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All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020
- Fomite 10y ago"From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available." is not "All European scientific articles". I've got at least three papers that wouldn't fall under that heading.
- whazor 10y agoChanged the title.
- kriro 10y agoIt's a matter of perspective. I'd argue most European research falls under this. If you work at a public university and are paid for it and do research during that time and publish it that should be covered. It would be pretty lame if only stuff that was explicitly funded in a research project would be covered.
- Fomite 10y agoResearch done on unfunded projects as part of a hard money position is super-tricky, which is why for a lot of things the restriction is funded research projects. For example, if your position is at a public university, but funded by an endowment from a private foundation, is it covered?
- Al-Khwarizmi 10y agoIf 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.
- Fomite 10y agoThe 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.
- Scarblac 10y agoIn 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.
- kurlberg 10y agoOne would hope that 35+ percent overhead would cover rent/heating etc.
- Fomite 10y ago53% at my institution
- flexie 10y agoOnly articles based on EU funded research or also articles based on research funded by member states?
- partycoder 10y agoI can see the evil people behind the TTIP getting in the way of this. Before this goes into effect, the US will execute order 66 and take all the articles down.
- Etheryte 10y agoHow is this related to the US at all?
- James001 10y agoThe TTIP
- T-A 10y agoWould the US be doing this to protect the profits of Reed-Elsevier (based in London), Springer (Berlin) or the Nature Publishing Group (London)?
- Zigurd 10y agoIn the way that one hand washes the other?
- partycoder 10y agoOr they can start pulling arguments from TTIP provisions and get away with blocking parts of the initiative. Now it's good this comes from the Netherlands (Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands).
- T-A 10y ago(Elsevier is funny. Technically it's a subsidiary of the RELX group, aka Reed Elsevier, which is headquartered in London.)
- Fomite 10y agoThis is already very similar to the requirements imposed by the largest U.S. funder of scientific research.
- ivan_gammel 10y agoSome public funding of copyrighted art work purchases would be also useful, if that's the only viable alternative to decreasing copyright age to some reasonable 20-30 years.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoGood. With whatever limitations, this is still good. It's not enough, but this is going to be a long LONG fight.
- lomnakkus 10y agoIf this actually pans out, it could be incredible. It always saddens me to get a link to a scientific paper and to hit my head on the paywall. There's of course the "(partially) publicly funded" qualifier, but I don't remember too much privately funded research in the journals that I read as a CS undergrad, so hopefully it won't matter too much. (I guess other areas such as Chemistry, Biology might be more prone to falling under this qualifier?!?)
- cyphar 10y agoWhat's even more frustrating is when you're a student at a university and you still can't get access to a paper because your library doesn't have a subscription to that specific journal. arXiv was the best thing to happen to physics papers, and SciHub is doing the same (but less legal).
- intrasight 10y agoWhat does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide.
- maerF0x0 10y agoI bet, in practice, this will mean some researchers will avoid public funds as it will come with overhead they do not want (publishing rules). But for most this will be a big win.
- merijnv 10y agoAhahahahaha. First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never enough money. Second of all: Most researchers HATE academic publishers and being forced to sign over their copyright to a paywall in exchange for nothing. But institutional evaluation criteria force you to do so. EU banning non-open publications will force publishers to allow open access OR force universities to revise their criteria to accommodate the inability to publish publicly funded work in non-open journals. I think all of my colleagues think this is a great thing. As do I. Elsevier can go blow a goat with their copyright assignment BS.
- igravious 10y ago> Elsevier can blow a goat I'm into the history of logic at the moment. As in not the filtered oh-so-neat version that is presented at third-level but the nitty-gritty twists and turns from Ancient Greece (go team Aristotle!), Indian, Arabic, Scholastic, Medieval, Pre-modern, the rise of symbolic/algebraic logic, Kant/Hegel/Trendelenburg, on to Frege and then the multiplication of logics (modal/tense/deontic, …) in the 20th century ending with type theory. Recently Elsevier contracted top logicians to produce a Handbook in the History of Logic. It runs to 11 volumes, each volume north of $300. So folks, if you want to get acquainted with the complete history of what is supposed to be a formalisation of rational thought it can be yours for $3,300 or thereabouts. There is no reason this should not be in the public domain, it's too fundamental and central to history of ideas. I could buy two cheap second-hand cars for that price. (Personally I have used SciHub to have a look and I don't mind saying so.) Now I would like to think that top logicians are not complicit in this scam, but I fear they are. I have a burning desire to crowd-source a website that provides the same information. >95% of the papers/texts are out of copyright. These academics already have very lucrative salaries and grants. I don't think we can point the finger exclusively at the Elseviers of this world, they have had a little bit of help along the way. Here in HN we have a bit of an open-access echo chamber. Some academics are very happy with the status quo, and who wouldn't be with those prices? I think it's _insane_. I'll post names and links of the details if people are interested.
- maerF0x0 10y agoIf trump wanted to help win over the science crowd, he could make this an issue. Seems more likely to come from Bernie though.
- fredoliveira 10y agoI struggle to see how or why a candidate who's proven to not necessarily have a stance on _any_ issues would want to do something like this to appeal "to the science crowd". In fact, that's exactly the crowd I'd consider the hardest to win by a candidate such as Trump. You know, critical thinking being a thing and all.
- maerF0x0 10y agoFair enough, I should have known that putting the words "Trump" in the first 100 words ofa post would be auto downvotes. I meant it to say that this is one way that candidates, particularly those who have most estranged the scientific communities, could shore up or make amends.
- scrollaway 10y agoI don't think your downvotes have much to do with trump - more with the post being irrelevant to the conversation.
- kriro 10y agoSeems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law. Either way I hope it also extends to the member states level eventually. The circus of avoiding conflict between EU funding and member state funding is often quite amusing so this will be interesting. It feels almost ethically self evident that any research funded by citizens in any way should be made available to said citizens (and that's more or less 100% of research in Europe). Lets step in that direction.
- ikeboy 10y agoWhat would the law say, and how would it prevent publishers from demanding money to publish now that their other sources of income have been cut off?
- lrem 10y agoBut they are already cashing in for publishing anything, with additional small charges like few hundred bucks for going over the page limit and big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible.
- ikeboy 10y ago" big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible." Yes, if you don't want them let them make money off your work, they won't subsidize publication and you'll need to pay. No law can change basic economics.
- Kliment 10y agoFuck them. Publication costs nothing. All they're selling is prestige, and the cost of that will be dramatically adjusted downwards if there is political will to do so.
- lrem 10y agoYet somehow there are so many platforms that will happily subsidise open publication without even taking the initial thousand bucks for letting me in, like Medium, Wordpress, Blogger... Seriously, the only reason why academic publishers can charge anything is their established position, where they are a proxy for gauging researcher's output by administration. Peer reviews are done by volunteers, discovery is provided by Google Scholar and everybody uses PDF anyways (usually printing it out, still orders of magnitude faster than fetching from a library).
- 88e282102ae2e5b 10y agoHas it been stated anywhere that they won't allow a temporary embargo after publishing? Like how some funding agencies allow papers to be behind a paywall for 12 months and only then require that it be open access?
- a_imho 10y ago>unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so backdoored by default. Any reason why it is 2020 not sooner or later?
- brodo 10y agoUnder the Horizon 2020 programme, open access publishing (green or gold) is already mandatory today for all EU/EC funded projects. Grant proposals must incorporate open access fees in order to be accepted. It's not much money for most project consortiums as the EU tends to fund big projects with budgets of ~10 million € and more as the norm (there are smaller ones, but ~2 million is really as small as it gets as far as I know). So a couple of 10K€ won't make that much of a difference. If it would become mandatory for all publicly research in the EU, the problem would be quite different. There are really small grants (50K€ and smaller) and if you have 2 publications out of that grant, you now pay 10-20% of your grant money for publishing fees.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoGold open access needs to die, and "open access fees" with it. Seriously, there is no STEM field I know of where you can't find good journals that allow posting of preprints. Green open access solves all the problems at zero additional cost.
- tmalsburg2 10y agoGold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access publishing. I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the best approach. The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge for that. Very simple.
- tagrun 10y agoIf it was so simple as service -> $$$, they should be paying up the referees, which is the only task that requires rarely found scientific skills. I seriously can't see how editing, typesetting and hosting can host that much, or can make them a respectable journal. No-name journals (for which top scientists don't referee) have that too. BTW, Americal Physical Society journals don't even do that and outsource typesetting and editing.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThe main problem is that the open access fees are so insane. Publishers currently have ridiculous profit margins, and of course they're going to try and maintain them. Unless some US/EU regulations kick in and set a reasonable max limit to open access fees, the situation is just as bad (perhaps even worse) than the status quo: Now, researchers from "poor" universities, small research institutuons, third world countries etc. don't get full access to the published literatute. But at least they can publish freely. If gold open access becomes the standard, they won't afford publishing anymore.
- sndean 10y agoI'm not as familiar with European journals, but if this happened in the US (more or less forced open access) it'd possibly mean that every time we want to publish it would cost researchers ~$3000. Hopefully this (and similar) legislation comes along with a statement regarding who's supposed to cover that cost. Because some of us avoid that price tag by publishing in non-open access journals.
- takluyver 10y agoI haven't read the specifics of this, but typically these kind of mandates come from funding bodies to cover the work they fund. So they're expecting that publication fees will be a budget item in grant applications.
- jwildeboer 10y agoNext step: As they have an exception for "IP" (intellectual property rights like patents) we must promote the logical consequence. All publicly funded research must mean all "IP" must be made available to anyone for free.
- takluyver 10y agoThat's probably unlikely, because patents are a source of potential revenue for universities, whereas journal subscriptions are a cost.
- WhoBeI 10y agoNope. You can seek protection (patent) before publishing your results. See page 3 in the linked pdf. The paragraph begins with "misconceptions about open access.." in bold. :) http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...
- ShaneBonich 10y agoOnce again Europe shows the way
- Fomite 10y agoThe NIH mandate for open access after six months has been around for years.
- return0 10y ago> must be freely accessible to everyone When? Open access after 12 months has different cost than immediate open access, and, at the pace of today's research, is not open access at all. And ERC funded research already requires open access publishing anyway. Why not demand publishing to open access/nonprofit journals instead? Why does EU have to pay elsevier $2000-5000 per article? This does not seem significant to me.
- mablae 10y agoAnd Aaron Schwartz is dead. RIP
- ralucag 10y agoI was just about to say that, he would have been proud.
- actionwords 10y agoHow can the Europeans even compete?
- alex_hirner 10y agoTo 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.
- tmalsburg2 10y agoWait, 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 which is becoming more and more popular at least in my field. GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? GitHub is just not made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run for profit. Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record.
- witty_username 10y ago> GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.
- tmalsburg2 10y agoMany people leave academia after a post-doc or two, most actually. These people will not have any incentive to manage their research data for the rest of their lives and the data will eventually be lost, unless GitHub continues to exist in its current form for the next half century, with is rather unlikely. For this reason we need dedicated research repositories that are managed by publicly funded non-profits. Zenodo.org is one example but I'm not sure if they have long-term funding.
- alaskanloops 10y agoThis is one of those things thats just so common sense, its hard to imagine a solid argument against it. Hopefully it will encourage the US to follow, although I'm sure publishers will dig their feet in and make up some bullsh*t reason why it would be a bad move.
- mrweasel 10y ago>This is one of those things thats just so common sense It really is, the public paid for the research, it rightfully belongs to the public.
- edwinksl 10y agoExcept it hasn't been like that for decades.
- alaskanloops 10y agoWhat happened? Where/why/how did it change?
- desireco42 10y agoWhy wait if you know it is inevitable? (as would say Richard Bandler)
- dandelion_lover 10y agoI wish the same happened with the software written using public funding.
- WhoBeI 10y agoI 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 are public funds it's basically going to be paid for by the EU in most cases. The "when and if" means that you can choose not to publish or you can choose to publish after you have sought protection (patent). You can also, as a publisher, have a wait period before research papers become "open access" to, I don't know, be an asshole I guess. Reference (pdf): http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra... Edit: The little pdf warning.
- hackuser 10y ago> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund In fairness, we pay twice for many things, such a toll roads. The first payment isn't always sufficient.
- holyoly 10y agoThat doesn't make any sense... How does having one screwed up system justify another? Maybe we should start paying twice for groceries too, because we pay twice for toll roads and research papers...
- hackuser 10y agoMy point is, whether or not you pay a fair amount doesn't depend on how many times you pay. Let's say your fair share is $10; $3 goes via taxes and $7 via the other mechanism. Here's a couple of scenarios where it's a good choice: 1) The new road is 60% in the public interest and 40% in the interest of its users, so 60% is paid with taxes and 40% via tolls. 2) Society feels it's reasonable that all children, regardless of family income, should have educational resources. 90% of school is funded by taxes and 10% funded by fees paid by students' families (lunch, field trips, books, etc.).
- iangpmulvany 10y agoSlightly related, I just took part in a workshop of experts who are tasked with advising the commissioner on policy decisions for making open science happen in the EU, I've written up my notes: https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a
- hackuser 10y agoAren't they already required to publish on Sci-hub?
- iangpmulvany 10y agoOf related interest, I"m just back from a workshop on Open Science from a group that advises the commissioner. I was an invited expert in to the workshop. This is part of the route through which announcements like the one linked here get made. I've written up my noted https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a
- MrBra 10y agoMy thoughts are for those that are not with us anymore that helped make this slowly happen... I say thank you, but if I could choose I'd rather have them back and get to this results a bit later. It's nothing new that in this field sometimes people have a tendency to put their ideals of progress before their own life. No matter how strong is your love for your world changing ideas, YOU as a person come first. Unless (but you could also argue about that) without your sacrifice the whole world population would be at immediate risk of extinction..
- daveheq 10y agoBut wait, scientific articles are hoaxes made for tax money, so now the lies are freely available to anybody!!! We need to cut more taxes on billionaires and publicly fund more oil projects so we can get these inconvenient science articles out of our way. Where's my next iPhone?!
- graffitici 10y agoDoes anyone have any insights regarding the "foreign startup visas". Does that legislation have a name I can use to track progress? It's quite annoying to have to apply for week-long business visas every time I have to travel to Europe. Especially in the summer, when it takes 2 months just to get an appointment with the consulate..
- known 10y agoToo little; Too late;
- norswap 10y agoTo contextualize the discussion on "open access" (the practice of editors that ask for a sum of money in order to make the paper available). It costs a lot: about 1k for ACM venues. Currently I have to pay for this out of my own budget, and I don't have that kind of money (I'm a PhD student, and in addition to my scholarship (1.8k€/month net of tax, in Belgium), I get a 5k€ budget for two years that must cover material and travel -- I can also get about one additional travel grant per year). Publisher have about zero added value except fixing the odd latex issue. Actual editorial work is assumed free of charge by professors. Other venues such as Arxiv and CiteSeerX do a better job of distribution for free. Science publishers are leeches in the system and should be removed. I think the EU a measure will precipitate the current movement against such predatorial publishing practice. Already, publishers are walking on eggs. They move against sci-hub but they'd never dare to go against the common practice to just host everything one publishes publicly, license notwithstanding, something almost everyone does in the CS field -- maybe they say it's a "draft"... (meaning there isn't a copyright notice mostly).
- dadkins 10y agoInterestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public domain. Journals have no problem publishing those. I think one direction this could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put their work in the public domain. Journals don't need copyright to function. There's still value in editing, peer review, and distribution. They're just being greedy by insisting on it.