The Council of the European Union is one of the two chambers of the EU's legislative branch. One of its multiple responsibilities is to coordinate member states' policies by brokering compromises between the member states. The Council is composed of 10 specialized Council configurations where each configuration deals with a distinct policy area. Every six months a different member state holds the Presidency of the Council. The Council configurations meet regularly, and one of the advantages of holding the presidency is that the presiding member state draws up the agenda for the Council and chairs all meetings, and ministers from the presiding member state chair the Council configuration meetings.
The current six-month presidency term is held by the Netherlands. One of the many positions important to them is Open Science.
As part of the most recent meeting of the Competitiveness Council, they announced an agreement on an ambitious new open access (OA) target whereby all scientific papers should be freely available by 2020. What makes this particularly challenging is that even the Netherlands, who is leading this charge and was heading down this path independently, were planning to achieve OA by 2024. As expected, there are plenty of details to be worked out:
The council's statement is also slightly ambiguous on what exactly should be accomplished by 2020. It calls for "immediate" OA, "without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes." Many non-OA journals currently allow authors to make their papers available—for instance in an institutional repository—6 or 12 months after publication, but the essence of immediate OA is that a paper is freely available when it gets published. How short journal-imposed embargoes would have to become to qualify as "immediate" OA remains unclear. Harnad says the deposit in an institutional repository should be "immediately upon acceptance for publication (because if the 2019 scientific article output is deposited in 2021, that is not OA in 2020)."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday May 31 2016, @01:42PM
I think any developments along this line are great; knowledge that was publicly funded, should be free for all, anyone that wants to look and learn should be able to!
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday May 31 2016, @04:58PM
knowledge that was publicly funded, should be free for all
Where does this leave research jointly funded by public and private sources? How do we tease out which parts of a publication to attribute to public funding and which to private?
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Tuesday May 31 2016, @05:29PM
I don't see the problem here.
Private funding joining a publicly funded project know well in advance that public money is involved. (Public money always flows slower than private in my experience).
Therefore, since private funding knew public money was involved in advance, they knew in advance the results would be open access.
I suppose a corner case exists where public funding joins a project AFTER private funding started it, (perhaps to pry the results free for little money). Perhaps the private funding should be offered their money back, or be allowed to veto the public funding? But again, these results were headed for publishing in peer reviewed journals anyway, so its not like secret corporate research or something. The private funding knew publishing would occur.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Tuesday May 31 2016, @08:02PM
As with any contract. Due diligence goes both ways. If public money is involved or get involved there will by public publication because the funders ie the taxpayers want a return on their investment. And publishing journals are not a party in the research.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday June 06 2016, @03:49PM
So if France funds research, would it be acceptable to paywall resulting articles but allow access without charge from French IP addresses? This way French taxpayers would get their ROI.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 31 2016, @09:53PM
I suppose it could be argued (as it was successfully (albeit a disgusting and hateful practice) done WRT racism for many years [wikipedia.org]) that any public funding should require that the results of such research be made public.
Is there any reason why that shouldn't be the case?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 01 2016, @09:09AM
I can hardly imagine that privately funded research would not want to be open access (OA). If you publish you want to be read. For example, Google recently published their alpha-go architecture in Nature. This is not OA but you can easily google the paper. Business secrets that google does not want to publish are not in the paper. The question about OA is who is ripping whom off. At the moment these are publishers ripping off everyone else and no one but that publishers want that to happen.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday June 03 2016, @04:12PM
I can hardly imagine that privately funded research would not want to be open access (OA).
Unless the research is, say, funded by a private university and in a field whose top 3 prestigious journals are not OA. Sometimes a university will prefer closed-access journals for a couple reasons. One is "publish or perish": getting articles into more prestigious journals make a school and its researchers look good. Another is that OA journals tend to charge more to review a submitted article [wikipedia.org], and a cash-strapped research program may not be able to afford a $3,000 review fee on top of whatever the research itself costs, especially for a school in a country whose currency has a low exchange rate [wikipedia.org] with the euro and United States dollar.
(Score: 4, Informative) by b0ru on Tuesday May 31 2016, @02:06PM
Whilst I'm delighted to see these sorts of initiatives, there is much word-weaseling. A pilot guide [europa.eu] to the Horizon 2020 initiative, dated February of this year, makes a distinction between 'Green' and 'Gold' open access (page 2), and the subsequent section regarding the so-called 'misconceptions' about open access are a bit disheartening, as well. IMHO, if the tax payer foots the funding bill for the research, the publication and associated data should be wide open for access.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday May 31 2016, @02:51PM
...and associated data...
This is also an important part.
All data used should be made public too, with obvious privacy considerations (removing names, addresses of test subjects, etc)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2016, @04:15PM
I doubt names and addresses are relevant scientific data.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 01 2016, @10:07AM
All data used should be made public too, with obvious privacy considerations (removing names, addresses of test subjects, etc)
There is a site, Academic Torrents [academictorrents.com], which distributes large data sets by torrent. However, even after rummaging around on their site, I cannot see what kind of licensing requirements they have for uploaded data. That information is not even in their RSS feeds. Presumably it is all distributed under a license or licenses which allow use and redistribution.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2016, @03:24PM
It is "weaselly" because it isn't a black/white issue. For instance, what about if only part of the research is partially funded? Is it to work in a viral manner where any minute contribution triggers the OA trap? And what is a contribution? Direct funds are easy, but what about borrowed but idle equipment? Say, public money was used on a project that is now over, and let us say a non-publicly funded program uses equipment from the now-defunct program to take data. Does that make it now pubic research?
Green/Gold are the two dominant OA methods in consideration. Green means the author/publisher deposits a copy of the paper somewhere, sort of arxiv-like. Gold means the work is published up front as OA whereby the author pays extra to have it immediately accessible by the journal. The Dutch have been pushing to have all of their research Gold OA, but there are many who feel this is not a sustainable model, in addition to it effectively adding an up-front tax on the researcher. The latter point is why a number of the other EU member states have an issue with the Dutch proposal. Green and Gold both meet the Open Science objectives, so in practice it will be a mixture that will depend upon the funding agency, the research group, and the journal as to what color OA that gets used.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 01 2016, @01:25AM
> Is it to work in a viral manner where any minute contribution triggers the OA trap?
Now that's an excellent example of the very sort of weaselly language you're talking about. "Trap"? Why do you use that word, "trap", as if a private funder of research who gets public help is somehow making a mistake, and is not aware of what they are doing? And what's with that loaded term "viral"? That's the kind of language Microsoft uses to describe the GNU Public License.
The author pays model is shit. The whole point of public funding is that the public funds it, not the author! Worst of all, it opens up the messy ethical issues of self publishing, in which no one can be too sure whether a paper was accepted more for the money than the quality. But they demand a fee far beyond any expenses they need incur, up there with the revenue a major paper of significant importance could possibly fetch from people willing to pay to get past the paywall. Guaranteed income for the publisher from papers of unknown quality that likely will turn out to be of minor or no significance and which the fees a paywall model could extort would never come anywhere close to the author fee. Vanity publishing would be a similar problem. Organizations have already cobbled together programs to pay these ridiculous fees on behalf of authors, but only for those authors who are insiders of some sort, employees of particular universities and the like. Authors among the general public are screwed. It stinks.
I've been looking for a place to publish some recent work, and so far have found nothing acceptable. Either I turn over all copyright to an academic publisher, and watch helplessly as the work is locked away, as was customary in decades past, or I somehow scrape up $500 or so to pay the author fee. I an self-employed, and so am not eligible for help from these organizations that help their own researchers pay. I'm a member of the ACM, but do they have any help for people in my situation? Hell no, they milk their "Digital Library" for all it's worth. For access to their precious Digital Library, they hit members up for an additional $100 above and beyond the membership fee, and only recently have they started offering the "author pays" alternative to them taking total ownership of all research they accept for publication.
(Score: 2) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 01 2016, @09:19AM
Unfortunately, author-to-pay seems the only way to fund OA. If you can suggest a better model everyone would be happy but free to submit and OA leaves the bills unfooted and would require a public takeover of publishing. In your situation, I would suggest to send to non-OA journal and put a pre-print online (i.e. the same paper, but not formatted in the journal style). I do not know of a journal disallowing that nor have I heard of any enforcement of taking any paper offline from private web-pages.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 01 2016, @11:59AM
You're right about enforcement. I've never heard of any researchers being harassed with a takedown notice for their own work, and I've heard that the IEEE at least has informally reassured everyone that they will never do that. Right, they'll keep that promise as long as management is able, but takeovers and turnovers happen. I expect it to happen eventually. I can see a Wall Street hedge fund dangling a carrot in the form of a huge pile of money, in exchange for handing control over to them. Once they get control, they will try to monetize everything in sight, no matter how many unwritten promises that will break. If or when that happens, the community will have to formally change the customs and rules to end it.
What unfooted bills are you speaking of? Academic publishers are total parasites. They don't pay the researchers and authors for work, the public does. They don't pay for peer review either, they outsource that work to other researchers whom they pay nothing. They don't even expend any resources organizing it, as still other volunteers sit on paper selection and peer review committees. They make small runs of books, which they sell at premium prices that more than recoup the expenses, and in any case that's changing to be more online, which cuts expenses greatly. Yet they still gouge university libraries and the public at print production price levels, for access to their publications. $1 per page, for a download?! That's sheer greed. Precisely 0% of any profits they make from those premium prices they charge goes to the authors. All that is why there was a backlash against Elsevier in particular.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2016, @02:58PM
That was exactly my intent. It is to suggest a similar scenario to that which Microsoft describes where some interpretation of the language suggests that ANY contribution of public money, no matter how small, automatically would spring the OA requirement on the project. And if that is the case, then it can also get very dodgy on what you consider a contribution of public support if you aren't careful. Say I'm working on my multi-million pharmaceutical project and my mass spectrometer dies. Since I really need one this week, and I know you, a university professor, has one (because we're colleagues) that is sitting on the shelf, you loan it to me for a few hours to make my measurement. If any laws were written or interpretated in a manner that says my whole program now has to be OA, then yes, that would be a "trap" sprung on me.
I don't think anyone wants a system like that, but if any of this gets codified into law, like all laws, care will have to be taken to accurately express the intent of the law. This is what I mean by it not being a black-and-white issue and why it will take some time to work through the intent and implementation of this.
The author-pay system (Gold OA) is put forth my some because it is the simplest to implement and leads to the quickest adoption because it is already in place at many journals (and is the only way some of the new OA journals operate). This is seen as, essentially, a tax on the funding agencies because this gets rolled into the cost of research. Unfortunately, probably because it comprises a very small percentage of cases, cases like yours lose out as this becomes an additional cost. Fortunately, it seems that Green OA will most likely end up in the future, largely because something like arxiv has given a very successful model to emulate.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday May 31 2016, @02:35PM
Funny that Big Science Publishing, better known as Elsevier, is headquartered in Amsterdam. Is the Netherlands shooting itself in the foot here? Or will this get watered down after the nice-idea stage is over?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2016, @03:26PM
No foot shooting. [timeshighereducation.com] Plus, Elsevier is going to have to adjust to the "new normal" anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2016, @04:30PM
This can either be a desperate (yet orchestrated) attempt to maintain the illusion that there is democracy in the EU, or a genuine open access initiative. Deems investigation and scrutiny, why not.
Good point on Elsevier, this is a big parasite on education and research that not only adds nothing to the value of publications, but can always give a boost to your "scientific career", provided you conform to their agenda.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Tuesday May 31 2016, @08:11PM
Check how many employees they have? follow where the are actually paying their corporate taxes? and then tell us if they are really shooting themselves anywhere? ;)
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday May 31 2016, @08:08PM
Is there any particular reason as to why Netherlands so insistent on this issue? Do they have any vested interests?
And why has the other countries been so silent on the matter?
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday May 31 2016, @11:14PM
Is there any particular reason as to why Netherlands so insistent on this issue?
They're ashamed of Elsevier?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday June 01 2016, @12:21AM
Makes you wonder ;)
Can't have Evilvier in Nicerlands :P
I thought that they perhaps is spending a lot of money on R&D or is hindered somehow by the lock-in effect of closed journals.
(Score: 2) by b0ru on Wednesday June 01 2016, @09:12AM
The Dutch government have been championing OA [openaccess.nl] and digital [tweedekamer.nl] privacy [dailydot.com] for some time, now. They've made some questionable legislative changes over the last decade or so, including pandering to BREIN [anti-piracy.nl], but they've had a sudden outbreak of common sense. Here's hoping it lasts, and that more countries within the EU participate and follow suit.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday June 01 2016, @10:08AM
Perhaps they can join forces with Poland that put an end to software patents in EU?