UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher | Hacker News Reader

UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher

universityofcalifornia.edu

104 pointsSubiculumCode49 comments

It is unclear to me what the real impact of this deal is. The article spends about one sentence describing the deal directly:

"All research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s extensive portfolio of hybrid and open access journals will be open access by default."

There are a lot of caveats here. It sounds like this only applies to some journals and some articles. There are a whole lot of vague quotes about how great this is though. I'd be interested to see a more detailed analysis of the impact this will have.

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...

"All Cell Press and Lancet journals are part of the UC agreement. For these top journals, UC’s shared funding model — where the libraries share the cost of open access publishing with authors — will be phased in, with all Cell Press and Lancet journals integrated no later than 2023, midway through the four-year agreement."

"a limited number of societies that partner with Elsevier for their publishing have chosen to exclude their journals from transformative agreements, so their journals are not eligible for either reading, publishing, or both under the agreement. A list of these exclusions will be available soon and linked from this page."

I am genuinely surprised that the UC was able to get Elsevier to agree to this much, even if it does come up well short of their original list of demands [1].

I do wonder what this means for researchers, in particular there was no mention of publishing fees. Generally in hybrid journals there is a hefty price tag for open access (basically -- you are paying for the expected revenue generated by your paper...) so I could see that this means the publishing fees for a top Elsevier journal upwards of 5 figures--a price that research groups will now need to cover. I was at a talk by Nature about their Nature Photonics journal, and when asked if they would ever consider doing open access for Nature Photonics they said they have thought about it, but that it would cost them about $40,000 per paper for it to be commercially viable. Even though the peer review is free, they have a team of editors that need to get paid and they only publish 10-20 papers a month.

Also -- see the previous discussion with more focus on Elsevier's side of the story at [2]

[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/rm-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26379954

Clearly open access has costs, but how does Nature Photonics get to $40k/paper?? Is that how much revenue they expect to derive from the lifetime of the paper?

Only a few percent of papers submitted actually get published. There is some amount of work involved. Also, these top journals hire full time editors (former scientists in ther field).

Let’s say it’s 15 papers per month, so $40k * 15 * 12 = $7.2m for four editors. I’m not at all convinced. 40k per issue would be plausible.

I’m guessing that they were exaggerating a bit. I think nature now charges like 12k for open access with makes that number more reasonable.

The United States (or any government) should require that scientific papers funded in part or in whole by Government funds should be available to all citizens and residents at zero cost.

I am for open science in general, but I cannot help but worry about how this disincentivizes research funding. Why? If the U.S. did adopt such a policy, then all funded research does not just benefit the United States, but every nation. Nothing wrong with that, but then those other countries may feel that there is less need to fund their own science programs because they can leech off the United State's investment. Other countries might even close access to their science, and they'd receive benefit from our investment, but we would not benefit from theirs. Alternatively, we can take the view that it is not zero sum, that interactions in open science always makes it the rational decision to keep science open and to fund it.

This is a bizarre argument. Are you seriously saying that by not forcing universities to pay a for-profit European publishing conglomerate, the US is disincentivizing research?

Countries don't fund research because of what shows up (or not) in scientific journals from other countries that they can somehow glean. They fund researchers to do research in their countries because the trickle-down effect of PhD students, graduate students, prestige, and ultimately spin-off companies and economic benefit that comes from doing so.

This has nothing to do with research funding. Money paid for access to papers goes to publishers.

It's not like in music where the publishers get the lions' share and the artists get a fraction of that - in academic pubishing, it's 100% to publishers and not a single cent ever of the proceeds goes to authors or reviewers or to funding science programs.

And "closed access science" produced by USA is still available to researchers in every country despite the paywalls, all the serious universities have arranged subscriptions, it's just that currently they are paying a large fee to unnecessary middlemen (e.g. Netherlands' Elsevier) for that privilege.

Very unlikely. There are a lot of other benficial effects from research and applied research, beyond its publications. A well running academic body is also a job motor and entrepreneurship driver. Usually the methods and materials section of papers is so thin that they are hard to replicate anyway. As a nation you'd rather have the scientists than the papers of foreign scientists.

By that logic we should either stop training scientists or prevent people with Ph.Ds from working for non-US institutions.

> then all funded research does not just benefit the United States, but every nation

This is already the case, since every nation can easily buy access to Elsevier etc.

Yes but how about foreigners?

I don't think the US government has any moral obligation to foreigners in this regard. Don't get me wrong: it would be wonderful to provide open access to all, but I don't see an ethical problem with drawing the line at "those who paid for it", which is to say "those who pay taxes in the US.

And of course, feel free to substitute US with $COUNTRY.

Cannot do that - too much classified work :)

Also, some places where funding matches are used to bring stuff to fruition would lose significant funding from both sides: private would not in many cases invest where the results would be given away for free, and govt could not invest or match to help bring things to market.

For example the SBIR program would face significant problems, and it's responsible for a lot of good research and products. DARPA stuff would face the same issues.

Or, to keep such stuff not public, groups that currently publish would simply not publish in order to get funding to continue working. Then the public again loses access to knowledge.

Also, there is no such thing as zero cost - someone is going to have to pay to make such materials available - and that cost (even though small) will likely be borne by the taxpayers. For example, arxiv costs a few million a year to run.

Such solutions are unlikely to yield the results you want.

It seems like copyleft is a solution to that sort of problem in the software domain but obviously not really in this context.

Another issue is that animal researchers are at risk of being targeted by a smear campaign by anti-animal research groups as they often take advantage of sunshine laws to cherry pick less than flattering footage.

This has led to a weird culture of where scientists are very hesitant to share any data with other scientists at public universities.

Simple fix: anything govt funded that's published (say in a journal) must be made open access. Anything that's not published is not affected. This deal doesn't sound so great for UC. It doesn't appear to apply to the traditional closed journals which includes most of the high prestige ones. UC was doing fine with no active subscriptions, per a thread a few days ago.

Not arguing with your broader point, but the passage quoted above lists all Cell Press & Lancet journals. These would include, e.g., Cell, Neuron, etc., which are top-tier journals in their respective fields.

Funding institutions wouldn't match grants because the resulting paper was available for free rather than by paying $50 to a publisher?

Not all scientific papers become public. The OP wants to make them so. So in cases where the resulting papers would be classified or in proprietary publications these could no longer touch public money, no matter how small.

This affects every part of the research process. Buy an electron microscope with $1 of govt money and 1m of private, then can this be used for any research that is not 100% freely given to the public?

The cross contamination problems would be a nightmare.

It's a terrible proposal.

It works for NIH already. Don't like it, don't take the money.

PubMed costs a few hundred million a year to run, paid for by taxpayers. If you want us to just pay all journals to run directly from taxes, that's one solution. Then Elsevier can cut out the middleman.

If you don't want taxpayers paying publishers directly, then your solution will result in a lot less publications. I'm not sure either is going to be a better solution for society.

I'm not sure where you're getting these figures from.

> PubMed Central (PMC) costs US taxpayers about $4.45 million per year to run, according to documents recently obtained by an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/07/16/the-price-of-...

The National Library of Medicine's entire budget is $341 million, and they have brick and mortar buildings to maintain and many other responsibilities - there's no way that almost their entire budget would go to paying for PubMed.

PMC is a tiny part of what makes PubMed, and is even considered distinct from PubMed [1]. Dig up the budget for PubMed, not a tiny slice. I've been down this road many times....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed_Central

Nowhere in that link, nor the article on PubMed describes PMC as a part of PubMed. Moreover, the relevant legal act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008, requires NIH-funded research to be published in PMC, so it's PMC's budget that is relevant here.

>Nowhere in that link, nor the article on PubMed describes PMC as a part of PubMed

Yes, this is why I'm confused why you'd dispute the PubMed annual budget by posting PMC budget.

PubMed is much bigger and more widely used (NIH data shows it), and it gives free access to lots of papers, gene databanks, and other public sources.

You claimed that PMC is a part of PubMed, but there's nothing that says so. Anyway, NIH-funded research is required to be published on PMC, not PubMed, so the cost of PMC is the one to be examined for the question of a mandatory open access policy. So all of what PubMed does is entirely irrelevant to this question, since PMC is where these have to be published to.

$50? More like $2000-5000 to publish, then $50 to read one paper without a subscription (which itself is usually a multi-million dollar contract for Elsevier in the case of most US universities).

The US is probably one of the countries that declassify the most though. Try to get a European country or China to do that.

For those interested: financial reports of arxiv https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials

I don't think anybody wants to make confidential info open here. We are talking about things that end up in publishers hands not trade secrets, defense or what else. DARPA funds a ton of open research too. I find your comment a bit misleading here.

Kind of like this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

It's interesting to note that NIH's funding is not strictly limited to health care and medicine. Often adjacent technologies are also covered, such as sensors and data acquisition systems. I could occasionally found interesting EE/CS papers on NIH's website. It's funny - reading EE/CS papers on a medical website, but these open access papers are extremely helpful. It's your tax dollar at work (in a positive sense)!

For example,

* PRISEC: Comparison of Symmetric Key Algorithms for IoT Devices

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6806263/

Umm... that's already required? Or at least required by NIH which funds a huge amount of research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy

There is a proposal to expand that policy to every agency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Research_Public_Access...

In particular, it would be nice to see this as a condition of NSF grants.

It is the case, but usually only mandated after a year and only if you used federal funding. but now that there are preprints, we can see the research much faster so papers in expensive journals matter less (except for promotion where bean counters dtill ebjoy tjeir excel sheets to sum and multiply impact facotrs).

Great - yet another misaligned incentive to throw into the often stressful mix of how lead authorship should be determined!

So... UC researchers got scammed again. Now authors will have to pay both from their direct and indirect costs. The university just managed to save a large chunk of money (that is now the burden of researchers own funding) and Elsevier will make a shit ton of money with the deal.

A mutually beneficial agreement with Elsevier contains a huge lot of amount of very big money. For sure.

TLDR: Elsevier caved, big time. This is a big win for open science, imo.

Good job, University of California.

Not my read. The university caved and decided to use the researchers money to pay half of the contract with Elsevier.

Exactly: now each paper will have to be paid with the researcher’s funds...

"bringing together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output"

Frankly this figure seems much to high. Can anyone verify the numbers?

The UC System is not small at all.

Research Universities include: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz

Medical Schools/Research: UC Davis Health, UC Irvine Health, UCLA Health, UC San Diego Health, UC San Francisco Health.

UC helps manage national labs: Lawrence Berkeley Lawrence Livermore Los Alamos

I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Considering that the UC system is pretty dominate in California, and California on it's own is >10% of the US population it isn't surprising. Especially when you acknowledge that the universities within the UC system are some of the best in the country, and therefor attract out of state students.

UC is also really collaborative so they share a ton of papers with others

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