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EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

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Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#41

Post by anonymousDan »

IanCal wrote: post #29
anonymousDan wrote: post #22

Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…

It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper, and makes things far more transparent. It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

Good point. However, at some point publishers are going to up their charges, e.g. because of inflation. How will the cost increases be negotiated? Between the funding bodies and publishers behind closed doors? Or will they be imposed unilaterally by publishers, forcing academics to limit their submissions to pay-for open-access journals? This will bring into conflict the need for academics to publish in top venues to ensure career progression and the budget limitations posed by finding bodies. I suppose this could give momentum to the move towards completely free open access journals, but I'm sceptical given the risks for academics in not publishing at top venues. And although they get a hard time, I do believe there are some costs involved in running a journal despite all the free work they currently get from scientists, so I'm not sure completely free journals are realistic either anyway.

I'm not sure if there are any more details available yet, but I would worry about this turning into even more of a gravy train for publishers. I can't see for example the Dutch government being in any hurry to introduce any legislation that will threaten Elsevier's viability.

Nonetheless it is still a positive step that scientific findings look like becoming more readily accessible for the general public.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#42

Post by legulere »

anonymousDan wrote: post #22

Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…

It also means that researchers have to think about the cost of publishing which they before haven't. This should create a downward pressure on prize/upward pressure on quality by the publishers.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#43

Post by pzh »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #17
a3_nm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone has to bear the cost of the review process Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).

The cost of the review process in this particular two sided marketplace (which publishing is - how do you decide which journal to send your paper to?) is not just the unpaid labor of the reviewers, but rather the establishment of the credentials and authority which the journals build up over time, which basically drove down the cost of reviewing to be much smaller than if it were simply a free for all. To see this in…

I think you'd be amazed how small most of the scientific communities in certain areas of research are. If you have the names of a few well-known researchers on the editorial board or in the list of reviewers of an open-access/electronic journal, this will instanty establish its credentials and authority. After all, researchers care mostly about the quality of the work and the results, and not so much about the branding.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#45

Post by p4bl0 »

IanCal wrote: post #29
anonymousDan wrote: post #22

Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…

It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper, and makes things far more transparent. It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

> It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper.

Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.

> It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.

That's why we also need to get rid of bibliometrics for evaluating researchers for their career. Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#46

Post by jordyjordy »

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Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#47

Post by thr0waway1239 »

amelius wrote: post #33
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of the review process in this particular two sided marketplace (which publishing is - how do you decide which journal to send your paper to?) is not just the unpaid labor of the reviewers, but rather the establishment of the credentials and authority which the journals build up over time, which basically drove down the cost of reviewing to be much smaller than if it were simply a free for all. To see this in…

Isn't that exactly what search engines are for? I.e., ranking work based on a complex mix of both content value and authority?

Yes, improvements in search will help, but the costs won't go down that easily. In Google's case, the initial seeding of page rank was quite manual. And then think of the cost of upkeep - people are trying to game search engines continuously, Google has to update its algorithms on a consistent basis, content farms have profited enormously at various points of time and needed to be literally programmed against, and finally Google guards the actual search algorithm closely.

In the research domain, solving these problems would actually be even harder (in my view). How do you know if you found the best paper, or just the paper which is the best match for your keywords? At least Google has a feedback mechanism - someone stays a long time on a given webpage if it is very relevant to what they are looking for. This is not a good metric obviously, it might happen on a research paper simply because it is too obscure :-)

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#48

Post by red_admiral »

anonymousDan wrote: post #22

Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…

Publisher-hosted open access is a scam.

Here in the UK we already have an open-access requirement for RCUK and EPSRC grants, but it can be met by uploading a preprint to an institution- or subject-specific repository (such as arXiv) and including a link to it in your report back to the grant sponsor.

Last time I published in a journal, I got a "special offer" of $1200 instead of $2000 to make it open access. I politely rejected the offer - it's already online for $0, just hosted by the university itself.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#49

Post by djhworld »

denzell wrote: post #44

Why? whats next? Free newspapers.. free travel.. let's close all businesses.

The EU provides a lot of funding for science projects across the union, this funding comes from member states, who raise money through taxation.

So in effect you have EU citizens paying for research to be done, but have to double-dip on the papers or artefacts that come out as a result of the research.

This initiative is designed to make publicly funded research.....public, and not held behind a paywall provided by a private entity.

Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

#50

Post by thr0waway1239 »

pzh wrote: post #43
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of the review process in this particular two sided marketplace (which publishing is - how do you decide which journal to send your paper to?) is not just the unpaid labor of the reviewers, but rather the establishment of the credentials and authority which the journals build up over time, which basically drove down the cost of reviewing to be much smaller than if it were simply a free for all. To see this in…

I think you'd be amazed how small most of the scientific communities in certain areas of research are. If you have the names of a few well-known researchers on the editorial board or in the list of reviewers of an open-access/electronic journal, this will instanty establish its credentials and authority. After all, researchers care mostly about the quality of the work and the results, and not so much about the brandi…

Has this not been true for a long time though? Why haven't new upstart publishers thrown the larger ones out already?
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