
European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016) - Tomte
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-european-leaders-call-immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers
======
aqsalose
Now this is an interesting development! We shall observe what comes of it,
though.

Meanwhile, a group of Finnish researchers are organizing a review boycott [1]
against Elsevier, one of the reasons being Elsevier's unyielding opposition to
the Finnish libraries' OA requests [2].

[1] [http://www.nodealnoreview.org/](http://www.nodealnoreview.org/)

[2]
[https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-...](https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-+FinELib+negotiations)

------
bubblethink
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 work (program committee, reviews
etc.) is done for free by everyone involved. That it can end up behind a
paywall is quite sad.

~~~
roadnottaken
Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private
journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which
should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still)
sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead
chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

~~~
a3_nm
> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to
> private journals for publications

Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that
are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access
journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is
very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

~~~
vanviegen
Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of
getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the
future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their
journal.

~~~
a3_nm
In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing
papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I
would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers
differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.

~~~
hueving
Well they wouldn't make it obvious. It would be rejected for other reasons.

------
denzil_correa
I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to
articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could
easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a
higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I
see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why
should we pay exorbitant article access fees for research already funded by
tax payers?

[0[
[https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf](https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf)

~~~
a3_nm
> "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what
> costs?

This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access".
Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per
article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option
to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is
no double payment.

~~~
raarts
I thought the 'double payment' refers to people paying for the research
through the tax system, and then paying again to look at the resulting paper?

~~~
a3_nm
Oops, right. I thought the parent comment referred to "double dipping" for
hybrid journals (those that have both open-access and closed-access articles):
where research institutes pay once for "open-access article processing
charges" (to publish) and once more for subscriptions (to read the articles
that are closed-access).

Of course, all of this is in addition to the intrinsic cost of doing the
research.

------
mirimir
This is limited to public-funded research results, I think.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/28/eu-
ministers...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/28/eu-
ministers-2020-target-free-access-scientific-papers)

~~~
skrebbel
Which is the vast majority of published research results.

~~~
mirimir
That's true. But still, it seems odd that most of the coverage doesn't mention
that limitation.

------
xvilka
Open Access (and better user interface/experience to be honest) - [http://sci-
hub.cc](http://sci-hub.cc)

~~~
contingencies
[http://libgen.io](http://libgen.io) not bad either

------
sgt101
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 demand side and borne
communally, now the cost is paid on the supply side. Science still values
paper counts and citation counts - but it seems to me that folks who can
afford publication now have an unhealthy advantage that they didn't used to!

~~~
xamuel
In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them
are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs
of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

~~~
a_bonobo
There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who
make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me
several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references,
for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as
written in this article:

[http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-
scie...](http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-
publishing-1.12676)

Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing.
Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most
profitable businesses in the world: [https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-
disrupt-this-elsevier...](https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-
elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-
aa3b9618d40a)

~~~
a3_nm
> you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a
> thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never
> found - missing or switched references, for example).

This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is
essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make
changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.

In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of
this dubious service is much lower than the charge.

But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be
grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The
journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society.
Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these
should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not
owners of the journal and articles.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed
Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML
format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this
process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such,
only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in
maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging.

In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily
write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract
references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of
it.

~~~
Nullabillity
So... require that the scientists submit the articles in JATS instead of Word
files or PDFs? LaTeX already knows about the stuff you mentioned, so it
shouldn't be too hard to make it output JATS directly. In fact, that already
seems to exist[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-
jats](https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-jats)

------
galadran
The UK is already (getting) there. UK Universities are assessed by the
"Research Excellence Framework" (REF). In order for work output (i.e. papers)
to be considered by REF, final peer reviewed papers must be deposited into an
open access repository within 3 months of acceptance.

Source: [http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/next-
ref/](http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/next-ref/)

------
Keverw
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 :(

~~~
bostik
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 include source code with my thesis. Every copy came
with a CD-ROM. (I even made sure to upload the same archive to the digital
library so access to print copies was not required.)

And two: the review board made a point of mentioning that I released the
sources for my thesis project with a very liberal license. What I had
considered only fair, the board considered out of the ordinary.

Footnote - I didn't include just the sources. I included the entire .svn/
__hierarchy to provide complete editing history.

Footnote 2 - I picked up git in 2007. Thesis was done in 2006.

~~~
type0
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.

~~~
bostik
Now this would be a novel approach. A proper review and comment history
attached...

I like it. I'm actually going to toss this idea to the people I still know at
my university.

------
agumonkey
No mention of it but I wonder if scihub has influenced this.

------
tripu
How can a government force a researcher to make their results public?

Isn't that reaching too far?

I feel there is a reasonable, decent case for private, for-profit scientific
research, is there not?

------
notadoc
Sounds like a good goal, though it also sounds ripe for abuse. Will "fake
scientific papers" be a new version of fake news? A surge of industry or
agenda funded junk or cherry picked science?

------
ycomment
Anybody have an update? This is from a year ago.

------
mtgx
China can't steal all of that IP if we release it to the public first!

Just kidding of course, this is great news. The EU should still be the main
beneficiary of open access science following this policy.

------
mikehines
Aaron Swartz would be proud of this progress.

------
okket
-> (2016)
    
    
      May. 27, 2016

------
roadnottaken
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 the publishers.

Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article.
If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of
their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the
universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to
release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works
currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals'
version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into
formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and
should belong to them.

It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely
available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily
publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't
just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt
strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of
them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).

~~~
bubblethink
>most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).

This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves
are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have
institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work
that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on
the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestige of existing
journals. Younger researchers will continue submitting to these journals since
they care more about their careers than ideals. Any change in public
perception would have to be driven top down by people already established in
their fields.

~~~
beevai142
Let's say that you suddely start caring once your library drops subscriptions
to journals that you need.

~~~
a3_nm
Then you just use Sci-Hub, like you do when working from home.

