Will the World Embrace Plan S, the Radical Proposal To Mandate Open Access To Science Papers? (sciencemag.org) 98
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: How far will Plan S spread? Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on. Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices.
If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley. North America isn't onboard. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the first Plan S participant outside Europe, and another private funder may follow," the report says. "But U.S. federal agencies are sticking to policies developed after a 2013 White House order to make peer-reviewed papers on work they funded freely available within 12 months of publication."
Canada also isn't ready to change their joint 2015 OA policy. "Plan S is 'a bold and aggressive approach, which is why we want to make sure we've done our homework to ensure it would have the best effect on Canadian science," says Kevin Fitzgibbons, executive director of corporate planning and policy at Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Ottawa.
Outside Europe and North America, funders gave Science mixed responses about Plan S. "India, the third biggest producer of scientific papers in the world, will 'very likely' join Plan S, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan in New Delhi, principal scientific adviser to India's government," reports Science. "But the Russian Science Foundation is not planning to join. South Africa's National Research Foundation says it 'supports Plan S in principle,' but wants to consult stakeholders before signing on. Jun Adachi of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, an adviser to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources, says that despite interest from funders and libraries, OA has yet to gain much traction in his country."
If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley. North America isn't onboard. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the first Plan S participant outside Europe, and another private funder may follow," the report says. "But U.S. federal agencies are sticking to policies developed after a 2013 White House order to make peer-reviewed papers on work they funded freely available within 12 months of publication."
Canada also isn't ready to change their joint 2015 OA policy. "Plan S is 'a bold and aggressive approach, which is why we want to make sure we've done our homework to ensure it would have the best effect on Canadian science," says Kevin Fitzgibbons, executive director of corporate planning and policy at Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Ottawa.
Outside Europe and North America, funders gave Science mixed responses about Plan S. "India, the third biggest producer of scientific papers in the world, will 'very likely' join Plan S, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan in New Delhi, principal scientific adviser to India's government," reports Science. "But the Russian Science Foundation is not planning to join. South Africa's National Research Foundation says it 'supports Plan S in principle,' but wants to consult stakeholders before signing on. Jun Adachi of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, an adviser to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources, says that despite interest from funders and libraries, OA has yet to gain much traction in his country."
Why is open access a radical idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
In what way is it "radical"?
Re:Why is open access a radical idea? (Score:5, Funny)
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Not sure since the NHS, NIH and other major granting agencies already have open access requirements for big grants.
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Not sure since the NHS, NIH and other major granting agencies already have open access requirements for big grants.
The NHS? Which NHS?
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I might be wrong but for some reason (I'm not a brit and have never resided in the UK) I suspect that the refer to the NHS in the UK when it's ysed without sepecefing country
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I might be wrong but for some reason (I'm not a brit and have never resided in the UK) I suspect that the refer to the NHS in the UK when it's ysed without sepecefing country
That's what I thought too but the NHS doesn't fund research: it's a socialised health care system not a research funding body.
Re: Why is open access a radical idea? (Score:1)
Strange, because the NIHR web page explicitly states that itâ(TM)s part of the NHS.
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It sure does. The UK government through UKRI funds MCR and NHS which NIHR is part of. Together they are probably the second largest grantor of research funding in the world (behind the US's NIH).
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It sure does. The UK government through UKRI funds MCR and NHS which NIHR is part of. Together they are probably the second largest grantor of research funding in the world (behind the US's NIH).
You mean the MRC? Yes, of course, but that's a separate thing from the NHS. The MRC, not the NHS, is the UK equivalent of the NIH. Similarly the Wellcome Trust in the UK serves a similar role to the Howard Hughes in the US.
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If they didn't state the country, of course you're wrong to presume the UK.
National Institutes of Health is the US funding agency for health research.
If you've every looked up health information online, and you wanted to read about actual studies instead of bullshit, then you already have used their website.
I'd like to see a study that compares the average number of potato chips per year eaten by people who don't know what the NIH is, vs people who do know. I'd expect a huge correlation.
UK is a small countr
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The UK is only the 5th largest economy in the world on it's own and besides the US, the biggest investors in public research.
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Well, no.
That was already a misleading statistic when you saw the headline last year, but even that statistic is totally untrue now. It was misleading based on exchange rates, but the British Pound is no longer a premium currency, because Brexit.
When you saw the headline, there were also other articles explaining that 9th largest was a more accurate estimate based on the same numbers. And clearly there has been a decline.
Nevertheless, the size of their economy is irrelevant; they're a small country with onl
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NHS - National Health Service - even though the UK is a small country, it competes as one of the largest funders of public health research right behind the US's NIH. If you add all the branches integrated with the NHS together, they'd probably end up in second place right behind the world's least socialist country, the US NIH, which spends more than the next 20-something countries combined (including the EU, China, Germany and the UK) on health research.
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NHS - National Health Service - even though the UK is a small country, it competes as one of the largest funders of public health research right behind the US's NIH. If you add all the branches integrated with the NHS together, they'd probably end up in second place right behind the world's least socialist country, the US NIH, which spends more than the next 20-something countries combined (including the EU, China, Germany and the UK) on health research.
I see. I think the difference I had in mind is that the NIH funds a lot of basic research that is unlikely to have any direct impact on public health whereas I doubt the NHS does this.
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You're thinking about NSF (National Science Foundation) they do more of the basic non-health-related research programs. NIH does most of the biomedical research.
NSF only has a $6B budget whereas NIH has $26B. Compared to the next runner up China that funds ~$2B worth of research total, half of which is biomedical.
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You're thinking about NSF (National Science Foundation) they do more of the basic non-health-related research programs. NIH does most of the biomedical research.
NSF only has a $6B budget whereas NIH has $26B. Compared to the next runner up China that funds ~$2B worth of research total, half of which is biomedical.
Not at all, I'm thinking of the NIH. I've worked in basic biological research in both the US and the UK and I've been involved in writing funded NIH grants. Over 50% of the large NIH budget goes towards basic research [nih.gov]. This is "bio-medical" but that doesn't mean it has a direct clinical application or even that it's health related. For example, I know people funded by the NIH to study how simple plants regulate their genes, to study evolution in yeast or flies, or how neurons in rodent cortex encode informa
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Radical change, eliminating curated journals (Score:2)
According to TFS, studies done with US government grants have to be open after a year, for example. Journals can curate and review the most interesting of the latest new research and be funded with subscriptions from those who want full access to the newest research. Those journals are signicant. Good or bad I have no opinion, but they are significant.
If it's changed to immediate open access, the paid journals pretty much go away. That's because anyone who gets a copy can post all the articles for free, el
Re: Radical change, eliminating curated journals (Score:1)
Note that switching to open access does not really remove the revenue stream of curated journals; it typically costs like $3000 to publish an open-access article, so it's basically just shifting the payment from the reader to the author.
Note also that most research atm does not become available under open access after a year, even "classical" articles from the 1960s that all modern work is built on from say Nature and Physical Review is still paywalled after all these years, even though it was paid
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You are assuming that the revenue stream goes into peer-review and quality control. But this not how the system works: Peer view and quality control is done by volunteers. And there are open access journals which have high standards and are highly regarded. The reason the existing system still persists is *only* due to momentum. Publishing in journals such as nature, science, and many similar is very prestigious and therefor this is what people try to do. But that this is mostly due to momentum can be seen
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Sadly,scientists in other fields are not as smart
Yeah bullshit.
Scientists in other fields have much higher costs on the whole than mathematics. They means they need grants for equipment, supplies, technicians and so on. That comes from the fnuding bodies. The more impact your work has the more you lkely you are to get funded.
And publishing in high profile journals is a good way to get that impact.
Reducing it to "not as smart or organised" is vastly oversimplifying the problem and doing so in a very snobby
Re:Radical change, eliminating curated journals (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientists in other fields have much higher costs on the whole than mathematics. They means they need grants for equipment, supplies, technicians and so on. That comes from the fnuding bodies. The more impact your work has the more you lkely you are to get funded.
And publishing in high profile journals is a good way to get that impact.
Funding is clearly the lifeblood of any university. Getting funding is why major universities create research consortiums to improve their chances of getting it.
Publishing in prestigious journals is key to getting and maintaining a reputation. However, major universities have the resources and infrastructure in place to publish their own journals, and many already do. Right now, the costs of publishing in paywalled journals is insignificant compared to the benefits; the question is do universities want to wrest control of their research papers from the publishers? They already provide the academic resources (reviewers, editorial boards) so the most important part of ensuring quality exists; what needs to happen is for universities to decide their own publications are as valuable, or more, for tenure decisions as the current pay for play ones. Academia has the ability to significantly reduce the power of those journals, the question is do they want to?
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Newton never said to publish open letters because they encourage funding.
It seems to have already been known at the time that when publishers control what information researchers share, they also are involved in funding decisions.
The claim wasn't that you make more money if you publish directly and let your peers review your work directly, the claim was that science moves forwards faster, and that the people doing the research have a more honest idea of what other people are learning for their experiments.
I
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Publishing in prestigious journals is key to getting and maintaining a reputation.
Yep, and that feeds into how likely you are to get a grant.
However, major universities have the resources and infrastructure in place to publish their own journals, and many already do.
Any idiot with a webserver can publish a journal. Nonetheless researchers who don't try for the top journals put their careers at risk.
Don't like it? Then contact your representative and get them to change the policy of the funding bodies that
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what needs to happen is for universities to decide their own publications are as valuable, or more, for tenure decisions as the current pay for play ones.
Tenure? What tenure? If it's not already dead then it's certainly on life support these days. Besides, until the external sources of funding get with the program, it won't change. Let's say a university does that it's great except now any academic who follows through now has their career tied to that university and that one alone.
Basically you are casually stating that other people should damage their careers over this. Perhaps they should but they won't, because that's not how people work.
While I agree overall, I think you missed my point. University research consortiums currently exist to improve member organizations ability to attract grant money. If those universities wanted, they have the resources, academic talent and prestige to create journals every bit as prestigious as the current pay ones. As you point out, many of their staff already peer review and sit on editorial boards of the pay journals. Many of them already publish a number of respected journals.
There would be no damage to
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If those universities wanted, they have the resources, academic talent and prestige to create journals every bit as prestigious as the current pay ones.
No they don't. Lots of people want to supplant Nature and Science, but no one has succeeded partly because of the massive chicken and egg problem. No one wants to waste their best work on a journal that might fail.
There would be no damage to careers since the journals would be as respected as the pay ones, since they have the same peer reviewers and editor
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Sadly,scientists in other fields are not as smart
Yeah bullshit.
You can tell how full of shit they are when they tell you they have to do it that way, but they still claim to support "peer review." But then when people make proposals that would bring it back closer to the actual peer review that Newton, et al, taught the world then they get all whiny about how hard it is if they don't get paid by a publisher.
Some of their supporters even just lash out randomly, like claiming that people who support peer (lowercase p) review must be snobs. But they themselves support rev
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Lol it's funny when angry, ignorant people make wild claims.
then they get all whiny about how hard it is if they don't get paid by a publisher.
Publishers don't pay peer reviewers or the people who publish in the journals. Nice try though.
I fully expect to rationalise at this point rather than admit that your conclusions were based on an utterly false assumption. I'm not trying to change your opinion, I'm simply trying to trigger the strongest backfire effect that I can.
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Well, I oversimpified a bit ;-) But the main cost requested in most individual grant applications in most fields is certainly for research personnel such as postdocs and Phd students and this is be similar in mathematics. Anyway, I regularly review grant applications and I don't care where something was published.
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And the other thing is: Not the funding agency decides that you should have a lot of nature papers to get the grant. The reviewers of your grant decide whether it is good or not. So again, even if you have lazy reviewer who only looks at the nature papers published by the applicant instead of properly reviewing the grant, it is *only* momentum that nature and co. are the prestigious journals and not some other open access journals.
Re:Why is open access a radical idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Elsyvier is going to shit the bed over its dodgy profit model of locking tax funded public research behind private paywalls being thwarted so they'll pay politicians to call it "communist". And thus it will be "radical".
Elsyvier has done brilliantly (Score:2)
To keep their game this long. They used to add real value, by moving paper about.
But I suspect that they have overplayed their hand. They could have become the curator of all this open access papers, maybe charging for submissions to cover costs. Instead they look like going the way of newspaper classified advertisements.
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In what way is it "radical"?
It's considered rent seeking by libertarians. The free market should be able to charge market value. Information does not want to be free and furthermore hates to be anthropomorphised. Etc.
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Because it challenges the capitalist scientific paper publishing model.
It's actually a socialist idea.
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It's actually a socialist idea.
You're saying it's a "government" thing?
Ummm... (Score:1)
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Dumbest false equivalence of the day?
The countries that don't join (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not radical and not new (Score:3)
Indeed things are now going further in Canada with new requirements being considered for open access to the data used in scientific publications too. However, the rules for this require careful consideration since sometimes the data involved can be extremely large (hundreds of petabytes) and/or extremely hard to understand without detailed knowledge of the hardware, data formats, calibration data etc. It is also not clear how useful this is. I worked on an experiment 15 years ago that went to a lot of effort to make its data easily accessible to the public. At the end of the first year of the initiative, only 5 people had accessed the data and 4 of those turned out to be members of the experiment itself who were curious about the program!
One year vs immediately allows journals (Score:2)
According to TFS, studies done with US government grants have to be open *after a year*. Journals can curate the best of the latest new research and he funded with subscriptions from those who want full access to the newest research.
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Europe, Canada and, as I understand it, the US already require open access to the results of government-funded research.
Not really. In America, only some government agencies require immediate open access. Others are open access after a year delay.
In fields such as particle physics ...
The physics community was a pioneer of open access, and is further along than most other fields.
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Your average citizen isn't reading these, open or not.
Everyone benefits from open science and the innovations and breakthroughs enabled by widely available information.
The journals need to find a new business model. Their days of hoarding taxpayer funded scientific results are ending.
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In fields such as particle physics where we all tend to work in large, international collaborations this already means that all research is open access
In most of physics work has been open access because people post stuff to arXiv. It works because the field considers first to arxiv to be first to publish.
Some areas of computer science sich as ML seems to have recently got with the program and use the archive now, because the conferences have become so overwhelmed it's about the only way to actually publis
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Europe, Canada and, as I understand it, the US already require open access to the results of government-funded research. In fields such as particle physics where we all tend to work in large, international collaborations this already means that all research is open access since even if you are not from one of these countries some of us our and have to publish in open access journals (and would want to anyway regardless of requirements).
The difference is pretty significant, I think. Since 2008, the NIH has required investigators to place the full text of all journal articles arising from NIH funded research studies into the PubMed open access database. The private Wellcome Trust in the UK has similarly required open access to publications arising from grants it funds. This does not mean the paper must appear in an open access journal. If the paper was published in a closed-access journal an additional fee must be paid to the journal make i
Re: Who will pay (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit, there is no "quality" of which you speak. All the journal does is provide online storage and search features.
See arXiv for an excellent example of an open access implementation that works quite well.
This Plan S initiative sounds fantastic and is something I've been harassing all and any of my science friends who come into earshot.
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The quality will drop significantly as most publicly funded things do.
Hey everyone, let's play Spot The American Still Stuck In The 70s.
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If China wants to keep their research private, they can always not publish in traditional ways at all, but keep access to their research limited to Chinese researchers. In that case, maybe the Chinese government would pay for the infrastructure. And publishers like Elsevier would get exactly zero money out of it.
But that is somewhat off topic. The question here is if we (in the western world) let commercial publishers control access to the results of research. Or if we make sure it gets released in some Ope
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Of course the countries that are behind would want the countries that are ahead to share.
As for China, talk is cheap. They want everybody else to show their hand while they keep their own hand hidden.
The article is accompanied by a chart of proportion of papers published now by country. China is already edging out the US in this measure, with everyone else far behind. Scientists want to publish, because their reputations hinge on it. Even if a government restricts publication, word is going to leak out across the peer network and at scientific conferences anyway.
If there is no indication now that China is keeping a lot of research to itself, moving to an open-access world is not somehow going to make th
has yet to gain much traction in his country (Score:2)
>> has yet to gain much traction in his country
Who the fuck wants to pay for papers. Just plop it onto some all-encompassing variant of ArXiV and let researchers data mine it to hell and back.
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Just plop it onto some all-encompassing variant of ArXiV and let researchers data mine it to hell and back. ... that would make data mining probably more universal, too.
It would be actually interesting to define some meta data standards, how to publish the actual data. E.g. for time series etc. (probably that exists already)
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Just pile it without any metadata. Metadata bikeshedding can take decades. Data mine this finite corpus and put a good search engine to search in it. Then build a concept graph and citation graph to improve ranking. All tractable, if not straightforward, problems.
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Most straight forward solutions fail quickly :D Or as some engineer once said: all problems have a simple straight forward solution that is wrong.
E.g. I want for all households in the square of +/- 20km around a given position that use a heat pump all electricity load graphs in 15minutes intervals (that is the standard) for all days between december 2000 and march 2019 where the lowest temperature was below +5C.
So meta data that indicates what load graphs are, which time span they cover, to which device/hou
elsevier wins (Score:2, Interesting)
Forcing funding agencies to make researchers work open access will mean that
the funding agencies (or universities etc) have to pay open access fees to elsevier, springer etc.
Elsevier doesn't care which end of the process it makes its money from, but instead of milking taxpayers
via library funding to buy journals it will do so from funding agencies to publish them.
Elsevier 1, taxpayer 0.
A community managed peer review system overlayed on the arXiv (for those disciplines that use it)
seems like the best way t
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No. Elsevier and their lot will finally have to do actual work to earn money. That's the radical part here.
The current publisher model is
1. have somebody else (mostly tax payers) pay for the research & writing papers
2. have somebody else (again tax payers) pay for reviewing said papers
3. bundle & publish the accepted papers, taking no responsibility for the contents whatsoever
4. ask everybody (including the tax payers) to pay the publisher money for getting access to their "copyrighted" content
It's
Sci-Hub already did. (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Politicians just haven't caught up to society - they're still threatening to send their thugs after people to lock them in cages for sharing science. Talk about a clash of Pre- and Post- Enlightenment cultures.
#aaronswartz #pdftribute
Bigger picture from 2001: ending "self-dealing" (Score:2)
Something I wrote when Slashdot was a shiny new thing: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... [pdfernhout.net]
"executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grant
Plan S . . . Ah, yes! (Score:2)
Plan S... Ah yes. Plan S deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long-distance electrodes shot into the pinion pituitary glands of recent dead. Have you attempted any of this plan as yet?