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

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

#111

Post by witty_username »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #85
alex_hirner wrote: post #46

To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain. The current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian.

Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub wh…

> GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...?

Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.

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

#112

Post by coldtea »

Tehnix wrote: post #102
merijnv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahahahahaha. First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never enough money. Second of all: Most researchers HATE academic publishers and being forced to sign over their copyright to a paywall in exchange for nothing. But institutional evaluation criteria force you to do so. EU banning non-open publications will force publishers to allow open access OR force universities to revise their criter…

>Ahahahahaha. >First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never enough money. What if though, they actually get their money from private funding, like a ton of research projects do. You cast this of as a thing even weird to even consider, but this just implies you don't seem to have found yourself in academia ever (or if so, without any actual colleagues). I certainly agree that no researcher…

>What if though, they actually get their money from private funding, like a ton of research projects do.

You'd be surprised how few those are. Even in the biggest private/public companies there are tons of research and tech subsidies, tax-cut deals and other schemes involved which end up in tons of government (our) cash. Those pay for lots of things, including part of their R&D.

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

#113

Post by nazgul17 »

acaloiar wrote: post #28
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 can't speak for the EU, but since my work last year was NIH-funded, we made it freely available via arXiv ( http://arxiv.org/ ). This seems to be common practice.

I am curious: doesn't this negatively affect your evaluation score with your university? How do you deal with this?

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

#114

Post by norswap »

To contextualize the discussion on "open access" (the practice of editors that ask for a sum of money in order to make the paper available). It costs a lot: about 1k for ACM venues. Currently I have to pay for this out of my own budget, and I don't have that kind of money (I'm a PhD student, and in addition to my scholarship (1.8k€/month net of tax, in Belgium), I get a 5k€ budget for two years that must cover material and travel -- I can also get about one additional travel grant per year).

Publisher have about zero added value except fixing the odd latex issue. Actual editorial work is assumed free of charge by professors. Other venues such as Arxiv and CiteSeerX do a better job of distribution for free. Science publishers are leeches in the system and should be removed.

I think the EU a measure will precipitate the current movement against such predatorial publishing practice. Already, publishers are walking on eggs. They move against sci-hub but they'd never dare to go against the common practice to just host everything one publishes publicly, license notwithstanding, something almost everyone does in the CS field -- maybe they say it's a "draft"... (meaning there isn't a copyright notice mostly).

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

#115

Post by conceit »

adrianN wrote: post #94
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund Most researchers will publish in journals that publish open access for a fee and the money for the fee has to come from somewhere. So in the end the public will spend as much money as they are doing so far.

Maybe, but currently people outside of universities have a really hard time getting research papers (legally, anyway). So even if the costs stay about the same, a lot more people will have access to the results.

Which doesn't help much if pay-per-view journals are still cited.

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

#116

Post by zbjornson »

olalonde wrote: post #87
hackuser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund In fairness, we pay twice for many things, such a toll roads. The first payment isn't always sufficient.

But at least when you pay your toll, the money goes to the government and not some private corporation.

Unless it's a private highway, although theoretically the owner saddled the cost of building it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highway

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

#117

Post by dadkins »

Interestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public domain. Journals have no problem publishing those. I think one direction this could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put their work in the public domain.

Journals don't need copyright to function. There's still value in editing, peer review, and distribution. They're just being greedy by insisting on it.

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

#118

Post by tmalsburg2 »

witty_username wrote: post #111
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub wh…

> GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.

Many people leave academia after a post-doc or two, most actually. These people will not have any incentive to manage their research data for the rest of their lives and the data will eventually be lost, unless GitHub continues to exist in its current form for the next half century, with is rather unlikely. For this reason we need dedicated research repositories that are managed by publicly funded non-profits. Zenodo.org is one example but I'm not sure if they have long-term funding.

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

#119

Post by tmalsburg2 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #103
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access publishing. I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the best approach. The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge for that. Very simple.

The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane. Publishers currently have ridiculous profit margins, and of course they're going to try and maintain them. Unless some US/EU regulations kick in and set a reasonable max limit to open access fees, the situation is just as bad (perhaps even worse) than the status quo: Now, researchers from "poor" universities, small research institutuons, third world countri…

> The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane.

I'm confident that the market will take care of this. If there are people who can't or don't want to pay $3000 for an article and the profit margins are huge, there is room for journals who offer a better deal.

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

#120

Post by alaskanloops »

edwinksl wrote: post #58
mrweasel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is one of those things thats just so common sense It really is, the public paid for the research, it rightfully belongs to the public.

Except it hasn't been like that for decades.

What happened? Where/why/how did it change?
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