11 ms·

Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

1079 points by philip1209 12y ago

philip1209 12y ago
> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."
- cmsmith 12y ago
  This is important, but what would be interesting is whether they will pay open access fees on top of your grant, or let you pay open access fees with your grant. The first option would obviously be preferable, especially since you can easily be publishing work after using up your direct grant money.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    on the other hand, the first option would encourage open access journals to rack up the price of publishing.
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    Essentially it's the same thing, it's just about who is responsible for what part of the budgeting. E.g. You get $100k of which $4k can only be used towards publishing expenses vs you get $100k and promise to publish open access and figure out the alotment on your own.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  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 more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost.
  - sre_ops 12y ago
    Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk
    - pkaye 12y ago
      yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.
      - sre_ops 12y ago
        Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.
        dalke 12y ago
        "publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded. "Go publish it on your blog." See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication. Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication. This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work. If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts. Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
- dang 12y ago
  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.
  - dougmccune 12y ago
    $5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-access-publishing-a-progress-report/ http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.
    - niels_olson 12y ago
      Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?
      - voronoff 12y ago
        Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.
        jeffreyrogers 12y ago
        That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.
bennyg 12y ago
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?
- philip1209 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29
- jonknee 12y ago
  Because this is free and will encourage others to do the same (again, for free)?
- heyjonboy 12y ago
  tl;dr: Science journals have lately be charging fees disproportionate to their perceived value. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012/09/26/why-are-journals-so-expensive/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012...
- dekhn 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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).
quadrangle 12y ago
SUPERB! BRAVO!
jonknee 12y ago
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.
- eli 12y ago
  Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ 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."
  - comex 12y ago
    The detail link elaborates: > to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
    - DaveWalk 12y ago
      Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away. Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
      - acveilleux 12y ago
        With open access on publication dates, there's no incentive for university to pay the extortionate subscription fees. All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonknee 12y ago
tim333 12y ago
Good on them. Maybe the various government funding agencies could do likewise?
DanKlinton 12y ago
Looks like Bill really likes open source :)
- BobMarz 12y ago
  If it weren't for Microsoft charging for software, he wouldn't have leverage to make this demand for free access. ;)
noonespecial 12y ago
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.
markbao 12y ago
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.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Not in the medium term. The paywalled articles' days are counted already -- in physics, putting the paper into arxiv is the standard practice, and it doesn't hurt anybody.
- dougmccune 12y ago
  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-Choice-Participating-Title-List.pdf http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-Choic...). 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 12y ago
    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-options http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option... 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.
hotgoldminer 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
- jonknee 12y ago
  Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
- cturitzin 12y ago
  Seems pretty likely this (and other pushes like it) will create that kind of disruption.
kenshaw 12y ago
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.
- toby 12y ago
  Is this what you mean? http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/ The current system rewards people who publish in the high-impact journals, which means they get the "coolest" papers, which means they remain high impact. The ones at the top now are not generally open access.
- dougmccune 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
jeangenie 12y ago
If most articles are private (due to added cost) but all GF articles are public then will there be any practical consequence?
sre_ops 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
ujjwalg 12y ago
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/20140922193017-36852258-horrors-of-the-scientific-publishing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922193017-368522...
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  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.
zkhalique 12y ago
This is really cool. I wouldn't call 2017 "immediate" but you know :)
- spicyj 12y ago
  Immediate describes the time to free access after publication, not when this policy goes into effect.
transfire 12y ago
+100
Steko 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- thisjepisje 12y ago
  As a Dutch person, I really like that website.
nemoniac 12y ago
The best thing you've ever done, Bill! Thank you.
carljoseph 12y ago
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-open-access-move-ignores-a-better-way-to-open-knowledge/ http://www.digitopoly.org/2014/11/24/the-gates-foundations-o...
- lvs 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Downvote because a reference was provided to support a claim about incentives, and I could not find that argument explained there.
rotskoff 12y ago
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.
nopinsight 12y ago
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.
vixen99 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
bluehex 12y ago
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.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  You're probably not missing much in terms of publications related to your field of work. This mostly applies to active researches.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  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/ZmMgamRV1YW https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg... 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.
droithomme 12y ago
> The policy doesn’t kick in until January 2017 Why not kick in several years earlier - like... now.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  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.
htmcer 12y ago
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
return0 12y ago
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.
leni536 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
indymike 12y ago
It's a little scary to see journals that are trusted to vet the papers they publish charging the authors substantial fees.
mattxxx 12y ago
This is beautiful.

1079 points by philip1209 12y ago

philip1209 12y ago

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

cmsmith 12y ago
This is important, but what would be interesting is whether they will pay open access fees on top of your grant, or let you pay open access fees with your grant. The first option would obviously be preferable, especially since you can easily be publishing work after using up your direct grant money.
- dnautics 12y ago
  on the other hand, the first option would encourage open access journals to rack up the price of publishing.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Essentially it's the same thing, it's just about who is responsible for what part of the budgeting. E.g. You get $100k of which $4k can only be used towards publishing expenses vs you get $100k and promise to publish open access and figure out the alotment on your own.
p4bl0 12y ago
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 more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost.
- sre_ops 12y ago
  Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk
  - pkaye 12y ago
    yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.
    - sre_ops 12y ago
      Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.
      - dalke 12y ago
        "publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded. "Go publish it on your blog." See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication. Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication. This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work. If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts. Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
dang 12y ago
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.
- dougmccune 12y ago
  $5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-access-publishing-a-progress-report/ http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.
  - niels_olson 12y ago
    Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?
    - voronoff 12y ago
      Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.
      - jeffreyrogers 12y ago
        That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.

bennyg 12y ago

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?

philip1209 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29
jonknee 12y ago
Because this is free and will encourage others to do the same (again, for free)?
heyjonboy 12y ago
tl;dr: Science journals have lately be charging fees disproportionate to their perceived value. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012/09/26/why-are-journals-so-expensive/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012...
dekhn 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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).

quadrangle 12y ago

SUPERB! BRAVO!

jonknee 12y ago

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.

eli 12y ago
Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ 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."
- comex 12y ago
  The detail link elaborates: > to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
  - DaveWalk 12y ago
    Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away. Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
    - acveilleux 12y ago
      With open access on publication dates, there's no incentive for university to pay the extortionate subscription fees. All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 12y ago

tim333 12y ago

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

DanKlinton 12y ago

Looks like Bill really likes open source :)

BobMarz 12y ago
If it weren't for Microsoft charging for software, he wouldn't have leverage to make this demand for free access. ;)

noonespecial 12y ago

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.

markbao 12y ago

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.

sz4kerto 12y ago
Not in the medium term. The paywalled articles' days are counted already -- in physics, putting the paper into arxiv is the standard practice, and it doesn't hurt anybody.
dougmccune 12y ago
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-Choice-Participating-Title-List.pdf http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-Choic...). 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 12y ago
  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-options http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option... 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.

hotgoldminer 12y ago

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 12y ago
Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
jonknee 12y ago
Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
cturitzin 12y ago
Seems pretty likely this (and other pushes like it) will create that kind of disruption.

kenshaw 12y ago

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.

toby 12y ago
Is this what you mean? http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/ The current system rewards people who publish in the high-impact journals, which means they get the "coolest" papers, which means they remain high impact. The ones at the top now are not generally open access.
dougmccune 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.

jeangenie 12y ago

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

sre_ops 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

ujjwalg 12y ago

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

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
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.

zkhalique 12y ago

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

spicyj 12y ago
Immediate describes the time to free access after publication, not when this policy goes into effect.

transfire 12y ago

+100

Steko 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
thisjepisje 12y ago
As a Dutch person, I really like that website.

nemoniac 12y ago

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

carljoseph 12y ago

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

lvs 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Downvote because a reference was provided to support a claim about incentives, and I could not find that argument explained there.

rotskoff 12y ago

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.

nopinsight 12y ago

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.

vixen99 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

bluehex 12y ago

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.

sjtrny 12y ago
You're probably not missing much in terms of publications related to your field of work. This mostly applies to active researches.
dredmorbius 12y ago
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/ZmMgamRV1YW https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg... 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.

droithomme 12y ago

> The policy doesn’t kick in until January 2017 Why not kick in several years earlier - like... now.

sjtrny 12y ago
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.

htmcer 12y ago

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

return0 12y ago

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.

leni536 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

indymike 12y ago

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

mattxxx 12y ago

This is beautiful.