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Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

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

#91

Post by nopinsight »

Since the prestige of journals in many fields is significantly affected by the names on its editorial board. What if the Gates foundation earmarks funds to work on lobbying and even pay significant consulting fees for top editors to move to open access journals operated by PLoS or other non-profits.

(A highly successful example in the machine learning field is detailed in a comment by exgrv here.)

The foundation could also purchase a few smaller publishers which own good journals in a number of fields, especially fields which immediate access is important to human well-being. Then, turn all those journals into open-access with no or minimal author fees.

Bottom line: These strategies together will create big incentives for researchers to flock towards those journals since immediate and open access is a boon to citation counts and impact factor. Other journals will feel the heat and need to compete (like by reducing prices or time to open access) to gain back their market share.

If the foundation spends enough efforts, it could also out-lobbying congress and/or funding agencies to change its policy on open access, as the size of Elsevier and other publishers are significantly smaller than the Gates foundation and the public perception among those with any opinion on this definitely sides with open access policy.

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

#92

Post by lvs »

carljoseph wrote: post #85
lvs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which incentives are wrong? The post you link seems a bit confused about, for example, why it's important to publish a finding only once. (Hint: So lazy people can't keep regurgitating their old results to seem productive in the eyes of grant-givers.) It also says the Gates decision goes too far, and then suggests something even farther: that the paper would need to be written twice, separately, for public and commer…

I'm definitely not agreeing with that article's perspective, just thought it provided a contrasting point of view. Not sure my comment deserved a downvote though (ouch!) :) That's definitely a good point about the journals not adding enough value. I think it's clear they've placed themselves into a bit of a position where they hold most of the cards and that really does need to change.

Downvote because a reference was provided to support a claim about incentives, and I could not find that argument explained there.

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

#93

Post by visarga »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be…

> the market value of the article would drop to zero

The articles have intrinsic scientific value that's even greater when they are being read.

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

#94

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

ecesena wrote: post #81
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.

It depends on the country. In many countries funding agencies will just not give you $5K to pay for open access fees. Conferences that involve intercontinental travel are already prohibitive for many academics, by the way, and more than two people going is quite a luxury. In my university, the most normal thing to do if we get several papers at a conference is that a single person goes and presents them all, and many research groups don't do conferences in other continents (or only when they have some international coauthor that can go).

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

#95

Post by vixen99 »

Oh Bill Gates, I love you! This is a wonderful step forward and maybe the beginning of the end for avaricious publishers. As a taxpayer I'm asked to pay £20 to access a single article written in 1960 on work financed and reviewed courtesy of taxpayers. This is madness.

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

#96

Post by pingec »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be…

> Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.

That or http://sci-hub.org/ (it's instant)

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

#97

Post by shortsightedsid »

eli wrote: post #22
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

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."

Slightly offtopic, but isn't it a bit ironic that NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NIH (Not Invented Here) both make perfect sense in this thread!

The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.

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

#98

Post by ecesena »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #94
ecesena wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.

It depends on the country. In many countries funding agencies will just not give you $5K to pay for open access fees. Conferences that involve intercontinental travel are already prohibitive for many academics, by the way, and more than two people going is quite a luxury. In my university, the most normal thing to do if we get several papers at a conference is that a single person goes and presents them all, and many…

I totally agree, I'm just saying that often the cost for conferences is also high/comparable. Here $5k is intended for a major journal. Similarly is for conferences, I remember traveling from Italy to the US only for ACM CCS (one of the top conferences in security). For "standard" conferences the budget was "standard" :) Again, I won't repeat it enough, I'm not saying is good paying for openness.

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

#99

Post by p4bl0 »

ecesena wrote: post #81
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.

> $5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive

This is not true, $5k is a lot of money. It is certainly more than what traveling to a conference cost! I'm in France, and even going to California for a week, including plane tickets, accommodation, food, and conference registration is less than $5k. The thing is we are sometimes told to target journals rather than conferences because "there is no more budget this year" for instance. If we had to pay $5k to publish in journals we would just be told not to publish in these journals.

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

#100

Post by p4bl0 »

scott_s wrote: post #60
p4bl0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

I think there is some confusion here. Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays". The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what the…

Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time…

I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").

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