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

sciencemag.org

91–100 of 105 posts

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

#91
post #58
post #20

Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be. Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(

When I did my master's, I explicitly chose 2-clause BSD as the license for all the code I had produced as part of the thesis. My thesis project was done with, and paid for, by the university I attended. Since my work was being funded with public money, I felt it only fair to release everything with a liberal license. The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to…

Interesting. I thought that kind of stuff (code) would be the intellectual property if the University and subject to their licensing terms.

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

#93
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole issue rendered moot by SciHub?

SciHub is still technically illegal.

Illegal or not, it resolves the issue for the majority of the demographic that needs regular access to publications but for some reason does not have this granted to them through their institution. I'm not sure how large this group is, and I've never needed to use SciHub, but I can't say I'm not wholly unsympathetic to their cause from an ethical standpoint.

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

#94
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?

Public domain concept does not exist in a lot of countries so what would be the legal frames there?

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

#95
post #58
post #20

Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be. Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(

When I did my master's, I explicitly chose 2-clause BSD as the license for all the code I had produced as part of the thesis. My thesis project was done with, and paid for, by the university I attended. Since my work was being funded with public money, I felt it only fair to release everything with a liberal license. The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to…

I think that the history should be mandatory also for the comments (i.e. from your adviser or reviewer). That could apply for other scientific disciplines as well and give a very good indication on the quality of the process that the thesis went trough, sadly academics are the worst people to agree on anything.

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

#96
post #32

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. 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. Of course they have the authority. Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law. Laws can be changed by go…

> Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law.

That is actually one interesting discrepancy, I think there are some countries where you can not assign away the copyright to your work for someone else in a manner that you loose the copyright yourself. Anyone familiar with this or am I just remembering things incorrectly? In such case how would Elsevier and the like react when someone decides to put their work published in such paper on their blog for free?

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

#97

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…

A senior academic professor write papers with graduate students and postdocs.

Because the senior professor wants his/her students to be successful in their next job search, he/she will continue to submit papers in high impact not open access journals.

Doing otherwise would penalize heavily his students and postdocs.

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

#98
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the high level accademics don't move to access on their own, government certainly has a large role in encouraging and incentivizing them to make the change, especially considering they provide a large amount of funding for academic institutions and research. Government action can certainly help us get there faster and more certainly than were we to wait for people to do it of their own accord.

It's not that simple. Where I live and work the implementation of these policies is actually quite horrible. We're supposed to put everything in open access repositories under a creative commons license and at the same time are supposed to publish in top journals if we want to have any career prospects. But almost no reputable journal of any rank and name allows this dual licensing - not Springer, De Gryuter, Oxford…

The government could help by making licensing clauses that prevent open access illegal/unconscionable.

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

#100

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…

This is happening on all levels: New researchers want to publish Open Access if they don’t hit Nature or Science, because that gets them more citations. Libraries push for Open Access. Permanent employees see that Open Access is how science should be.
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