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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

#131

Post by tmalsburg2 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #123
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think so. The problem is that the market is completely dominated by a few big publishers, and that it's a really hard market to disrupt because everything is about prestige.

The market has already started to change with new players like PlosOne and Peer-J successfully competing with the more traditional publishers.

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

#132

Post by x5n1 »

comboy wrote: post #108
kurlberg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devil is in the details: one possible outcome is that researchers must pay journals for open access publication, and this could change "'small science' fields" into 'big science' ones. I.e., a good but not grant funded researcher will need to find a 'rich' colleague to pay for the publication fee. Whether the 'rich' person should be a coauthor is then of course a matter of negotiation.

But does it say anywhere that it has to be a science journal? Isn't it enough for them to put the paper on their website to comply with that law?

Yeah not to mention that anyone can start a company to publish journals. A non-profit could do it.

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

#133

Post by wongarsu »

a_bonobo wrote: post #90
tunnuz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays. On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" resea…

As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen. We'd need a different way to judge someone's scientific output which is definitely hard - do we start to check Twitter or blogs for scientific outreach? Do we judge scientific "novelt…

>As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen.

Having seen this evaluation process from the inside, it would still work if everyone was limited to ~3 papers per year. In my experience sheer quantity doesn't land you a job, because quantity usually is a detriment to quality. More important factors are the prestige of the journals you published in, whether those journals are relevant to the position, how consistent your publishing record is (is there a five year break?, have you even stopped publishing?). In CS "best paper" awards from conferences also have significant weight.

Add to that that fewer papers make it easier to asses their quality, and being limited to three high-quality papers a year isn't a detriment to hiring.

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

#134

Post by Scarblac »

heimatau wrote: post #95
WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

I know many may disagree but I'm curious about this movement of 'publicly funded should be publicly available' wouldn't this infringe on national competitiveness? Like India nor the USA didn't funded these studies but...those people will have access to these research papers? Talk about a free lunch. And potentially demotivating to other countries, as they could be like 'well, EU did it...let's lower our investments i…

Those other countries already have universities that have buy access to the journals that the papers appear in. Research isn't secret. It's just expensive to access for normal people.

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

#135

Post by Scarblac »

Fomite wrote: post #74
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your position is at a public university, you probably work at a publicly-funded building, using publicly-funded electricity and heating, and publicly-funded office material. So I'd say it should be covered.

The building I work in was built using money from two foundations. The electricity and heating, as well as office material, theoretically comes from grant indirects - which at the moment for me come entirely from private industry.

In Europe? I always thought that that sort of thing was common in the US, but it's surprising that it happens to that extent in Europe.

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

#136

Post by alex_hirner »

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…

Bigchaindb is tackling generic open data repositories from a technical pov. As has been said below, the larger part of the sustenance prob is economical of course.

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

#137

Post by alex_hirner »

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…

Bigchaindb is tackling generic open data repositories from a technical pov. As has been said below, the larger part of the sustenance prob is economical of course.
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