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Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

news.sciencemag.org

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Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#61

Post by exgrv »

dougmccune wrote: post #31
kenshaw wrote: post #25

Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel tha…

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…

I believe that the prestige of a journal is mainly defined by the members of the editorial board. So if you can convince members of the editorial board of prestigious journals to resign and join your new open access journal, it can very rapidly become very prestigious.

That is what happened in machine learning in 2001, when forty editors of the journal 'Machine Learning', published by Springer, resigned to join the open access 'Journal of Machine Learning Research', which was created in 2000. Today, JMLR is much more prestigious than Machine Learning (impact factor of 3.42 v.s. 1.46 in 2012).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Res...

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#62

Post by voronoff »

niels_olson wrote: post #49
dougmccune wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of…

Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?

Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#64

Post by mandor »

kenshaw wrote: post #25

Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel tha…

There are no "review fees" (we review papers for free) and most editors (who select reviewers and select the papers) are not paid. So, basically, the cost is the cost of a website.

At any rate, to 'disrupt' conventional journals, you need to convince the big names to be the editors/reviewers (which is often hard!), in order to give some credibility to your new journal.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#65

Post by frozenport »

dang wrote: post #23
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat peopl…

You think that's nuts, consider that I just did a review and got paid nothing!

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#66

Post by sre_ops »

pkaye wrote: post #52
sre_ops wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk

yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.

Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#69

Post by DaveWalk »

comex wrote: post #28
eli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ? "The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."

The detail link elaborates: > to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.

Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away.

Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#70

Post by delecti »

Steko wrote: post #67

Unrelated design gripe... Someone paid someone else to make their website look like this: http://i.imgur.com/dTQUQGd.jpg A disturbing trend that seems to be increasing.

Alternatively, someone didn't pay someone else to make their website look better than that.

I'm not sure anybody in the process looked at that and said to themselves "yup, that looks good". Which is also a problem, but one for which the "show desktop version" checkbox is a good solution.

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