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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After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results of research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.
(Plan S, key principle, September 4, 2018)
The European Commission, European Research Council, and the national science funding organisations of Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK together fund €7.6 billion of research. In a combined initiative (Plan S), that research must be freely accessible from January 1, 2020 on: anybody must be able to freely download, translate or re-use the resulting papers.
In cases where no quality open access journals or infrastructure exist, the members of Plan S will provide incentives and support to do so.
Any open access publication fees will be funded by the funding organizations, and not individual researchers; universities, libraries and other research organizations will be asked to align their policies and strategies.
The funding organizations will monitor compliance, and punish non-compliance.
This might change the face of scientific publishing in two years time, posits Nature. If the point of punishing non-compliance isn't contentious enough, another one of Plan S's principles might be:
The 'hybrid' model of publishing is not compliant with the above principles.
As currently only 15 percent of scientific publications are open access, this would mean that scientists involved will be barred from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science.
Also at Science Magazine and the PLoS Blog.
In win for open access, two major funders won't cover publishing in hybrid journals
Plan S, the open-access (OA) initiative launched by the European Commission and Science Europe in September, has gained two major new members. The Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—two of the world's largest private foundations that support research—announced today they are joining a consortium of 11 European funding agencies in requiring their funded research to be immediately free for all to read on publication.
The two new partners add a lot of funding muscle to the effort to require scientists to publish their papers in journals that make their content free to the public, instead of charging subscriptions. The existing Plan S coalition partners, represented by Science Europe, collectively spend about $8.7 billion on research. Wellcome, based in London, funds about $1.3 billion of biomedical research per year, whereas the Seattle, Washington–based Gates Foundation spends more than $1.2 billion on global health R&D.
The largest part of the policy change is that as of January 2020, Wellcome and Gates will no longer cover the cost of their grantees publishing in so-called hybrid OA journals, which have both subscription and free content. Most scientific journals now follow that hybrid business model, which allows authors to pay a fee if they want to make their articles OA. For the past decade, Wellcome has allowed its grantees to pay these fees, in part because it viewed them as a way to help publishers finance a switch in their business models to full OA. "We no longer believe it's a transition," says Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome. "We're looking to bring about a change where all research is open access."
Previously: Plan S: Radical Open-Access Science Initiative in Europe
Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers?
How far will Plan S spread?
Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on.
Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices.
[...] For now, North America is not following suit. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the first Plan S participant outside Europe, and another private funder may follow. But U.S. federal agencies are sticking to policies developed after a 2013 White House order to make peer-reviewed papers on work they funded freely available within 12 months of publication. "We don't anticipate making any changes to our model," said Brian Hitson of the U.S. Department of Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who directs that agency's public access policy.
Previously: Plan S: Radical Open-Access Science Initiative in Europe
Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation Join "Plan S" Open-Access Initiative
China Backs "Plan S" for Open-Access Research
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 10 2018, @12:42PM (3 children)
One small print though: learn Mandarin, you 鬼子.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @01:21PM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @02:49PM (1 child)
Hint: scientific papers usually report new findings, using NEW terminology.
Now please try to repeat what you said...
(Score: 5, Funny) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @04:04PM
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。
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @01:24PM (4 children)
It doesn't do anything to diminish the evil's of their abominable government, but nor do their atrocities diminish this good.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @02:57PM (3 children)
Personally, I believe all scientific results should be made freely available to the public. I am doing my best to do this with my own work.
However. In this particular case, please recognize that China has nothing to lose and everything to gain if big publishers go out of business.
They are currently giving money to outside entities in order to read papers, while the profit margins for their own journals are probably much smaller (and it's more or less the Chinese buying from the Chinese, since their best work is usually sent out anyway).
So if they agree to this they suddenly get more papers to read, for free, and otherwise keep doing what they're doing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:48PM
we can all figure that out. i don't care what their motivations are. all tax payer funded study results should be public, by law.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:51PM
I didn't say it was altruistic, I said it was good.
(Score: 1) by easyTree on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:30AM
https://sci-hub.tw/ [sci-hub.tw]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 10 2018, @05:15PM (5 children)
If they stick to the plan, China will definitely become the most scientifically powerful country. And they were already headed in that direction. But there will be lots of temptations to curtail it.
Also, as pointed out above, it will give a strong boost to those who can read Mandarin. Even if there is machine translation, such translations are usually quite imperfect...and often impenetrable unless you already know exactly what's being talked about.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 10 2018, @08:58PM (3 children)
Competition is good. Perhaps this competition will push the West towards greater academic freedom. It's a gruesome, disgusting hypocrisy that the Land of the Free keeps the bulk of its scientific findings locked, barred, and paywalled, and not even with the justification of collecting a fair price, as the fair price was already paid. Can't even call that reasonably ethical capitalistic behavior, it's just plain theft. Collect money, then don't render services or goods in exchange. Academic publishers are straight up thieves. I'll gladly struggle to learn Mandarin if that's what it takes to be free from them.
Japanese competition sure jolted the US auto industry into making decent cars again. Competition works in many fields, and should work to liberate research. Here's hoping the Chinese stay on course with this plan and see it through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @10:49PM (2 children)
How are the publishers theives? The academics choose where they publish, no one is forcing them to do it this way. The truth is all most care about is whether you are likely to cite their paper. If you arent someone likely to cite it they could care less if you can read it or not.
So the problem is on the academic side, the publishers are just providing them a 'get your paper cited' service so they can get more grants. Its strange that the grant agencies dont care more about open access though...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:58PM (1 child)
Academic publishers were for disseminating research, and protecting researchers from exploitation and distraction. Now, they're among the worst offenders. They weren't supposed to gouge anyone for access, they were supposed to charge only enough to cover their expenses. They weren't about profit, they were about expanding human knowledge.
They demand researchers turn over all copyright, and pay the authors of the works they publish 0% of the revenue they collect. The reason why was only to avoid the work, expense, and legal problems with having to get hundreds of permissions over and over in order to do routine organizing, publishing, and dissemination. This was not an issue when they kept their end of the unwritten agreement, which was not to hoard knowledge, and not to gouge the public and especially fellow researchers for access.
But now, they've broken their end of this unwritten bargain. Technological advance has made publication and dissemination far less costly and cumbersome. Print is now an impediment. But like publishers of other sorts, they too have balked at modernizing. They do want all the cost savings that technology brings, but they don't want to pass any of that on. They're still charging $30 for one 10 page research paper. Do you think $10 for a paperback is high? At the prices academic publishers try to charge, a typical 300 page novel would be $900.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:06PM
Yep, no disagreement. Still not their fault academics keep paying them for doing literally nothing.
This isn't like your grandma who can't be expected to understand how the internet works so still pays for AOL... academia supposedly consists of the best and brightest who are being primarily funded by taxes to improve the future of the country. They have let you down, not the publishers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:41AM
Time for me to learn Mandarin. And consider moving to China. I mean they're fucked up but at least they're headed in the right direction unlike the U.S..