Pioneering CERN Scheme Will Pay Publishers More If They Hit Open-Science Targets

Leaders at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization's collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. From a report: The current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments. Under the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers that adopt polices such as use of public or open peer review and linking research to data sets, and less to those that do not. Some open-science specialists say the policy could be a game-changer in encouraging transparent science. Others caution that it could set a precedent for publishers to boost their fees in exchange for becoming more open. "Particle physics is large, international, highly complex, highly dynamic. Openness is the only really effective way of practising science in the discipline," says Kamran Naim, head of open science at CERN.

The move comes as a result of CERN's success in encouraging journals that publish its work to do so more openly, through a programme called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). SCOAP3 launched in 2014 and its members include 3,000 libraries, research funders and research organizations worldwide, all of which contribute to a common fund at CERN. This is used to pay annual or quarterly lump sums to journals, in amounts depending on how many papers they publish. The initiative has so far supported the publication of more than 70,000 open-access articles. It has an annual budget of around $10.4 million.

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Asimov's version of Communism, Gaia, obviously.

This cannot be very hard

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

All of the interesting stuff in particle physics is and has been open for years now.

The main hub is at https://inspirehep.net/ [inspirehep.net]

So for the journals this is just extra income with no work attached.

What purpose do Journals serve today?

[kwelch007]

I mean, I understand what purpose they served in a pre-digital era. But what purpose do they serve today? Particularly, what purpose do they serve to deserve such high payments? Papers can be shared and reviewed much less expensively now than ever before. I must be missing something,

Backwards Looking Plan

[Roger W Moore]

This strikes me as just propping up an outdated publishing scheme. All the writing and reviewing of papers is done entirely by scientists. We used to need publishers because printing and distributing paper journals was a job that required a printing press and those used to be very expensive to buy and to run. Today, ironically in large part thanks to CERN's invention of the Web, the reason we used to need publishers has disappeared because it's trivial to distribute electronic copies of papers.

Instead of

It's high time to do something

[KAdamM]

It is high time to do something about the publishers. They have free papers written with LaTeX templates - these are almost publish-ready documents. They ask referees to check the papers for free. Then they charge you $12690 (Nature) or $4000 (APS) for open access publishing. Or they charge governments and universities in millions of dollars for national access. What are the overheads? The costs of publishing (online) or little editing after the referees have done their job, seem to be negligible compared t