Japan's push to make all research open access
nature.com
nature.com
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
[1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of...
> The term "open access" is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed "pay to publish". [1]
[1] Seems to be about how OA is done in countries that aren't Japan.
"Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on 'green OA' — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi.
Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities."
The current implementation of OA (any of them) is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy: we convinced ourselves that “publishers are evil” and impossible to get rid of, and now we are paying them so that they don’t have to do their job. We basically retired publishers early with an extra pension, all because everyone “wants to believe” in open access. But guess what? This is not disruptive. OA is just as “capitalist evil” as the usual publishing, or even more so. Do you want to be disruptive? The disrupt. Get rid of the publishers. Or at least constrain funding only to not-for-profits for example.
There's no APC with Green OA, so what money are you talking about? Green OA is regular publishing, but with self archiving. There will be a version freely available, and the publishers aren't paid for that privilege.
If you want a route to the death of publishers, green OA is a promising one.
(I think the headline ought to emphasise that this is pushing green OA, which is the interesting bit)
that's not how it works. you don't pay anything.
I think this is backwards. The definitive version that should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the paywalled version.
This is already the case, almost wveryone puts the preprints on arxiv/SSRN
Social sciences may be behind though as you say, I do not know as I'm not in that field.
That matters for a few reasons:
(1) the average person more frequently encounters psychological, social and medical issues more than they do math problems. And since the research in those fields tends to be pay walled, people are at the mercy of things like SEO spam medical and health sites.
(2) wrong ideas in medicine or psychology can (and have in the past) damaged entire generations of people. So in that sense their blast radius can be very large. This means that peer review is especially important and that there's a potential negative externality to posting preprints and drafts before they're finalized. I suspect we'd have to solve the peer review and quality problem before STEM-style preprint archives become the norms in all fields.
Much of the medical and life sciences space does not publish on Arxiv or OA platforms.
It's slowly changing with Green OA initiatives being pushed by government donors, but not there yet.
> Social sciences may be behind though as you say
Econ, a lot of PoliSci, Finance/Business, and Computational Linguistics was very early on the OA/Working Paper movement.
That's just bs. They can make a law fixing that for free but won't. It's not can, but will which is the problem.
What is this bullshit? How is copying text around suddenly costly?
india's research repository. all phd thesis and everything is here.
PS: And by the way, if you say that “not every country has access to these libraries” then think about whether they have money to pay for APCs.
Prestigious journals have very low (single-digit percentage) acceptance rates.
One or two rungs down, the standard domain-specific journals are still rigorous, and you need to do substantial work to get published in them. It's a hurdle that any decent graduate student with a good advisor can pass, but it's not as if you can just write anything and get published.
There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.
> I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.
Doing a literature review is not that difficult. You begin with a few highly cited papers. Then you look at what papers they reference in the intro. You also look at the list of papers that cite them and sort by the number of citations. You can work in both directions and pretty quickly establish what the important papers in the field are.
Notice that the important thing here is to look at citations. Getting a paper into a journal is only the first, most basic step. Peer review is only an initial quality check. Over time, other scientists decide what papers are important and cite them. If a paper racks up 100 citations, that means a lot more than just passing peer review.
Yes, but the point is not that the good journals are not there, it’s that the good ones are drowned out by the absolute humongous amount of garbage that comes out every day. If you do research you know that it’s not so simple like “oh I only read papers from journals X and Y”. Good research comes out everywhere, and if you don’t cite it people (I mean reviewers, if you can call them that) will complain, and anyway you’ll be putting yourself in a bubble which is bad practice. It used to be that journals would do the work for you to separate good from bad research, but nowadays it’s on the researcher to dig through 1000 papers to find a single good one. It’s ridiculous and meaningless. If we’re paying them and making them rich, at least I’d expect them to do their job.
There exist publishers that, instead of being part of big media outlets, a run by research organizations themselves (e.g. EMBO press). I agree that it would be nice if more would be published there.
At least when publishing was an actual market (instead of being just a money sink) the publishers had to actually do their job to survive.
> Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money
The only pressure I ever get is from editors (i.e., other mathematicians, who make all the final decisions), if I'm taking too long and they want me to hurry up.
If a representative of the publisher attempted to pressure me for any reason, then my response would be less than polite.
Occasionally I have gotten review requests from "pay to publish" journals which will publish pretty much anything, and which don't have any credibility within the math community. These, I simply delete as spam.
Most people say “we’ll just don’t read/cite them” but the fact is that there is no clear red line; it’s all foggy. In order to look at a paper and say “I will not read you because you are crap” you need to spend some time with it, and if you have 2000 of them, that translates to a lot of wasted time. The reason why journals are supposed to do serious peer review was exactly so that we don’t have to do it ourselves.
These pressures are harder to notice, without population level data.
As others have pointed out, some countries mandate national or institutional repositories.
A good grassroots way out of this is educating researchers to always take one of these options. Let publishers overplay their hand and get crushed.
Of course, it would be nicer if regulators realized how ridiculous this all is and crushed them without the need for public outcry, but one may dream.
So the first draft before review - the one you wrote all on your own - is what you can put up online. I'm not in CS but I assume the logic is similar in other fields.
They also provided a separate link of the final published PDF that you could use to distribute the paper to colleagues and interested parties. This link worked for a sufficiently long period of X amount of days/months. After that it was paywalled and in their garden
This is a choice that European countries are making that has nothing to do with open access. You can always choose to overpay well-connected insider contractors to accomplish any of the functions of government.
I could be wrong, but I don't think PC chairs are paid, by anybody. Maybe they get free housing at the conference, but this is more of a consolation prize given the amount of work involved.
Certainly the rank and file PC members don't get anything. I was on one PC mailing list where one of the organizers accidentally let slip that (some) organizers get free housing, and there was a big uproar in the PC. None of us get anything like that.
So this is literally a system where the expert reviewers get nothing, and even the chairs in charge do it nearly for free. What part of this needs to cost money?
The peer review comes from the community. The exclusivity and filter comes from the community. Even the funding comes from the community, because community members pay to go to the conference.
What the publisher does is, as GP noted, mainly to host PDFs on a website and make sure they stay up. That costs something, but nothing like what the licensing fees for these services are (or the so-called "open access" fees that we now pay).
Black OA means hacking journals and making their papers free for all.
That's the only OA we need to invest in. Make the BOA ratio into a perfect 1.0, and all other problems with OA vanish.
1. Green OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author waives copyright
2. Diamond OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author KEEPS copyright
3. Black OA: free for readers, pirated by hackers; DISREGARDS copyright
See my other note where I argue that BOA is the most important one, since it does not depend on state funding or publisher largesse. It simply seizes the knowledge that must be seized.
I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences. It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data. And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.
it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.
We've had this system for years now and it feels like it barely made a blip.
>Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities.
One should note that this isn't too expensive because of associated costs: it's that the for-profit publishers keep ratcheting up the cost. Nature-group journals now take more than ten grand in OA fees per paper, which is not justified by any associated cost. They're typesetting a PDF and hosting it for ten grand a PDF.
It’s more or less the same in the UK and France as well.
> I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences.
IIRC in the UK it does not count in the national performance assessment it if is not in an open repository.
> It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data.
Yeah. Data is a big problem. There are many different types that cannot be handled just like a pdf (tons of files in the same dataset, huge archives and everything in between). It’s a huge lot of storage space, the vast majority of which will never be even accessed, never mind used. I’ve been part of several initiatives and it is not easy to set up.
> And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.
That’s a damn shame. The British government is doing a lot of things right with their open access policy, but a thing that works quite well in France is that there is a single national repository ( https://hal.science : it voild be better indexed but it does show up on Google Scholar) and everyone uses it. This is the sort of things that makes sense at the national level. A myriad of small repositories on obscure university websites is not very helpful. That way it also does not depend on the (possible lack of) willingness of individual institutions to fund it and do it properly.
> it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.
If we’re really serious about open access, only articles in a public repository should count. All the legal issues there used to be were cleared up, the infrastructure is there (things like arxiv can be used as a last resort for governments or institutions that won’t get their ducks in a row). The issue is really lack of good will.
But it's odd that the paper must be in the institute's repository and not one of a larger list of preprint servers. I would assume the authors would much rather put a paper on arXiv than on their shoddy university repository.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by...
The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement.
My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.
That being said, there are also issues with opening the gates to anyone to get your data and use it to publish; https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
My data is OA, but I'd appreciate any one wanting to use to first reach out and discuss any nuances that may influence their analysis.
By signing DORA, the university leadership has stated support for a principle about how hiring and promotion decisions should be made. But it may take a few years before that principle is fully absorbed by the faculty committees who actually evaluate candidates.
https://www.eiopa.europa.eu/digital-operational-resilience-a...
are we pretending pdf hosting is actually costly or what? the devil should hire better advocates
Oh, are you not a student or teacher or employee here at the University of XYZ? I'm sorry, this research is not 'freely' available to you.
Are they say more like "curators"?
The million dollar question is why don't researchers publish on journals that don't charge outrageous open-access fees. Here the main problemis that carreer advancement is predicated on publishing in prestigious venues. Such venues take advantage of that by jacking their price. Fixing this will require cooperation from governments, which have leverage on both sides of the equation: they can help fund alternative paper repositories, and they are ultimately responsible for the rating criteria of what venues are prestigious and how research grants get awarded.
It’s not that those things aren’t important in a functional economy, but that your absolute thinking cannot explain open source, and thus your theory is incomplete to explain human activity.
For a fair comparison of “advancement” in open source you have to discuss free open source applications where a commercial version of a similar app exists.
Photoshop vs Gimp, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Microsoft office vs libre etc etc. objectively speaking the commercial version is going to be better across the board.
Open source variants are getting closer these days like Blender and Godot but you’re on a different scale of waiting for those advances to catch up vs the commercial for profit versions.
> The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.