Major UK Science Funder Will Require Grantees To Make Papers Free (sciencemag.org) 63
The UK's leading funding agency has announced that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read.
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shared this report from Science: The policy by the funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding... About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI's current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for "gold" open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher's website, or choose the "green" route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year.
Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers. But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted.
The funder's executive champion for open research succinctly explained their rationale.
"Publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer."
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shared this report from Science: The policy by the funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding... About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI's current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for "gold" open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher's website, or choose the "green" route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year.
Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers. But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted.
The funder's executive champion for open research succinctly explained their rationale.
"Publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer."
Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:2)
From the article "UKRI will nearly double the funding it provides for supporting open access—including gold open-access fees–from £24 million to £47 million per year."
Re:Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:4, Informative)
I was not aware that peer reviewers were paid. Those who organise it (ie the publishers) get paid, but not fellow researchers.
Re:Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you want to review every piece of research drivel for free, on your own time?
Regardless of whether it is pleasant work or not, peer-reviewing is generally not paid.
Under our current journal-based publishing system, the financial rewards go to those who contribute the least.
I'd go become a goddamn monk first.
A monk and a grad student are almost the same.
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A monk and a grad student are almost the same.
A monk at least has something resembling inner peace.
Yeah but a monk has to meditate for hours to reach a state of relaxation, for a grad student it's reached after five minutes with Pornhub and a box of tissues.
We're publishing for free right now (Score:3)
It occurs to me that you published that, for free.
I'm publishing this.
There are plenty of ways to publish stuff openly, for free.
There is a reason people want to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in Science, or The Lancet. It might be useful to think about why that is.
People want The Lancet to be more like WordPress.com not charging any significant fee. It occurs to me that we have something that's like WordPress.com. It's called WordPress.com.
Clearly, the New England Journal of Medicine
Re:We're publishing for free right now (Score:5, Insightful)
Journals are considered prestigious because of incumbent lock-in. The best journals attract the best authors. Publishing the best papers gives the journal even more prestige.
So they are profiting only because of their incumbent position, which is rent-seeking.
One or two prestigious journals in each field made sense back in the days of paper, because interested people could subscribe to that one journal to read the most important new research.
But that model makes no sense in the age of the Internet. Government should use its funding power to change the publishing model for the good of everyone.
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> The best journals attract the best authors. Publishing the best papers gives the journal even more prestige.
So you're saying that the difference between WordPress, or and even Twitter, vs a good journal is that they select the very best papers? So when I open the leading journal in my field, I can expect to find very quality work. As opposed to sifting through crap.
Am I understanding you right? That does match my experience.
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Also I'd like to understand this better:
> One or two prestigious journals in each field made sense back in the days of paper, because interested people could subscribe to that one journal to read the most important new research.
Right, makes sense. There are a couple of sources I stay up on in my field, because they put out important, quality content. Others less so and I don't have time to go through a thousand articles every month to find the important and high quality ones. That's the job of the editor
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You lost me here. Government should force you to wade through tons of crap? Not allow you to let a good editor do that for you?
No, what is being said is "My damn tax money paid for this research, I shouldn't have to pay for it again to read it.".
I don't care about your "comfort" in sifting through research. It is also not like if open access journals become the norm that every paper will be dumped into non-relevant journals either, we will still have specialized repositories for the different fields - with at least as stringent requirements as there are now for publication. If I have already paid my taxes, and those taxes have at
Who, then? (Score:2)
> With at least as stringent requirements as there are now for publication.
> I should then not have to pay to
Who, then, is going to pay?
You said it's going to have at least the same quality of editorial selection, the same review process, etc. So who is going to pay for operating this journal, if not the people who want to read it?
I'd really like to have a top-quality journal for my specific specialty, but I haven't found a staff who wants to produce one for free and I don't feel like paying a dozen p
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I'd really like to have a top-quality journal for my specific specialty, but I haven't found a staff who wants to produce one for free and I don't feel like paying a dozen people to produce it for me each month.
If you want that, and there is enough demand by readers and researchers publishing for a journal in your subfield, then take a page out of free software's book. Somehow thousands of different distros, both large and small seem to do it just fine. Tens of thousands of software projects over the years have managed to do it as well. Most of them even without financial backing.
If there is demand for publication in your area, volunteers should be more than enough to weed crap papers out, and maintain a searchabl
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> take a page out of free software's book. Somehow thousands of different distros, both large and small seem to do it just fine
Somehow yes. And not by making it illegal to hire a programmer to write software you want. (Or equivalently, buying software). Not by legally forcing people to contribute to open source rather than buying the software they need.
That's not how we did it. I say we because I've been releasing open source software since the year after the term "open source" was coined. We didn't pass
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That's not how we did it. I say we because I've been releasing open source software since the year after the term "open source" was coined. We didn't pass any laws to force people to do it our way.
The laws were already there... That's the entire reason WHY we can have open source like the GPL at all.
This law is no different than the GPL. If you take publicly funded money ( Use GPL source code and release a binary ) you have to make the results publicly available for free to the public ( make available -for free or at worst the cost of media and shipping- ALL of the source code for the project that is connected to the GPL code ).
I fail to see how this is so hard to understand. If you take public money
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I just want to clarify a misconception here.
> Use GPL source code and release a binary ) you have to make the results publicly available for free to the public
That is false. You can read the license to check.
What you must do is offer to provide the source *to people who buy the binaries*.
Quoting the license:
--
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the f
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find the important and high quality ones. That's the job of the editor.
Actually, the unpaid reviewers decide which are the high-quality papers.
The "editor" is a rent-seeking leech.
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From my limited experience, the reviewers don't choose which articles will appear each month. They are more of a check at stage three. They don't choose which papers to review, and they don't choose which ones get published in the journal.
Do you not like free money? Do you not want to contribute to society?
If you do, and you're convinced that you could get millions of dollars for no work, and produce a top-quality journal, by calling yourself an editor, I'm very confused about why you haven't done that. T
Re: We're publishing for free right now (Score:2)
Re:We're publishing for free right now (Score:5, Insightful)
Government should force you to wade through tons of crap? Not allow you to let a good editor do that for you?
Nobody is being "forced" to do anything other than make taxpayer-funded research accessible.
If enough people are willing to pay for a quality selection and presentation, the journals will prosper. But if all they offer is exclusive monopoly access, they will soon be out of business.
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Right, makes sense. There are a couple of sources I stay up on in my field, because they put out important, quality content. Others less so and I don't have time to go through a thousand articles every month to find the important and high quality ones. That's the job of the editor.
This, exactly this --- the aspect of curation --- is why journals are valuable. They serve as a filter to set a bar in terms of research quality and impact delivered to the reader, according to each journal's policies and intent.
The idea that incumbency is the sole driver of status is specious. It is quite possible to create a new journal de novo to compete even at the very highest levels. Look how johnny-come-lately Cell has elbowed its way into regions where Nature and Science previously had exclusive s
Re: We're publishing for free right now (Score:2)
What if the amount of researchers in your field has become so huge that any subset of papers for the top journals will never be the subset suited for you? Or in other words reality.
None of the top journals are specialized enough that a selection by the editor can be right for any researcher to rely on. Social networking is far more important than journals, you can't read it all but your social network of peers can and alert you when they think you should know.
Re: We're publishing for free right now (Score:2)
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Re: We're publishing for free right now (Score:2)
Not as huge as the money they make off those journals.
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The answer surely lies in between the two extremes. The root of the problem is that the academic community needs gatekeepers for research, but they cannot or are unwilling to do the gate
No need to IMAGINE, we have that (Score:2)
> But conversely, it is not as simple as publishing your research in your personal blog or even on a pre-print server. Think of the chaos that will ensue if it was a free for all. How would anyone be able to separate the genuine research from the crackpots?
There's no need to "think of the chaos if" people were just publishing whatever they want, with nobody curating. We have that system too. It's called Facebook.
We know exactly what the quality of non-curated content I, because we have non-curated conten
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What's your field that facebook is the preferred publishing platform for preprints?
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We're not talking about preprints. We're talking about final papers.
I don't think there is ANY field where that model is preferred. Because that model sucks. Really, really sucks. Yet most of the people commenting here want it mandated by law. Apparently most of the people commenting here do no academic work. Not even reading the latest research in their field.
If they DID read the latest research in their field, they wouldn't be using the "anybody publishes whatever and nobody provides any information on wh
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A preprint is a final paper until it isn't.
Using facebook as an example when almost free for all preprint servers exist and are frequently cited from is a bit silly.
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Most preprint servers won't even ALLOW peer-reviewed papers, so saying they are the same as top journals is a tad ridiculous.
However, if you want to claim they are the same, clearly you could just use the preprint servers instead of the journal, right? Therefo
Hit submit too soon (Score:2)
I accidentally hit submit too soon.
If you want to claim that preprint servers provide the same quality as top journals are the same, clearly you could just use the preprint servers instead of the journal, right? Therefore it would be totally pointless to change the journals to be like the preprint servers. If you want something that's like the preprint server, you can just use the preprint server!
(Which is essentially the Facebook model, and has precisely the same problems that make them useless for staying
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I wasn't saying dumping papers on preprint servers should be the norm, I was implying facebook as an example of a free for all was hyperbole when preprint servers exist.
Though I do think something like print servers should be the norm, not some journal with a limited number of articles per month ... but peer review for "all" and let citations sort out the rest. How will print servers get good reviewers to do it for free without the prestige of elitist journals? They obviously won't, so paid peer review prob
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I hear what you're saying.
There is one part of Facebook (and YouTube) that makes them MORE useful than preprint servers. You said:
> The number of researchers has exploded, yet the number of top journals stays the same.
And that's precisely why journals are useful for staying up to date with what's important in your field. I don't have TIME to read 100 papers a day. There are 3 million PhDs just in the US, publishing a million papers a year. If even 1% of those are in my field, that's at least 10,000 pape
Re: We're publishing for free right now (Score:2)
Mostly first mover advantage.
They need to keep up a certain level of quality in admission and editing, but still mostly first mover advantage.
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Regardless of whether it is pleasant work or not, peer-reviewing is generally not paid.
This trope is old, tired, and wrong. Researchers (including many but not all graduate students) are salaried. Part of their job description is to review papers, and advancement is based, in part, on the quality of journals for which they serve as a reviewer. That's why where one has reviewed appears on one's CV.
The journal might not be paying the reviewer, but the reviewer is paid for the time spent reviewing manuscripts. The coffee machine company doesn't pay the scientist when they go to get another c
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Reviewing other peoples work is a pain in the ass. Would you want to review every piece of research drivel for free, on your own time?
I always assumed that's where the "Pay us $24.95 to download a single paper" cost went toward
Re: Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:2)
Re: Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:2)
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As far as I know in the US reviewers are not paid. They are fellow scientists and the only benefit they get by reviews is kind of prestige in their area. Only publishers are payed and depending on the journal sometimes even the PI has to pay for publishing the research paper.
In former time it was reasonable, since publishing paper journals actually costed money and required maintaining expensive equipment, nowadays most of the journals are online with very limited paper copies, yet still they are often paye
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I was not aware that peer reviewers were paid. Those who organise it (ie the publishers) get paid, but not fellow researchers.
Thanks! I just assumed they got paid, but as you indicate and a quick search reveals generally they are not. £47 million (about $65 million) seems like a lot just to get published.
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Academic publishing is a massive rort. I spent 10+ years studying and working at my university in various positions and I cant think of a single academic I met who thought the system was good for academia. Academics get flogged on the wheel of "publish or perish" for little to no pay , often exploiting the labor of PhD candidates hoping that one day they, or the candidate whos research they are appropriating generates enough publications on the resume to get upgraded to Associate Professor (outside the US ,
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From the article "UKRI will nearly double the funding it provides for supporting open access—including gold open-access fees–from £24 million to £47 million per year."
IFAIK, peer reviewers aren't paid.
Re: Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:2)
Re:Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Elsevier actually do very little
Expect for copy editing, type setting, indexing, DOI registration, hosting in perpetuity, documenting the peer review process, tracking errata, cross referencing, tracking citations, ...
Re: Inb4 who's paying for peer review? (Score:2)
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2019 Highlights (see figures below for a fuller picture)
As of December 31st, 2019, PLOS had net assets of $11.8 million, improved by $1.1 million compared to the previous year’s $10.7 million.
Of the 2019 year-end net assets, cash and unrestricted investments totaled $12.5 million compared to $11.5 million at year-end 2018.
For the year ending December 31st, 2019, PLOS generated total revenues of $31.6 million compared to total revenues of $31.7 million for the year ending Decem
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Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
And to Sci-Hub as well.
Information wants to be free. (Score:1)
... as a famous man once said ...
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Think of the poor publishers (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, publishers are predicting doom and gloom:
Publishers have resisted the new requirements. The Publishers Association, a member organization for the U.K. publishing industry, circulated a document saying the policy would introduce confusion for researchers,
Yes. Imagine having to read more freely available papers.
threaten their academic freedom,.
Of course academic freedom is threatened - people would actually be able to read their research
undermine open access
No doubt, making papers freely available means more would be available, the horrors.
leave many researchers on the hook for fees for gold open access—which it calls the only viable route for the publishers.
Fixed that for them.
It remains to be seen whether some publishers will refuse to publish papers by authors who opt to immediately post a green version of their paper
That would be foolish, as it would drive universities to change the publish or perish model by simply using a public repository, providing peer reviews, and giving it the imprimatur of one or more prestigious universities. Many schools already have their own publishing arm, adding a digital repository would not be that big of a stretch.
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Part of Plan S that mandates open access (Score:2)
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"You can thank Boris and his cronies for trying to put a stop to this policy. Everything that happens in the UK, you can basically blame Brexit and Tories. I know I do."
Everybody does.
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"Everybody does."
If only.