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posted by martyb on Monday December 10 2018, @12:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the information-wants-to-be-free dept.

China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls

In a huge boost to the open-access movement, librarians and funders in China have said that they intend to make the results of publicly funded research free to read immediately on publication.

The move, announced at an open-access meeting this week in Berlin, includes a pledge of support for Plan S, a bold initiative launched in September by a group of European funders to ensure that, by 2020, their scientists make papers immediately open.

It is not yet clear when Chinese organizations will begin implementing new policies, or whether they will adopt all of Plan S's details, but Robert-Jan Smits, the chief architect of Plan S, says the stance is a ringing endorsement for his initiative. "This is a crucial step forward for the global open-access movement," he says. "We knew China was reflecting to join us — but that it would join us so soon and unambiguously is an enormous surprise."

In three position papers, China's National Science Library (NSL), its National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), a major research funder, all said that they support the efforts of Plan S "to transform, as soon as possible, research papers from publicly funded projects into immediate open access after publication, and we support a wide range of flexible and inclusive measures to achieve this goal". "We demand that publishers should not increase their subscription prices on the grounds of the transformation from subscription journals to open access publishing," the papers say.

Previously: Plan S: Radical Open-Access Science Initiative in Europe
Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation Join "Plan S" Open-Access Initiative


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @04:04PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Monday December 10 2018, @04:04PM (#772397)

    librarians and funders in China have said that they intend to make the results of publicly funded research free to read immediately on publication

    One small print though: learn Mandarin, you 鬼子.

    These days, you may well be able to use machine translation for the text. Scientific papers tend to have a limited and specialised vocabulary set within a well-defined structure, so are among the easiest things to translate.

    Hint: scientific papers usually report new findings, using NEW terminology.
    Now please try to repeat what you said...

    現在,您可以使用機器翻譯來處理文本。 科學論文傾向於在明確定義的結構中具有有限且專業的詞彙集,因此是最容易翻譯的內容。

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