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."
Good news (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like good news to me. But seriously, who *actually* reads journals any more? Pre-print services are more far more convenient. All we need to do is latch on some peer review and ranking system onto the arXiv (or similar) and we get rid of all of these outdated journals.
Re:Sense being made by the UK government? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
But seriously, who *actually* reads journals any more?
Only the best scientist and researchers in the world.
All we need to do is latch on some peer review and ranking system onto the arXiv (or similar) and we get rid of all of these outdated journals.
Sounds like a restricted wikipedia and we all know that wikipedia is immune from mis-information. Honestly, I don't see any issue with journals. They are peer reviewed and most are digital and fully-indexed these days. Journals provide about the only reliable, authoritative documentation on the internet.
Re:Great idea ... let's just hope the publishers.. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the options they mention is to put the paper in an institutional repository (i.e. on a web server run by your university). Even Elsevier currently already allows you to put your final submission online yourself, so that shouldn't be a problem. This is not such a big step as it seems in that respect.
What I do very much like is the required use of the CC-BY licence if any processing fees are paid. To see why that is such a big deal, here's what e.g. Elsevier normally offers authors: 1) You write the paper, 2) we get a volunteer editor to look at it, 3) the volunteer editor gets some volunteer reviewers to review it, and you scientists go back and forth until the editor says that it's accepted, 4) you sign over your copyright to us, 5) we typeset it, 6) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays us for a subscription, and 7) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays a per-access fee. Recently, with all the Open Access discussion going on, they've added an option: 8) You pay a $3000 "handling fee" to cover our expenses, and we'll give access to anyone for free.
Note the catch: you the scientist do most of the work yourself, and pay the publisher for their part of the work, but the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work! That seems grossly unfair to me. In this new policy, the publisher may still own the copyright even if they get paid, but with a CC-BY licence, everyone else essentially gets the same rights they do, so it's toothless. That is a step in the right direction.