
Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles - philip1209
http://news.sciencemag.org/funding/2014/11/gates-foundation-require-immediate-free-access-journal-articles?utm_content=buffer26432&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
======
jonknee
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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to
[http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](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 done
about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the
users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be
forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal
penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?

You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to
me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's
quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.

The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use:
[https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html](https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html)

That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have
to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market
value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the
eyes of the law?

To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a
terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where
only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive
factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to
develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out
that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal
activity."

~~~
verisimilitude
This is the single best tip I've read about anything in the past six
months[1]. Here's why:

In 2012, I graduated from dental school in debt up to my EYEBALLS[2], and
look, I can NOT afford the per article fee required for me to form my own
opinions on important dental topics like implantology, oral surgery, adhesive
bonding, high strength porcelains. I've had to rely on reading literally tens
of thousands of forum posts[3] by dentists to sort out the totally-wrong from
the quite-valuable information, to see if the "thought-leaders" (the well-
known dentists who are paid to write articles) are supported by fact.

I sent a letter to the dean of my dental school about being able to read
primary lit articles like I could in school, here's a quote from the letter:
"As you are undoubtedly aware, one of the School’s objectives in its mission
statement is a devotion of “time and resources to the discovery and
dissemination of new knowledge.” Considering this goal, it is frustrating for
the School of Dentistry to espouse the value of scientific research yet deny
alumni access to the primary literature." I received a very polite non-answer
and no action in the two years since I sent it. Ef that.

I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on
the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.

So, sillysaurus3, you finally gave me the tools to round out my collection of
dental primary literature articles in Pages 2.7.3 (per the second footnote of
this post, you will note that I can not afford to upgrade to Papers 3).
Because of your post, I can become a better dentist, faster, with fewer
errors.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

[1] And I became a father four months ago.

[2] Seriously, my student loan payments are 2.7x my house payment. 35% of my
after tax income is student loan payments. It's... sad.

[3] DentalTown.com ... the good, the bad, and the ugly in dentistry. Just
don't go on their political forums. Good God, what a bunch of fools.

~~~
fractallyte
I worked with a fantastic implantology startup
([http://bioimplant.at](http://bioimplant.at)) up until a few months ago, and
it was illuminating to discover just how much of the implant industry is a
racket.

Most surprising of all was the casual ignorance of the majority of
'dentists'/'implantologists' on the DentalTown implants forum. I'd certainly
never want any of them in the vicinity of my mouth.

As for these institutions trumpeting their devotion to the 'dissemination of
new knowledge', get in touch with Dr Pirker at BioImplant, and ask for his
point of view on the subject...

------
philip1209
> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-
> access journals."

~~~
dang
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 people who are already effectively
giving their work away. Yes, journal economics and so on, etc., but
something's got to give here.

~~~
ecesena
$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.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
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).

~~~
ecesena
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.

------
bluehex
This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading
research papers?

I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wanted to
reference was behind a paywall, to the point that I lost all interest in even
trying to gain access. I'm sure my own laziness plays a role, but I feel like
the restricted access trained me to think research papers are for academics
and scientists and it's not worth the effort to try reading them.

Now I'm a professional Software Engineer and I can count the number of
research papers I've read on my hands. I wonder how much better off the next
generation of knowledge workers will be as access becomes more open.

~~~
dredmorbius
I find that the practice of reading _any_ given stream of data without some
directed filtering on my own part is relatively low.

But once you _do_ find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go
directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful.

I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years,
and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional
bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful.

The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order
sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of
exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply
memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I
highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of
the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific
quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied:
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMgamRV1YW)

Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1)
Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary
baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which
posts its data reports online.

The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also
finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a
work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking
indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having).

What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest,
follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and
then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information
available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations.
Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally
available, which are very useful.

Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project
Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there
are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including,
ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist
and libertarian organizations).

Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to
bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are
greatly wanting.

~~~
Havvy
It's not ironic. Sharing freely is part of the free market. Price points of
zero are not disbarred.

------
noonespecial
It's not a perfect solution but it sure does head in the right direction. If
the perception can be changed so that "serious" science with big donors is
always published openly and only rinky-dink "school" science is published
behind paywalls because it's just "publish or perish" schlock it will be a
huge win.

------
kenshaw
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 that with proper management, and
digital distribution, that a project like this could 'disrupt' conventional
journals.

~~~
dougmccune
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 cheaper (PeerJ, PLoS One, etc) and
struggle for many years to build up the prestige.

~~~
philip1209
I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like
platform using PGP. You could then use a graph model to quantitatively
determine reputation based on who reviews which article.

~~~
dougmccune
The biggest problem is how to get the people doing the hiring to care about
your new magic metric. You could devise some amazing algorithm to calculate a
researcher's impact, but if nobody on a tenure committee thinks it's a valid
way to rank researchers then it's not going to go anywhere. This is where you
hit the most inertia in the industry. The people making hiring decisions look
at which journals you publish in and they care about the journal's impact
factor and historical prestige. It's the fast/lazy way to judge a candidate.
It's going to be hard for a technical solution to the problem to address that
sociological problem.

------
Steko
Unrelated design gripe...

Someone paid someone else to make their website look like this:

[http://i.imgur.com/dTQUQGd.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dTQUQGd.jpg)

A disturbing trend that seems to be increasing.

~~~
delecti
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.

------
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.

------
markbao
This is really great, but to play devil's advocate, does this hurt the
authors? That is, does this mean that they can't publish in _Cell_ or another
reputable journal, and would this discourage them from taking funding from the
Gates Foundation?

As an article in The Winnower said, science is not disinterested and there are
egos involved. "We got published in _Cell_ " or "Our paper is in _Science_ "
still speaks prestige.

~~~
dougmccune
Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you
can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article
made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article
OA all you have to do is pay $5k.

At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either
$1,500 or $3,000 (source:
[http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-
Choic...](http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-Choice-
Participating-Title-List.pdf)). The more prestigious the journal the more the
fee is typically. Also, high fees are common in hard sciences (where
everything is grant funded, like from Gates, NIH, etc) but the fees are
typically much lower in social sciences and humanities where there aren't
typically publication fees built into research grants. I don't think we (Sage)
publish anything that can command the $5k like Cell and Nature, which is
basically the price point where OA fees top out.

So the authors will still want the prestige of the top-tier journals (at least
while hiring decisions are still made with that metric), and one byproduct of
mandates like these is more APCs flowing to the big publishers.

~~~
markbao
That's what I thought at first, but the language from the original post seemed
ambiguous—that it could only be published in Open Access Journals, and I also
couldn't find OA costs for _Cell_ or _Science_. I did find this page from
Elsevier, though, and it looks like it ranges from $500 to $5,000:
[http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-
option...](http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-options)

Thanks for the first-hand knowledge about Sage. Presumably, though, at a one-
time price of $1,500–$5,000, publishers e.g. Elsevier weren't making much from
keeping them closed-access in the first place, were they?

Not sure if the trend of more APCs going from grant funders to publishers is a
good one, but probably better that the grant funders pay than those who can't
afford access.

~~~
dougmccune
Not sure what you mean by "weren't making much from keeping them closed-
access". Paywall publishers earn the bulk of their revenue from charging
academic libraries subscriptions to the journal content. This subscription
revenue can only exist if the content is not freely available to all. So
there's definitely a big pile of cash that keeping articles closed access
brings in. The worry about having OA articles isn't that you might miss out on
the $30 pay per view charge that you or me run into when we hit the paywall,
that's almost inconsequential from a revenue standpoint. It's the worry that
they won't be able to charge a library a yearly subscription fee.

------
tim333
Good on them. Maybe the various government funding agencies could do likewise?

------
leni536
_And the underlying data must be freely available._

This is the best part. It's not even funny how I have to extract data points
from plots of articles if I want to use them. Even from recent ones. Most
often the raw measurement data is not even available even in the form of
plots.

~~~
dalke
Back in the bad old days, biomolecular crystallographers would tend to hold
their data for as long as they could, in order to publish more about data that
only they had. (To be fair, it might have taken 10 years to get the protein /
DNA / virus / etc. to crystallize.) The publications would be scores of pages
because they wanted to describe all of the details, and hence the credit.

They would, for example, only publish the backbone structure of a protein as a
drawing, and not as 3D coordinates. In response, people would input the 2D
coordinates into software that would try to reconstruct the 3D structure.
(This was possible because the publication would often be as a split
stereoscopic image.)

Finally, in the mid-1990s, the major journals put their feet down and said
they would only publish of the coordinates were deposited in a public data
collection, which would be released no later than a year of publication.

So yes, the people funding the science, and the people publishing the science,
who sometimes have to force the people doing the science to actually be more
open.

------
ujjwalg
I love what they are trying to do. The entire scientific publishing industry
is messed up and can use any help it can get. I wrote a blog about how
terrible the scientific publishing system is sometime back.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922193017-368522...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922193017-36852258-horrors-
of-the-scientific-publishing)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The entire _academic_ publishing industry is messed up. There's just as much
of a cost issue with arts and humanities journals.

After health care, journal publishing fees are one of the biggest and most
regressive 'free market' choke-point costs ever levied on human civilisation.

------
return0
The question is what is the volume of papers published by the foundation's
funding, and is it enough impetus to cause a shift of mentality across the
academia?

Also, what will be the cost of this endeavor? It will certainly help to lower
the price for open publishing among journals.

Hopefully this will put into question the hesitance of government funding
agencies to stop subsidizing ancient publishing conglormerates.

------
carljoseph
Whilst I feel this is a step in the right direction, some have already
argued[0] that it goes too far and sets up the wrong incentives.

[0] [http://www.digitopoly.org/2014/11/24/the-gates-
foundations-o...](http://www.digitopoly.org/2014/11/24/the-gates-foundations-
open-access-move-ignores-a-better-way-to-open-knowledge/)

~~~
lvs
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 commercial consumption.

"Would this change undermine the business academic journals are in? The answer
is only if they add no value above the raw knowledge an academic could make
available themselves."

And the argument is that they are not adding nearly as much value as they are
extracting from the system.

~~~
carljoseph
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.

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

------
jeangenie
If most articles are private (due to added cost) but _all_ GF articles are
public then will there be any practical consequence?

------
htmcer
It is also interesting to note that Bill Gate is an investor at
[http://researchgate.net/](http://researchgate.net/) whose mission is to
connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific
output, knowledge, and expertise

------
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.

~~~
dalke
I agree with you. I want to point out though that the older interlibrary loan
system still exists, if you want to access papers off-line and at a cheaper
rate.

For example,
[http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/](http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/)
says "Anyone who has access to the [Cambridge] University Library may use this
service. The fee for an Inter-Library Loan request is currently £3.00 for
members of Cambridge University and £6.00 for all other readers."

And for Sheffield,
[http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/services/ilcharges](http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/services/ilcharges)
suggests it would be £9.40 for an article.

I don't know about the UK, but here in Sweden it's easy to get a library card
for the local university library, and access to their ILL services.

------
rotskoff
I'm a serious advocate of open access, but it should be noted that money which
is otherwise ear-marked for research is now being poured into the publishing
industry in the form of author fees. The last article that I published cost
nearly $2000.

------
indymike
It's a little scary to see journals that are trusted to vet the papers they
publish charging the authors substantial fees.

------
zkhalique
This is really cool. I wouldn't call 2017 "immediate" but you know :)

~~~
spicyj
Immediate describes the time to free access after publication, not when this
policy goes into effect.

------
nemoniac
The best thing you've ever done, Bill! Thank you.

------
mattxxx
This is beautiful.

------
quadrangle
SUPERB! BRAVO!

------
sre_ops
Oh this is going to be fantastic. I cannot wait until the public see what kind
of junk is produced by these "researchers" in their original form.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
It is amazing how much junk gets published in academia and how many shady
practices there are. One professor in my old department used to make slight
changes to a paper and methodologies and publish to another journal. He had
dozens of publications this way.

Another professor that was a friend of my professor asked us to cite his
paper. I was never able to replicate his results, but we still sited it
anyways.

One professor used to hunt around for different statistical tests until she
found one which gave her the desired p values so she could publish.

One of the PhD students I worked with would draw absurd conclusions from the
data. He would see an effect when there wasn't one. He was regularly shown to
be wrong when we did statistical analysis, but he never changed his ways. He
is currently doing his postdoc at a very well known institution.

The worst part though is that I have also come across many genuine and hard
working professors and labs who take time to scrutinize their work and produce
good results. They end up losing the tenure battle.

------
droithomme
> The policy doesn’t kick in until January 2017

Why not kick in several years earlier - like... now.

~~~
sjtrny
Because it can take over a year to go from submission to publication.
Implementing this rule now would mean current articles under review would have
to be withdrawn.

------
transfire
+100

------
DanKlinton
Looks like Bill really likes open source :)

~~~
BobMarz
If it weren't for Microsoft charging for software, he wouldn't have leverage
to make this demand for free access. ;)

------
hotgoldminer
Fence sitting. The journals need a way to cover operating expenses. On the
other hand, if a more efficient and cost effective model exists, this is good
disruption. Nothings free tho, right?

~~~
jonknee
Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often
isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded
research.

------
bennyg
Why don't they just pay for all of the major science publications to have free
access for everyone - not just requiring it of the authors they subsidize?

~~~
dekhn
It would be an interesting experiment to negotiate a single annual payment to
all journals to make them publish all articles in an easily downloadable and
extractable form.

~~~
wmf
I guess the publishers would not accept any payment less than their current
(very large) profits, so you'd basically be locking in those profits and the
system wouldn't get any cheaper.

~~~
dekhn
I think they'd accept a smaller payment (and I'm guessing like you). if you
could guarantee them a fixed profit, without the need to compete, advertise,
print things, etc, that's just easier.

The idea would be to negotiate terms that are favorable (enabling more
scientific research and public access to funded research).

