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European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

sciencemag.org

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Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#41

Post by beevai142 »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

> When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.

Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#42

Post by pavlov »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. --- It's rightly owned by the publishers.

Are you American? I ask because this comment reflects a particularly American notion of property as an immutable, "God-given" right. In this thinking, governments exist to protect private property, not define it.

As someone else pointed out, the concept of intellectual property only exists in law that is inherently mutable. And whether the government can take away someone's property by redefining it as not property -- that's a question over which Americans once fought a bloody civil war.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#43

Post by whazor »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

You should not forget that governments are above money and law. They could essentially change IP property laws. It is about academic freedom which EU citizens deserve to have. You raised some good points about the publishing of new articles, however currently the peer review is already done by public organizations. And I believe that presentation is not that difficult. In the end I think it will boil down to publishers retrieving subsidies.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#44

Post by snakeanus »

a_bonobo wrote: post #15
xamuel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... Profit margins are amazin…

https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#45

Post by TallGuyShort »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

The fact that it's tax payer funded is extremely relevant. It's not 100% their research. I pay for research whetherI want it or not - it should at least come with the string attached that I don't have to pay to read the results.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#46

Post by snakeanus »

sgt101 wrote: post #2

Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…

> I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access

How about papers in the public domain?

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#47

Post by snakeanus »

denzil_correa wrote: post #25

I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant arti…

I was under the impression that they would force open access for free.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#48

Post by beevai142 »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.

Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.

The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.

This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#49

Post by a3_nm »

roadnottaken wrote: post #30
bubblethink wrote: post #27

This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical…

Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications

Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#50

Post by a3_nm »

denzil_correa wrote: post #25

I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant arti…

> "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs?

This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.

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