to publish as open-access.
Check out Elsevier's own page (https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access) where they list a price between $150 USD and $6000 USD depending on journal and article. On that page you can find a pricing sheet where out of 2340 journals they list, only 83 have an open-access fee of less than $1000 USD.
Springer Nature's fees seem similar, so hopefully this agreement brings down the cost as well.
The whole of academic publishing is a mess, and really needs large universities pushing the open access agenda. In a perfect world, academic journals would be run by non-profit entities and exist solely for the betterment of academia, but sadly large publishers like Elsevier turn billions in profit each year, lining their pockets with money leeched out of grants and universities.
Itself a tremendous affront to the public, which funds most research.
Edit: Still, this is good news and better than before.
The sad thing about #2 is that said object stores could archive digital artifacts such as code and data sets, and they could provide an open API for the development of improved tools and user interfaces, but legacy publishers like Elsevier don't seem to be interested in such improvements. Technical societies (ACM, IEEE) don't seem to be much better.
"Science advances one funeral at a time."
When prestige signalling is no longer tied to those journals, the publishers will lose their leverage.
I'd love to see a group of researchers band together and all agree to publish in some alternative to Nature. Leave no 'prestigious' authors publishing there. And let the cabal that are stuck in that thinking realize everyone is walking away from them and making them irrelevant.
It's theoretically possible that academics collectively decide that closed-access journals are off limits and start over with a new set of open access journals - but I suppose they are rather doing what they can (or relying on university administrations) to push for publishers to change this "exploitative" economic model (where the public essentially pays twice - first to do the research and then second to have access to read it).
While academics define themselves by innovation, there is a very strong adherence to establishment and institutions (like the traditional peer-reviewed publishing model, though there are good arguments for this as evidenced by problems caused by unpeer-reviewed preprints that have hastily made their way into public discourse during coronavirus). The hope is that academics don't have to throw away a method for signaling publication quality (or rather, perceived potential for impact) that has pretty been a part of the entire history of modern science. Whether it's a true mark of quality or not is a different matter; the most prestigious journals also have the highest retraction rates.
In Europe, funding agencies have begun requiring publication in open access journals as a stipulation for receiving funding, and this has driven journal publishers to provide an option for authors to pay for the publication (which is paid out of grant funding). However, this is not still not pervasive because there are still many funding sources that don't require it. Publication fees for authors are quite steep (around $3k per article; a productive lab may publish something on the order of 10 per year), and if the grant doesn't specify that they would cover open access publication fees then researchers tend to squeeze everything toward covering costs to do the research (equipment, personnel, travel to meet up with collaborators or other researchers).
I once spoke to someone at a conference on the subject of publishing (maybe some 6 years ago) who told me about a journal coup where a large majority of the editors and staff for a journal quit and started their own journal which was well received in the field and quickly becoming the journal of record. I can't quite remember what field it was, but I think it may have been related to neurology (non-human IIRC, as the individual had just given a presentation on cuttlefish cognition).
Anyway, for a close community of researchers on a specific topic, it's possible that they can make such agreement (to start over with another journal) - but in general it would be quite difficult to coordinate such a consensus in a larger community.
Even if journals are not considered prestigious in the traditional sense (often measured by what is called an impact factor - related to the average number of citations its papers receive), publishing in them still marks membership in a particular community (e.g., certain types of papers or papers addressing a certain topic have historically been published in X; following the succession of your academic forebearers).
So there is a lot of incentive not to scrap the current journals and start anew.