All European Scientific Articles To Be Freely Accessible By 2020 (eu2016.nl) 76
An anonymous reader shares a report on EU2016: All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders. And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May. Under the presidency of Netherlands State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker, the EU ministers responsible for research and innovation decided unanimously to take these significant steps.Many questions remain unanswered. For instance, it is not clear whether the publishers would be forced to make their papers available for free or whether EU will only allow scientists who are happy to abide by the rules to publish papers. We should have more details on this soon.
Re:what a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It says on the article that the rules are supposed to cover parers written on taxpayer money. I'm sorry if this takes the edge off your righteous anger and rage.
Re: what a bunch of bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Then it's a shitty ass summary. My apologies for the bad comment. That's a big difference from the summary. If your work is funded by the government, which means taxpayers, your papers should be freely accessible. Also, any inventions that are novel enough to be patentable should be freely available for anyone to use without paying royalties. The US has a monstrosity called the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to patent federally funded research and charge royalties from taxpayers. That's bullshit.
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Currently government research funding is rigged against open access. The success of the research project will be measured by the impact of the publications generated by it, which means getting published in high impact journals. High impact factor journals are subscription access, or charge a significant fee to make papers open access. If you republish essentially the same work elsewhere as open access, this will be considered a violation of the publisher's copyright, and moreover as auto-plagiarism. As a un
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What? No it doesn't. Is English your first language?
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While I agree, that's a complaint of the idiots who post articles on /., and no one else.
Re:what a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. You are a scientific researcher but you don't want to make your results publicly available?
How exactly is that science that you are doing?
Proper science (with the maximum chance of advancing correctly and rapidly, and the maximum benefit to humanity) is an inherently open information-sharing activity.
Are you working on bio-weapons science or something else really dangerous like that? If not, I don't see your motivation for hiding your results.
If you're doing science just for the money, you're doing it wrong.
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Yeah, that's why more innovations come from outside the US than anywhere else. Oh, wait . . .
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Re: what a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Not in Europe. The US system is a failure and everywhere else is doing better science.
Well, I guess after about a decade, Europe is apparently jonesing become more like the US system again...
In 2007 the US, George Bush signed the bill that required all NIH funded research to be open access. This culminated efforts starting back in 2004 voluntarily open access publicly funded research in the NIH. The NIH is the world's largest non-military funding source of research. The law requires manuscripts must be put into PubMed Central *immediately* upon acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal (not after it's published).
It appears this new policy direction in the EU is basically following the US's lead in this area (and improving on it by requiring access to data as well)...
We welcome Europe to join this open-access system that is a "failure"...
Re:what a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
You are a scientific researcher but you don't want to make your results publicly available?
I'm guessing they're not, just an AC troll. Researchers don't get paid whenever something they write is downloaded; the journal leeches are paid whenever someone without a subscription buys access, or paid through subscriptions. If anything, not having your work more available is hurting you, since less people can read, access, and cite your paper. I really can't think of what advantage there would be, intrinsically anyway, to publishing in a paid over an open journal.
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The EU has no right to force me to make my papers publicly available. The EU neither respects people's rights nor freedom. Fuck Europe.
Why in hell wouldn't you, as a researcher, want to make your papers publicly available? Papers describe research that represents a lot of invested time and money, and you're going to want to publicize it and get it peer reviewed.
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And you have no right to have your research funded by the EU unless you agree to the strings that come with the money.
Get over it.
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The EU have both the right and the duty to ensure that I, Joe Taxpayer, can access the results and will receive the full benefits of research paid by me. You, on the other hand, don't have any right to take my money and then alter the deal. Go EU, fuck AC.
it si opne, nothing unclear about that. (Score:1)
The source links to the PDF wit the full text.:
Open access
Open access means that scientific publications on
the results of research supported by public and
public-private funds must be freely accessible to
everyone.
Nothing unclear about that.
http://english.eu2016.nl/binar... [eu2016.nl]
Not bad, but significant gray areas, side-effects (Score:4, Interesting)
I support the intention behind this directive. There are, however, some gray areas and some unintended consequences.
>> publications on the results of research supported by public and public-private funds
> Nothing unclear about that.
It's not that bad, but there are significant gray areas. Here are a few:
A) Most importantly, most "publications on the results of research" that they intend to cover are financed by universities. Most universities get at least some government funding, if only 5% of their budget. So figure a school is privately funded 95%, and gets 5% of of it's budget from government grants for providing certain types of education. Is the institution barred from recouping some of the costs of the research? Maybe so, maybe not.
B) This one is complicated, but I have direct experience with it and the new rule seems to ban a system which has worked extremely well. The last place I worked was an "extension" office. Funding was very interesting. We had world-class experts and facilities in the fields we covered, and we did two different but related things with our experts and facilities. Companies like Boeing or Ford would pay us to do testing and research for them. In a year, we might get $80 million dollars in contracts and have $30 million in direct costs for those contracts. We'd spend $20 million on training programs, mostly having our experts train first responders. That leaves $30 million "profit" which we'd give to the state, since it was a state agency. The state would turn around and appropriate back $10 million for our facilities expenses. So in the end, our agency received NEGATIVE $20 million from the taxpayers. We paid the tax payers, from fund received for contracts and also provided free training for first responders). We were giving money TO taxpayers, not getting money from tax payers, right? (Which is awesome, IMHO.) Well, after we gave the taxpayers $30 million, they gave us back $10 million for our facilities costs, so on paper we received taxpayer funds. Does that mean that the testing we did for the private companies would have to be open to the public for free? it would seem so. Which would suck, because Boeing and Ford aren't wouldn't keep paying us $80 million to test their new ideas if the results are immediately available to their competitors. Those contracts had been paying for our public services, such as first responder training, as well as paying a "profit" to taxpayers, but seemingly that would no longer be allowed.
C) A more common scenario, given the exact wording used, might be the following. It says "publications on ..." have to be open (not the research itself, but any publications discussing the results). So my boss asks me to write up an analysis of some new government data on cell phone use amongst college students and correlate it with our in in-house data, in order to make suggestions for our business strategy over the next 24 months. My analysis would be "on the results of" government research. Therefore we can't keep our analysis private?
the results of research which was funded
Again, it's not necessarily a bad idea, but there are some issues, some gray areas and some areas that would be affected which might not be the intent of the supporters.
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Yes, but don't forget that your institute is sitting at the summit of an academic pyramid funded by... taxpayer money. You are just giving back.
Makes more sense, then.
Grants, Grants, Grants (Score:3)
(I assume that you're in the US since you consider the case where the government might only contribute 5% of a university's budget.)
Second order effects like the school's general fund getting a pinch government money are irrelevant. The question is whether the research is being directly payed for, in full or in part, by a government grant (e.g. NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA). US researchers already have to state government funding sources in publications, so there's not much ambiguity about whether research is being
Stirring the money isn't new or unusual (Score:2)
> The question is whether the research is being directly payed for, in full or in part, by a government grant
I have a hard time thinking of ANY organization that doesn't make "adjustments" to what expense is paid for by what money, since that's an entirely imaginary concept. The government gives the school some money, which goes into the school's checking account. Students give the school the some money, which goes into the school's checking account. The school writes a check for some new furniture. Did
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Yep, this is what I tell people when they claim that oil companies don't get subsidies.
What??? (Score:2)
What are you talking about? Given the topic, I'm guessing that you mean energy companies might get subsidies for their solar-electric programs, where they spend considerably less on solar than the subsidy amount, and the same company might also be involved in oil, meaning the solar subsidy would in effect offset costs on the oil side?
Typically, when people mention "oil company subsidies" they mean to confuse the reader by effectively claiming that recognizing expenses, as all companies are required to do
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Typically, when people mention "oil company subsidies" they mean to confuse the reader
How ironic. I was saying that when people claim that oil companies don't get subsidies, they mean to confuse the reader. And here you are to support that behavior...
In fact the opposite is true - scams like Enron work by NOT recognizing expenses,
I didn't say thing one about recognizing expenses. That was you. Try again. Or, preferably, don't.
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So what "oil company subsidies" are you talking about, and how does that relate to the topic at hand?
Useless abstractions (Score:2)
Those are the second order effects that I talked about, and they're irrelevant for this question. If you win a grant, then yes the school does take a cut, but there is money earmarked for an individual researcher. If you don't win a grant, then no money is earmarked for you. The question is: do you win a grant or not. That's it.
You're making this more complicated than it really is. Let's take your logic a step further. You argue that because all the money is sitting in the school's bank account, then all th
Actual real problem at my job (Score:2)
My neighbor and I don't mix our bank accounts together, and I doubt you mix yours with yours with your neighbor.
At my last job, I did devops for the entire organization.
The organization had many different programs, including one funded by a DHS grant (cybersecurity classes). My work benefitted ALL programs, including the one program funded by the DHS grant. Were the things I did work under a federal grant, and therefore subject to 50,000 pages of federal regulation ? That was an actual, real problem.
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Case B seems straightfoward: if you are not publishing then you are not required to do so. If you are publishing then it must be open access.
Publish: communicate to another (Score:2)
The facility performing the test communicates it to the client. The research on their new products idea IS published, as the word is used in law. To "publish" something is to communicate it to another.
A better rule might be if it were "offered to the public", the price must be minimal.
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Not in any context that I have ever heard it used. To "publish" is to make public, or to make available to the public. To "disclose" is to communicate results privately to a third-party. http://legal-dictionary.thefre... [thefreedictionary.com] is a very crappy two-minute reference to back this up - do you have a link to backup your definition as I have never heard used in that way.
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The second sentence from your link, "to utter to a third person ". There really are two defintions in law, aren't there. Where one is required to "publish" notice, the statute typically specifies something specific like "publish in the primary newspaper of daily circulation". Where one must NOT "publish" (defamation, classified info), it means tells communicate to an other person.
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The first sentence is the general legal definition "To circulate, distribute, or print information for the public at large."
The second sentence is a more specific case that only applies to slander.
Let's try it and see (Score:2)
> definition "To circulate, distribute, or print information for the public at large."
Let's try it and see. This directive says that if it's published, it must be made available to the public. Let's try substituting in that definition of "publish":
Any report circulated, distributed, or printed for the public at large must be made available to the public.
I'm not sure that makes sense, seems redundant. If that's what they mean, they should say that. It's certainly not clearly obvious that they mean "an
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No it does not. The text of the sirective says if it is published it must be made freely accessible. "Publically available" is your own redundant substitution.
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As a taxpayer, I don't see anything gray about that: your research is funded by the public, you deliver your results to the public. If you don't want that, slash your budget to what you can pa
This is awesome enlightened legislation (Score:3)
They're blinding me with science!
How did actual politicians come up with something this wise and uncorrupted? It boggles the mind.
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From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues.
Read the fine print that the politicians wrote. As I read that, they're saying it's freely available unless the researcher decides otherwise.
EU Datacenter (Score:2)
Who is gonna host all that data and for how long ?
Do these reasons only count for the data. Or can they be abused to enforce the old way of doing things.
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Re:EU Datacenter (Score:4, Interesting)
Brewster Kahle [wikipedia.org]. Forever.
Your data, good for a thousand years [pcworld.com]
If that's not good enough, go back to sleep for another twenty years.
Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind [phys.org]
Problem solved.
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Brewster Kahle has a reasonable, albeit obvious, solution.
But will DVD drives be around in 1000 years?
I solved this problem about 10 years ago. All a future civilization needs is computer technology and an x-y scanner at, say, half the optical resolution of silver (or platinum) emulsion photographic film.
It is patented.
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Thank you !
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"Who is gonna host all that data and for how long ?"
Sci-Hub.
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Who is gonna host all that data and for how long ?
semanticscholar.org?
Does it matter? (Score:1)
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On balance I think there is a slightly larger chance of President Trump being elected President for life than the EU organising a break up in only 4 years.
Native source (Score:3)
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/a... [rijksoverheid.nl].
- There will be an "Innovations deal". They will attempt to scrub current rules for "innovation impeding" laws.
- Evaluation of the last EU research program, claims that on average every Euro invested in Research created 11 Euro of wealth.
- The new EU research project (Horizons 2020) is the biggest ever with 70 billion euro.
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It's not unreasonable to pay for editing/publishing in a high-profile journal that also has to assume bandwidth and other costs. For most research, having to pay for that service (instead of submitting as "closed access") is a non-issue. Simply put, if someone has a major project and wants to publish in a prestigious journal (say, Nature) they can usually find 2-3000 for publication (even 2-3 times that would not be a problem for a career-changing publication). This money is peanuts for a big science projec