Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Sunday January 04 2015, @06:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the sharing-is-caring dept.

Science Mag, a science site that carries a boat load of paywalled science articles, apparently sees no irony in carrying an article about India's Ministry of Science & Technology mandating public access to any funded projects.

India’s Ministry of Science & Technology earlier this month announced it will require researchers who receive even just part of their funding from its biotechnology and science and technology departments to deposit copies of their papers in publicly accessible depositories.

Researchers are required to submit papers to a repository within 2 weeks of acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal. Some papers may not become freely available for 6 to 12 months, however, if the journal asks for a delay to protect its subscription revenue. In including such delays, India’s policy tracks similar policies adopted by many other public and private funding agencies around the world.

Any institution that receives funding from the the Ministry will be required to set up a digital repository that will archive papers. The ministry, in turn, will maintain a “central harvester” linked to each of the institutional repositories; it will allow users to search for papers across the entire system.

Further this is retroactive to 2012, and any institution that receives an annual grant that covers, or partially covers the salary, infrastructure and research requirements of its staff will come under this mandate. The central harvester will be accessible to search engines.

Related Stories

Costly Journals Add Almost No Value Over Freely-Available Pre-Prints 28 comments

In the ongoing open access debate, which oldmedia publishers have been able to drag out for decades, oldmedia publishers have repeatedly made the assertion that articles in their very expensive journals are greatly improved during the publication process. Glyn Moody, writing at Techdirt, discusses the lack of value added by expensive, subscription-only journals over the original, freely-available pre-prints of the very same papers, thus negating the claims from the oldmedia publishers.

Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.

Scientific method requires that hypotheses be testable, and that means publishing anything necessary for a third party to reproduce an experiment. So some might even say that if your research ends up behind a paywall, then what you are doing is not even science in the formal sense of the concept.

Previously on SN :
New York Times Opinion Piece on Open Access Publishing (2016)
India's Ministry of Science & Technology Join Open-Access Push (2015)
Open Access Papers Read and Cited More (2014)


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @01:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @01:51PM (#131562)

    Publicly funded science should indeed be public but making rules retroactively is just plain wrong. I don't see how this is even possible or perhaps the agreements weren't really finished in which case this isn't really retroactive.

    Also I think the 6 to 12 months delay is way too much. Accessing the latest stuff is but one reason people subscribe to journals, their most important contribution should clearly be to hand pick the the wheat from the chaff.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:07PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:07PM (#131566) Journal

    How much useful or interesting articles comes from India?