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In comparison several European countries are increasingly mandating that publicly funded research should be open access. Why this simple concept would elude the
by spystath 9y ago
In comparison several European countries are increasingly mandating that publicly funded research should be open access. Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me.
However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author. The open access costs are equally extortionate for several journals in the ballpark of £2000 for a single article. As a result publicly funded grants must also include a quite significant budget for publishing costs further inflating the already bloated administrative overhead of research programmes. So you either pay the journals to open up your article or pay for a subscription. It does increase visibility and accessibility of research but, still, we are not quite there yet.
- garmaine 9y ago> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. Money.
- theGimp 9y agoDoes money not exist in Europe?
- vecr25 9y agoI'm pretty sure we have that thing here too.
- incompatible 9y agoI suspect politicians in Europe are less dependent on private contributions.
- namelost 9y agoEurope has wider variation in political corruption (less corrupt in Germany, more corrupt in Romania). Whereas US politicians always seem to be moderately corrupt, wherever they come from.
- 8bitsrule 9y agoKind of you to put it that way. 'Always' is too blanket, but those who are not are clearly diminishing in number. (They ... 'retire'.)
- jessriedel 9y ago> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. The NIH, the single biggest funder of research in the US, has an open access mandate.
- Fomite 9y agoThe single biggest funder of research in the world.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago> However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author. I feel lucky to work in a field where journals are OA, but authors do not have to pay to publish. Our major journals are published by learned societies that were founded with endowments large enough to cover publication costs in perpetuity. In fact, that’s how a lot of journals used to be published before big publishers, like Elsevier and Springer, convinced those societies to entrust them with the journals, claiming it would make things easier for everyone.
- whatshisface 9y agoOut of curiosity, what's the field? In physics nothing is particularly open-access but that doesn't matter because everything with any significance at all gets put up on arxiv six months before publication.
- jmgrosen 9y agoFor its conferences, ACM SIGPLAN asks the authors to pay for the open-access fee if possible, but will cover it if the author cannot afford it.
- arrayjumper 9y agoDon't know about OP. In my experience a lot/most Computational Biology papers are Open Access.
- pcnix 9y agoI can second this. I've had a much better experience in Computational Biology compared to other fields wrt paper access.
- Vinnl 9y agoWell, it does matter somewhat: authors still publish in journals at the traditional publishers, and universities still subscribe to it, wasting research funds in developed countries and making the barriers to participation higher for researchers in emerging economies.
- labster 9y agoEven simpler concepts like "passing a budget" or "vet your staff before hiring" elude the U.S. government these days so I really can't expect them to even comprehend the concept of open access journals.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zeth___ 9y agoFFS, this is not politics. Or rather it is, but it's politics both parties in the US system are in complete agreement over. Putting this down to a Democrat/Republican split is asinine, ignorant and counter productive. Never forget it was an Obama appointee that drove Aaron Swartz to suicide for doing much less than Alexandra Elbakyan. There is a reason why sci-hub is run by a neo-communist.
- kkylin 9y agoIntentional or not, pay-to-publish also acts as a barrier-to-entry for less well-funded research groups.
- Fomite 9y agoThis is a very real thing - a open access paper or two per year is, for example, a non-trivial amount of my startup funding.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoIn reality the authors and editors do 90% of the work and are not paid. If the articles are electronic then the "publishing" costs are minimal. No real reason for everything to be open access (and I mean real open access, not charging authors).
- knowThySelfx 9y agoTrue, those who do the real work doesn't get paid, but the ones who publish it gets paid.
- gowld 9y agoThere's no need to pay a publisher £2000. The authors can self-publish.
- Fomite 9y agoNot if I want to keep my job come review time.
- probably_wrong 9y agoSelf-publishing is not without its problems. Peer review, while not perfect, guarantees that the text has been reviewed by quality researchers. Journals have an interest in filtering bad publications, if only to keep their reputation. In contrast, a self-published paper has no guarantee of quality, simply because everyone can do it. An author's reputation is often a proxy to assess a publication's quality, but this is clearly bad for new researchers. I think there are good alternatives - my last publication costed around $300, which were used to pay for the conference where I presented it.
- daddosi 9y agoAh, so we simply create a protocol that transparantly breaks down the peer review process into a rainbow of gradients thereby allowing the desired process of review by what you call quality reseachers. Such protocol could allow a review-for-free mechanism that could be time consuming and it could build a fund for the review process. Arguably the review process needs not to be finished at any time. It is probably big fun to revisit the process in the licht of later findings. Lastly but not least the protocol could help establish a name for reviewing scientists who just happen to do a lot of reading. A (large) bit like github does for programmers.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoSelf-publications and 'gray literature' are generally deemed worthless and often even considered to contribute a large amount of negative value to a CV. To put things simple, you'll loose your job.
- jimhefferon 9y ago> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. At this point the US government pretty much entirely works for monied interests. It has waxed and waned over the years but for the past thirty years or so, it has strongly waxed.
- louden 9y ago> For instance, in 2013, the Obama administration mandated that copies of research conducted through federal agencies must be uploaded to free repositories within 12 months of publishing. All federally funded research in the US is mandated to be open access.