U.K. and European Commission embrace open access
July 18, 2012
(Credit: European Commission)
U.K. research funders have announced a liberated open-access policy
From April 2013, science papers must be made free to access within six months of publication if they come from work paid for by one of the United Kingdom’s seven government-funded grant agencies, the research councils, which together spend about £2.8 billion (US$4.4 billion) each year on research, Nature News Blog reports.
The policy, announced by the agencies’ umbrella body Research Councils UK (RCUK), makes clear that researchers should shun science journals that don’t allow authors to follow this mandate.
The European Commission has also announced its intention to make open-access all research findings funded by Horizon 2020, its enormous, €80-billion (US$98-billion) research-funding program for 2014–20. And it is urging member states to follow its lead, Nature News Blog reports.
Under proposals announced in Brussels, articles would be either made immediately accessible online, with the commission paying up-front publication costs (expected to be 1% of the total research budget); or made available by researchers through an open-access repository no later than six months after publication (12 months for social sciences and humanities).
The commission is also committing to a stronger policy to open up wider access to the data generated by scientific experiments — although this won’t be mandatory for all projects, because of privacy and commercial interests.
Comments (8)
by star0
I recently heard about a very elegant solution to academic publishing. The idea is called “epijournals” — I expect you will hear more about them soon enough, if you haven’t already. The idea is this: first, authors publish their papers on the ARXIVES; then, they submit them to an epijournal that then sends them off to editors and referees; finally, if the referee agrees that they are of high quality, they are considered “accepted” and given the epijournal’s imprimatur of quality. The idea is basically a journal with NONE of the overhead — no actual publishing (published on ARXIVES); no secretaries; just a bunch of editors and refs with email accounts and a webpage is all it takes.
By their very nature, epijournals are open source; and data is as easy to access as going to the ARXIVES. And by having papers be refereed, one has a way to signal that the authors are doing good work (so that they get tenure and higher pay, for example) — the “stamp of quality” is the primary reason that authors don’t just put all their papers on ARXIVES and not even bother to submit them to a journal.
by Shaun Coates
Awesome, hopefully we will see more steps like this being taken by other countries around the globe.
by Anthony
Perhaps one day, in the United States of America, taxpayers will have “free” access to the research for which we have already paid.
by Starheart
The knowledge is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t know boundary, or constraint, or copyright. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you can access it too.
by Editor
So you admit that open access is skynet :)
by Bri
Skynet is our nightmare scenario. What will happen if we don’t stop shooting first and asking questions later. An us against them. Not a whole. He refers to the one. What will actually happen.
by Gorden Russell
This will only serve to get us to the singularity that much sooner.
by Bri
SINGULARity. One, not war. Peace love and UNDERSTANDING. To view. To see. E plurabus unum. The managers at Mc Ds didn’t see, didn’t understand. The posters didn’t see, didn’t understand. My punishment? Teach the managers, teach the public. Give them the right information to understand. See the whole.