EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020 (opens in new tab)

Publisher-hosted open access is a scam.

Here in the UK we already have an open-access requirement for RCUK and EPSRC grants, but it can be met by uploading a preprint to an institution- or subject-specific repository (such as arXiv) and including a link to it in your report back to the grant sponsor.

Last time I published in a journal, I got a "special offer" of $1200 instead of $2000 to make it open access. I politely rejected the offer - it's already online for $0, just hosted by the university itself.

This is from May, but the commitment is welcome none the less. As other comments mention there are plenty of ways for academic papers to be free to read and for us to still have a broken system.

In the UK, 'green route' or self-archiving means that, after a moratorium, you can put your paper on your institution's website. The moratorium could be three years, so it's still highly restrictive and locks in commercial publishers' profits.

My view is that a 'knowledge commons' system could easily work. Wikipedia apparently spends $50 million in total. I believe a similar amount of funding would easily support an academic publishing ecosystem in which publishing and reading are free.

I present some more detail here: https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/designing-knowledge-commons-t...

It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper, and makes things far more transparent.

It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

On the contrary, I think publishers have a lot to be worried about because this is a first step toward ending the legacy publishing model. Since journal publishers are middlemen that add almost no actual value to the publication process, their revenue stems from access control to published content. The new law removes a large amount of future content from their control, making them more reliant on open access fees. If other countries follow the EU's lead then eventually we will reach a critical mass of open content where the subscription model is no longer tenable. At such a point, stakeholders would be confronted with the obvious question: "Why are we paying a publishing company--which relies on volunteer authors, peer reviewers, and editors--to upload this content to the internet for free?". The next step is collective action to bypass the big publishers altogether, such as restricting grant money from going toward open access fees.

Clearly you - and many people commenting here - have no idea how the business model works and keep making these comments of: "don't mess with the free market."

Explained in a very simple way:

- Researchers do the heavy work, carrying out the research and writing up the articles: they don't get a cent from publishers (sometimes they even have to pay to publish).

- Reviewers, since of the most knowledgeable researchers in the area, take their time and knowledge to check what the researchers did: they also don't get a cent from publishers.

- Publishers, get all the work already done and charge money - stupid amounts of money like 30eur per article - to let other researchers see the works.

Researchers have nothing to lose by cutting the publisher. We are not wasting any money - on the contrary - for demanding free access.

Seriously, people should stop commenting themes they simply don't have a clue about.

One way or the other, to the extent that there will be a cost associated, it is going to be borne by taxpayers in open access (in fact, the taxpayers in the richest countries will probably subsidize the research of the poorer ones during collaboration).

But your point is very true - at some point we need the top publishers to be thrown out of business and for new ones to emerge AND the new publishers need to maintain costs which reflect true costs rather than the current 'what can we get away with?' prices they charge. Strangely, competition will be really good for this situation but it will not be so great for the researchers. (It would be like determining the quality of a webpage when no website has a PageRank higher than 3). Isn't that why there is so much hair pulling over this issue amongst researchers?

Isn't this ruling going to at least help a little in the sense that the researches now have a legal reason to push back on publishers who charge the exorbitant rates, plus as the sibling comment says, introduces a bit more transparency into the process?

I am interested in getting your thoughts on how to kickstart more competition amongst publishers.

Honestly, if academics still choose to pay the established journals thousands to host single pdfs, they're paying for the brand. If schools still choose to subscribe to those journals when all of the papers in them are available for free, they're paying for the brand. The publishers legitimately own the brand.

The goal is for all public scientific research to be available to the public for free, not to smash middle-men. If your goal is to smash middle-men, you'll be smashing all day and all night for the rest of your life, and middle-men are generally better at smashing than you are.

Also, if you look at your job, you may be a middle-man yourself. Most upper middle-class people are.

I'm not sure about that. Where I currently live we now have a regulation that we need to put every article open access on some server, while at the same time providing us with no guarantee or assistance that journals won't sue us. Meanwhile, journals keep requesting copyright transfer agreements.

Basically, our government currently forces us to commit copyright infringement or to end our careers and funding by not publishing in established journals.

In the good old spirit of our country, nobody does anything and the open access servers remain empty until the higher authorities get a basic grasp of the publishing reality. People are used to incompetent bosses around here.

It also means that researchers have to think about the cost of publishing which they before haven't. This should create a downward pressure on prize/upward pressure on quality by the publishers.

By a law that declares the reproduction of Scientific Articles a permitted use.

> someone has to bear the cost of the review process

Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).

> I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry

I assume that 50 years ago the cost of getting information out to people was quite significant. printing, distribution, logistics... a single researcher wouldn't be able to deal with lots and lots of publishing institutions efficiently, and a single institution (except for the largest ones) wouldn't be able to publish efficiently. at my uni school, they had 2 geometry professors, and they perhaps published something every few years. no need for the school to publish its own geometry journal. middle-men such as Elsevier emerged to provide a useful service, achieving efficiencies of scale on both ends, providing a publishing channel for smaller schools and a discovery service for researchers. kind of the same as why travel agents existed. it was too difficult for a single person to deal with all the hotels and airlines in the world, and they didn't even know where to go and ask about that stuff.

Today, the cost of getting the information out to people being insignificant, they are an obstacle instead of being an enabler, adding very little value to what people can do directly. On the other hand, as long as they can keep the effective monopoly going, they can milk the market. Travel agents didn't have a chokehold on a market, and got easily disrupted by web sites. Elsevier requires regulators to step in.

It's not just the cost of reviews though. Most new journals take decades to become break-even, they're typically subsidized by cashcow journals (big names with good reputations which bring in solid revenue).

Launching a new journal is a non-trivial process, you have to convince people to publish in it, you have to convince peer reviewers that it's worth their effort, etc. You have to have a marketing and sales teams that gets it into the hands and minds of researchers/libraries/etc. Then follows several decades of brand building before you make any real money. Many journals don't make it and die and publishers have to swallow the losses.

In practice OA has other solutions (author pays) to fund this, but it's far from a free lunch.

Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.sciencealert.com/europe-announces-that-all-scient..., which points to this.

IANAL, but to me, the wording “must be freely accessible to everyone” in the press release means free copies should be OK. As long as those are exact and complete copies.

Precisely. European articles may be "free to read", but most of them will probably not be free to publish.

For-profit publishers will probably appreciate this: it means that, while European institutions will probably still pay subscription fees (to read foreign research), they will now also have to pay extortionate open-access fees when publishing. In addition to paying researchers to produce and peer-review the research...

Preprint services like arXiv are not taken seriously by academic hiring and promotion commitees. The work has not been peer reviewed. Preprints do count for scientific priority however.

The current issue of Science says about five disciplines are trying to imitate the physics arXiv. There is much resistance in some sectors.

I reckon the existence of scihub might have prompted this decision. In that case, the project is a success.

That's a little elitist of you. There are lots of people outside academia who can understand and benefit from academic publications.

Consider, for example, somebody thinking of creating a startup doing research on what the bleeding edge of a field is. Or a former student considering re-entering academic research checking up on how the field has progressed since they left it. Or simply an independent researcher trying to understand if what they've created is novel and publishable.

Isn't that true of most public systems? Namely that everyone pays for resources that will ultimately be used by a small percentage?

> Doesn't that just have the effect that everyone now has to pay for scientific articles?

Everyone was already paying for them before. The money that used to be collected on the sale of articles has never gone to finance the scientists making the work.

Really? That's all it takes? With all of the bungling in recent years, they have a long way to go before "pride" and "European institutions" can appear in the same sentence. You should also think through the full consequences of this move. The idea of free papers is nice, but it's not a fairy tale victory of good over evil. Also, political motives are worth considering. Science in the EU, given what it is, may wish to become more competitive in the face of American science and attract collaboration in more or less the same way open source and free software has.

If they agree to EU funding they are subject to the rules imposed by it. At least that's what I hope will happen.

Same things that happens when you have to apply other EU regulations like the "Right to be Forgotten".

What most likely will happen is that there will be a geoblocked EU repository/ies which will provide free access to research material.

Also it's important to note that only research which has been funded with public funds is applicable for this and depending on under which "Open Access" model they'll end up operating under there might be some additional restrictions.

From the source on futurism.com: "This would legally only impact research supported by public and public-private funds".

So if the team is funded partially by some European organization(s) it would apply to them, otherwise not.

First in line to Disneyland, or first in line at the suicide booth?

Direction is as important as order, so a criticism of "not first" must be more nuanced.

The U.S. is heading in a direction that will cede control of ICANN. I can't imagine a more inept proposition...

Do you have a link to those studies? I would really like to know where those $1500 are being spent.

Because the journals held by a few global players (Elsevier, Springer, Oxford Journals) are the most prestigious ones, and a researcher's career and funding hinges almost solely on the number of his publications/year in prestigious journals.

And who protects the researchers?

The same people who demand this open access also advocate research evaluation criteria that mostly count the number of publications in top journals owned by Springer, Elsevier, etc.

On what is this based?

You mean similar to the timing for the abolishment if roaming costs?

Just wait till you see how many people use "America" when they mean "The United States of America".

Have you actually published an article ?

Publishers now don't even do editorial service. They give you a template you must follow and the actual (free) reviewers tell you if you write good english or not.

Sorry, perhaps this differs from field to field but at least in mine what you say is patently false.

Journals have no linguistic editing, no proofreading, and the typesetting is outsourced to India - at least Springer does so, as I know from personal interaction with the typesetters. Articles must be delivered more or less camera-ready according to the journal style. Editorial boards and all editors, as well as as reviewers work for free.

If you have a research group that actually pays for being published, then that's called "grey literature" or even worse, just plain self-publication, and it's worth nothing. It can even have a negative impact on your CV.

I didn't down-vote you, because you ask a valid question.

However, free newspapers and travel sounds good to me.

If all/most resources were free it would then be just a matter of deciding which were worth spending your time on.

There doesn't really seem to be much negative, other than current business models fading away. However, I don't think most people would care much if all businesses did close and were replaced with a different economic model. (Not that I have one in mind, just that I don't think we need to be attached to the current business model)

The EU provides a lot of funding for science projects across the union, this funding comes from member states, who raise money through taxation.

So in effect you have EU citizens paying for research to be done, but have to double-dip on the papers or artefacts that come out as a result of the research.

This initiative is designed to make publicly funded research.....public, and not held behind a paywall provided by a private entity.