Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

english.eu2016.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 137 posts

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#31

Post by cyphar »

lomnakkus wrote: post #10

If this actually pans out, it could be incredible. It always saddens me to get a link to a scientific paper and to hit my head on the paywall. There's of course the "(partially) publicly funded" qualifier, but I don't remember too much privately funded research in the journals that I read as a CS undergrad, so hopefully it won't matter too much. (I guess other areas such as Chemistry, Biology might be more prone to f…

What's even more frustrating is when you're a student at a university and you still can't get access to a paper because your library doesn't have a subscription to that specific journal. arXiv was the best thing to happen to physics papers, and SciHub is doing the same (but less legal).

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#32

Post by dahart »

intrasight wrote: post #12

What does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide.

I don't know, but speculating on what seems most reasonable, I wouldn't assume that publishers will have any burdens forced upon them apart from losing exclusive control. I'd guess that it means publishers simply don't get exclusive copyrights.

Who has the burden of publishing the free access could be the researchers themselves, or the universities, or the government, I think there are a lot of options besides the current private for-profit publishers.

I also wouldn't assume that much will change in practice immediately -- while the research and data might be available for free, some publishers do currently provide some value above and beyond access. Curation, editing, indexing, quality control, prestige, print versions, conferences, etc. - all things that free access doesn't necessarily come with.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#33

Post by fredoliveira »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #13

If trump wanted to help win over the science crowd, he could make this an issue. Seems more likely to come from Bernie though.

I struggle to see how or why a candidate who's proven to not necessarily have a stance on _any_ issues would want to do something like this to appeal "to the science crowd".

In fact, that's exactly the crowd I'd consider the hardest to win by a candidate such as Trump. You know, critical thinking being a thing and all.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#37

Post by takluyver »

jwildeboer wrote: post #35

Next step: As they have an exception for "IP" (intellectual property rights like patents) we must promote the logical consequence. All publicly funded research must mean all "IP" must be made available to anyone for free.

That's probably unlikely, because patents are a source of potential revenue for universities, whereas journal subscriptions are a cost.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#38

Post by return0 »

> must be freely accessible to everyone

When? Open access after 12 months has different cost than immediate open access, and, at the pace of today's research, is not open access at all. And ERC funded research already requires open access publishing anyway.

Why not demand publishing to open access/nonprofit journals instead? Why does EU have to pay elsevier $2000-5000 per article?

This does not seem significant to me.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#39

Post by return0 »

intrasight wrote: post #12

What does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide.

It means EU funds will pay elsevier a fee for every article to make them open access.
Post reply on HN