UK Research Funders: Publicly Funded Research Must Be Publicly Available 61
scibri writes "The UK's research councils have put in place an open access policy similar to the one used by the US NIH. From April 2013, science papers must be made free to access within six months of publication if they come from work paid for by one of the UK's seven government-funded grant agencies, the research councils, which together spend about £2.8 billion each year on research (press release). The councils say authors should shun journals that don't allow such policies, though they haven't said how those who don't comply with the rules will be punished."
Great idea ... let's just hope the publishers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Who exactly should get a head start, and a head start on whom?
The journal publishers? Researchers sometimes even have to pay a fee to submit papers for publication in the first place.
The peer reviewers? they aren't paid by the journals or by the researchers.
The researchers? they have already processed the information, which is why they are submitting for publication.
Leaving a 6 month clause just begs to have endless lobbying to get it extended to 12 months, then 2 years, etc.
If you are actively researching in a field, you will still be forced to get the expensive peer reviewed journals, usually bundled with a bunch of other journals you don't want at all, but are more or less forced to buy because of the prohibitive cost of buying articles one at a time.
Journal Publishers basically get all the content written and submitted by scientists for free, selected by peer reviewed by another bunch of scientists for free, then slap a cover on a bunch of them and sell them at obscene prices. The price increases have way outstripped the CPI since the mid 80's and it's way past time the greedy bastards got a shake up.
Re:Great idea ... let's just hope the publishers.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Technically, you're most likely using the taxpayers' money to conduct the research in the first place, so I find your argument that the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work, hard to grasp.
I fully agree. As a publicly funded scientist, of course the results of my work (as in, the work done by me) belong to everyone, and so when I'm done, I want to share them with everybody. The problem is that before I can do so, I have to have the paper peer-reviewed and published to make sure it's up to scratch, and in the course of that, I have to give away the rights to share it with the people who paid for the research!
I don't want the copyright for myself (what am I going to do with it?) The only reason I want to have the copyright is so that I can distribute the paper under a free licence, so that anyone can benefit, rather than just the publisher, its shareholders, and whoever is rich enough to be able to afford the access fee.
Re:Sense being made by the UK government? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it could, but if you read the Finch report, you'll find that they're recommending what's known as gold open access. Researchers will be expected to pay an preposterously high per-article fee during the publication process -- a fee that they will be expected to write into their proposal for funding. This means that shedloads of funding will be going from research groups to publishers. A 2,000 UKP per publication 'article processing fee' has been proposed, although with gloomy predictability, higher-profile publishers with better impact factors have generally made it known that their article processing costs, seeing as how they're Quality and all, may (alas) be somewhat higher. They can get away with it.
This, incidentally, means that people who happen to do research and receive public funding, but don't happen to have any project funding (and this is far from rare), are going to find it very difficult to afford to publish. We're going from a situation in which the general public can't afford to access/read research to a situation in which only a subsection of academics will be able to afford to publish, thus privileging themselves on the REF (latest incarnation of the research evaluation exercise) and denying the stragglers. Publishers are content with this because they're on the gravy train for life. Many academics aren't unduly concerned because they have project funding and it's just another system of fees. And hey, screw the riffraff, right? They can stay in the low impact factor ghetto where they belong.
Open access is a good idea. This, on the other hand, is just your typical everyday lunatic you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours moneywasting. The actual solution is within the government's reach (hint: it involves privileging legit open access journals in the REF, rather than paying wodges of cash to Nature), but that won't get anyone invited to any dinner-parties at all, so we'll just keep throwing money at publishers instead.
I'm in a situation right now where my own funder both mandates open access and refuses to pay for it, which, regrettably, is the sort of laughably schitzophrenic thinking I have come to expect from them. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'They're all a load of useless bloody loonies.'
Re:Sense being made by the UK government? (Score:4, Insightful)