All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european-scientific-articles-to-be-freely-accessible-by-2020

by whazor • 10 years ago

1167 133 10 years ago

english.eu2016.nl

Fomite12• 10 years ago

"From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available." is not "All European scientific articles".

I've got at least three papers that wouldn't fall under that heading.

whazor• 10 years ago

Changed the title.

kriro2• 10 years ago

It's a matter of perspective. I'd argue most European research falls under this. If you work at a public university and are paid for it and do research during that time and publish it that should be covered. It would be pretty lame if only stuff that was explicitly funded in a research project would be covered.

Fomite12• 10 years ago

Research done on unfunded projects as part of a hard money position is super-tricky, which is why for a lot of things the restriction is funded research projects.

For example, if your position is at a public university, but funded by an endowment from a private foundation, is it covered?

flexie• 10 years ago

Only articles based on EU funded research or also articles based on research funded by member states?

partycoder2• 10 years ago

I can see the evil people behind the TTIP getting in the way of this. Before this goes into effect, the US will execute order 66 and take all the articles down.

Etheryte• 10 years ago

How is this related to the US at all?

James001• 10 years ago

The TTIP

T-A2• 10 years ago

Would the US be doing this to protect the profits of Reed-Elsevier (based in London), Springer (Berlin) or the Nature Publishing Group (London)?

Zigurd• 10 years ago

In the way that one hand washes the other?

partycoder2• 10 years ago

Or they can start pulling arguments from TTIP provisions and get away with blocking parts of the initiative. Now it's good this comes from the Netherlands (Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands).

Fomite12• 10 years ago

This is already very similar to the requirements imposed by the largest U.S. funder of scientific research.

ivan_gammel• 10 years ago

Some public funding of copyrighted art work purchases would be also useful, if that's the only viable alternative to decreasing copyright age to some reasonable 20-30 years.

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

Good. With whatever limitations, this is still good. It's not enough, but this is going to be a long LONG fight.

xiphias• 10 years ago

It at least partly legitimizes sci-hub in EU

takluyver3• 10 years ago

Not in any legal sense - it applies to new, publicly funded research from 2020, not existing papers. Whether it legitimises Sci-hub in popular awareness is debatable.

lomnakkus• 10 years ago

If this actually pans out, it could be incredible. It always saddens me to get a link to a scientific paper and to hit my head on the paywall.

There's of course the "(partially) publicly funded" qualifier, but I don't remember too much privately funded research in the journals that I read as a CS undergrad, so hopefully it won't matter too much. (I guess other areas such as Chemistry, Biology might be more prone to falling under this qualifier?!?)

cyphar• 10 years ago

What's even more frustrating is when you're a student at a university and you still can't get access to a paper because your library doesn't have a subscription to that specific journal. arXiv was the best thing to happen to physics papers, and SciHub is doing the same (but less legal).

intrasight• 10 years ago

What does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide.

maerF0x03• 10 years ago

I bet, in practice, this will mean some researchers will avoid public funds as it will come with overhead they do not want (publishing rules). But for most this will be a big win.

merijnv• 10 years ago

Ahahahahaha.

First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never enough money.

Second of all: Most researchers HATE academic publishers and being forced to sign over their copyright to a paywall in exchange for nothing. But institutional evaluation criteria force you to do so.

EU banning non-open publications will force publishers to allow open access OR force universities to revise their criteria to accommodate the inability to publish publicly funded work in non-open journals.

I think all of my colleagues think this is a great thing. As do I. Elsevier can go blow a goat with their copyright assignment BS.

Fomite12• 10 years ago

I have never, in my entire life, avoided funding that would also make my work more accessible to a broader audience. I don't know any other academics who would do so either.

squidfood• 10 years ago

Other option: publisher grants a single right to author or author's institution (but no one else) to make a copy available.

x0x0• 10 years ago

with google scholar that's good enough, no? It already matches to pdfs on academic sites.

Fomite12• 10 years ago

How this happens right now with NIH funding is yes, the government basically forces publishers to make things freely accessible - the paper is going in a public repository. Journals that publish lots of NIH funded stuff handle this for the author, while journals that don't tend to make it the author's problem.

And yes, if an author doesn't comply, it can be a problem for future funding.

jessriedel• 10 years ago

> Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals?
How this happens right now with NIH funding is yes, the government basically forces publishers to make things freely accessible - the paper is going in a public repository.

I think you're either mistaken, or you didn't understand the difference between the two original questions. The NIH doesn't force the journals to do anything. The NIH makes it a requirement for researchers they fund to make all publications open access (after some time period), effectively prohibiting the authors from publishing in closed-access journals

acaloiar2• 10 years ago

I can't speak for the EU, but since my work last year was NIH-funded, we made it freely available via arXiv (http://arxiv.org/). This seems to be common practice.

nazgul17• 10 years ago

I am curious: doesn't this negatively affect your evaluation score with your university? How do you deal with this?

dahart• 10 years ago

I don't know, but speculating on what seems most reasonable, I wouldn't assume that publishers will have any burdens forced upon them apart from losing exclusive control. I'd guess that it means publishers simply don't get exclusive copyrights.

Who has the burden of publishing the free access could be the researchers themselves, or the universities, or the government, I think there are a lot of options besides the current private for-profit publishers.

I also wouldn't assume that much will change in practice immediately -- while the research and data might be available for free, some publishers do currently provide some value above and beyond access. Curation, editing, indexing, quality control, prestige, print versions, conferences, etc. - all things that free access doesn't necessarily come with.

return02• 10 years ago

It means EU funds will pay elsevier a fee for every article to make them open access.

zmb_• 10 years ago

I just went through this discussion in an EU funded project, and the consensus was that complying is up to the individual partners. In our case all academic partners decided to comply by posting preprints on their websites (contentwise identical to the accepted version), which is allowed by both ACM and IEEE.

IanCal3• 10 years ago

I really dislike this approach. Finding the free version is harder and the links are much less likely to be permanent. I've found a huge amount of data, code and extra material is simply missing now. In 20 years are you confident someone will maintain the same url and content?

Can you afford the open access option with the journals you want to submit to?

pgcudahy• 10 years ago

For biomedical research supported by the US NIH they require it to be posted to PubMed central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) within 6 months of publication. Since so many biomedical papers have at least some NIH funding the journals all went along with it.

maerF0x03• 10 years ago

If trump wanted to help win over the science crowd, he could make this an issue. Seems more likely to come from Bernie though.

fredoliveira• 10 years ago

I struggle to see how or why a candidate who's proven to not necessarily have a stance on _any_ issues would want to do something like this to appeal "to the science crowd".

In fact, that's exactly the crowd I'd consider the hardest to win by a candidate such as Trump. You know, critical thinking being a thing and all.

maerF0x03• 10 years ago

Fair enough, I should have known that putting the words "Trump" in the first 100 words ofa post would be auto downvotes. I meant it to say that this is one way that candidates, particularly those who have most estranged the scientific communities, could shore up or make amends.

kriro2• 10 years ago

Seems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law. Either way I hope it also extends to the member states level eventually. The circus of avoiding conflict between EU funding and member state funding is often quite amusing so this will be interesting.

It feels almost ethically self evident that any research funded by citizens in any way should be made available to said citizens (and that's more or less 100% of research in Europe). Lets step in that direction.

ikeboy3• 10 years ago

What would the law say, and how would it prevent publishers from demanding money to publish now that their other sources of income have been cut off?

lrem3• 10 years ago

But they are already cashing in for publishing anything, with additional small charges like few hundred bucks for going over the page limit and big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible.

88e282102ae2e5b• 10 years ago

Has it been stated anywhere that they won't allow a temporary embargo after publishing? Like how some funding agencies allow papers to be behind a paywall for 12 months and only then require that it be open access?

a_imho• 10 years ago

unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so

backdoored by default. Any reason why it is 2020 not sooner or later?

brodo• 10 years ago

Under the Horizon 2020 programme, open access publishing (green or gold) is already mandatory today for all EU/EC funded projects. Grant proposals must incorporate open access fees in order to be accepted. It's not much money for most project consortiums as the EU tends to fund big projects with budgets of ~10 million € and more as the norm (there are smaller ones, but ~2 million is really as small as it gets as far as I know). So a couple of 10K€ won't make that much of a difference. If it would become mandatory for all publicly research in the EU, the problem would be quite different. There are really small grants (50K€ and smaller) and if you have 2 publications out of that grant, you now pay 10-20% of your grant money for publishing fees.

semi-extrinsic3• 10 years ago

Gold open access needs to die, and "open access fees" with it.

Seriously, there is no STEM field I know of where you can't find good journals that allow posting of preprints.

Green open access solves all the problems at zero additional cost.

tmalsburg26• 10 years ago

Gold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access publishing. I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the best approach. The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge for that. Very simple.

sndean• 10 years ago

I'm not as familiar with European journals, but if this happened in the US (more or less forced open access) it'd possibly mean that every time we want to publish it would cost researchers ~$3000.

Hopefully this (and similar) legislation comes along with a statement regarding who's supposed to cover that cost. Because some of us avoid that price tag by publishing in non-open access journals.

takluyver3• 10 years ago

I haven't read the specifics of this, but typically these kind of mandates come from funding bodies to cover the work they fund. So they're expecting that publication fees will be a budget item in grant applications.

jwildeboer• 10 years ago

Next step: As they have an exception for "IP" (intellectual property rights like patents) we must promote the logical consequence. All publicly funded research must mean all "IP" must be made available to anyone for free.

takluyver3• 10 years ago

That's probably unlikely, because patents are a source of potential revenue for universities, whereas journal subscriptions are a cost.

WhoBeI2• 10 years ago

Nope. You can seek protection (patent) before publishing your results. See page 3 in the linked pdf. The paragraph begins with "misconceptions about open access.." in bold. :)

http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...

ShaneBonich• 10 years ago

Once again Europe shows the way

Fomite12• 10 years ago

The NIH mandate for open access after six months has been around for years.

return02• 10 years ago

must be freely accessible to everyone

When? Open access after 12 months has different cost than immediate open access, and, at the pace of today's research, is not open access at all. And ERC funded research already requires open access publishing anyway.

Why not demand publishing to open access/nonprofit journals instead? Why does EU have to pay elsevier $2000-5000 per article?

This does not seem significant to me.

mablae• 10 years ago

And Aaron Schwartz is dead. RIP

ralucag• 10 years ago

I was just about to say that, he would have been proud.

alex_hirner2• 10 years ago

To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain. The current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian.

tmalsburg26• 10 years ago

Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub which is becoming more and more popular at least in my field. GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? GitHub is just not made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run for profit. Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record.

witty_username2• 10 years ago

GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...?

Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.

alex_hirner2• 10 years ago

Bigchaindb is tackling generic open data repositories from a technical pov. As has been said below, the larger part of the sustenance prob is economical of course.

alaskanloops2• 10 years ago

This is one of those things thats just so common sense, its hard to imagine a solid argument against it.

Hopefully it will encourage the US to follow, although I'm sure publishers will dig their feet in and make up some bullsh*t reason why it would be a bad move.

mrweasel• 10 years ago

This is one of those things thats just so common sense

It really is, the public paid for the research, it rightfully belongs to the public.

edwinksl• 10 years ago

Except it hasn't been like that for decades.

desireco42• 10 years ago

Why wait if you know it is inevitable? (as would say Richard Bandler)

dandelion_lover• 10 years ago

I wish the same happened with the software written using public funding.

WhoBeI2• 10 years ago

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it.

EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget are public funds it's basically going to be paid for by the EU in most cases.

The "when and if" means that you can choose not to publish or you can choose to publish after you have sought protection (patent). You can also, as a publisher, have a wait period before research papers become "open access" to, I don't know, be an asshole I guess.

Reference (pdf): http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...

Edit: The little pdf warning.

hackuser6• 10 years ago

I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund

In fairness, we pay twice for many things, such a toll roads. The first payment isn't always sufficient.

holyoly• 10 years ago

That doesn't make any sense... How does having one screwed up system justify another? Maybe we should start paying twice for groceries too, because we pay twice for toll roads and research papers...

olalonde• 10 years ago

But at least when you pay your toll, the money goes to the government and not some private corporation.

tmalsburg26• 10 years ago

I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund

Most researchers will publish in journals that publish open access for a fee and the money for the fee has to come from somewhere. So in the end the public will spend as much money as they are doing so far.

adrianN• 10 years ago

Maybe, but currently people outside of universities have a really hard time getting research papers (legally, anyway). So even if the costs stay about the same, a lot more people will have access to the results.

jupp0r• 10 years ago

True, but this at least sets the incentives right to create a system outside of rent-seeking publishers. Journal editors are unpaid for the most part anyway, might as well make that a community effort.

tunnuz• 10 years ago

Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays.

On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" researchers that "contribute" to 20+ papers a year (except for the fact that they have an army of Ph.D. students slaving off for them).

a_bonobo• 10 years ago

As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen.

We'd need a different way to judge someone's scientific output which is definitely hard - do we start to check Twitter or blogs for scientific outreach? Do we judge scientific "novelty" (of which maybe only the author herself/himself is the expert in, so only s/he can properly evaluate)? Do we start to evaluate preprints (biology doesn't do this much)? Many open questions, and not much is happening in terms of change.

(Edit: This is, by the way, one of the reasons why there is so much more Arabidopsis than Wheat research - Arabidopsis is easier to manipulate and grows faster, so you can get more publications out for the same amount of work)

Fomite12• 10 years ago

Some of the work I've done that I like the best have been side musings that wouldn't make the "3 paper" priority cap, but have never the less been useful to me and others.

Also, you'd probably get a surge of shit submissions in November from everyone who didn't get their three in.

heimatau2• 10 years ago

I know many may disagree but I'm curious about this movement of 'publicly funded should be publicly available' wouldn't this infringe on national competitiveness?

Like India nor the USA didn't funded these studies but...those people will have access to these research papers? Talk about a free lunch. And potentially demotivating to other countries, as they could be like 'well, EU did it...let's lower our investments in research'.

It's my opinion that there should be a gateway and one must us their state ID or something. And if you are at a public library, easy access. But not public to the whole world.

Edited: I'm heading to sleep and I'd like to discuss this to those that want to. I'll return to the thread in about 24 hours as I have a busy day tomorrow.

mindcrime2• 10 years ago

wouldn't this infringe on national competitiveness?

A rising tide lifts all boats...

IanCal3• 10 years ago

What would be the reasoning behind dropping funding? That you can read the output of another country instead of duplicating work?

I doubt heavily that would happen but even if it did that'd be a good thing.

It's my opinion that there should be a gateway and one must us their state ID or something.

A full, international login system for every person in the EU just in case someone else in the world might want to read a paper? That sounds expensive and complicated compared to just using the web as it exists.

Scarblac2• 10 years ago

Those other countries already have universities that have buy access to the journals that the papers appear in. Research isn't secret. It's just expensive to access for normal people.

kurlberg2• 10 years ago

The devil is in the details: one possible outcome is that researchers must pay journals for open access publication, and this could change "'small science' fields" into 'big science' ones. I.e., a good but not grant funded researcher will need to find a 'rich' colleague to pay for the publication fee. Whether the 'rich' person should be a coauthor is then of course a matter of negotiation.

comboy• 10 years ago

But does it say anywhere that it has to be a science journal? Isn't it enough for them to put the paper on their website to comply with that law?

iangpmulvany2• 10 years ago

Slightly related, I just took part in a workshop of experts who are tasked with advising the commissioner on policy decisions for making open science happen in the EU, I've written up my notes: https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a

hackuser6• 10 years ago

Aren't they already required to publish on Sci-hub?

iangpmulvany2• 10 years ago

Of related interest, I"m just back from a workshop on Open Science from a group that advises the commissioner. I was an invited expert in to the workshop. This is part of the route through which announcements like the one linked here get made. I've written up my noted https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a

MrBra• 10 years ago

My thoughts are for those that are not with us anymore that helped make this slowly happen... I say thank you, but if I could choose I'd rather have them back and get to this results a bit later.

It's nothing new that in this field sometimes people have a tendency to put their ideals of progress before their own life.

No matter how strong is your love for your world changing ideas, YOU as a person come first.

Unless (but you could also argue about that) without your sacrifice the whole world population would be at immediate risk of extinction..

daveheq• 10 years ago

But wait, scientific articles are hoaxes made for tax money, so now the lies are freely available to anybody!!! We need to cut more taxes on billionaires and publicly fund more oil projects so we can get these inconvenient science articles out of our way. Where's my next iPhone?!

graffitici• 10 years ago

Does anyone have any insights regarding the "foreign startup visas". Does that legislation have a name I can use to track progress?

It's quite annoying to have to apply for week-long business visas every time I have to travel to Europe. Especially in the summer, when it takes 2 months just to get an appointment with the consulate..

known• 10 years ago

Too little; Too late;

norswap• 10 years ago

To contextualize the discussion on "open access" (the practice of editors that ask for a sum of money in order to make the paper available). It costs a lot: about 1k for ACM venues. Currently I have to pay for this out of my own budget, and I don't have that kind of money (I'm a PhD student, and in addition to my scholarship (1.8k€/month net of tax, in Belgium), I get a 5k€ budget for two years that must cover material and travel -- I can also get about one additional travel grant per year).

Publisher have about zero added value except fixing the odd latex issue. Actual editorial work is assumed free of charge by professors. Other venues such as Arxiv and CiteSeerX do a better job of distribution for free. Science publishers are leeches in the system and should be removed.

I think the EU a measure will precipitate the current movement against such predatorial publishing practice. Already, publishers are walking on eggs. They move against sci-hub but they'd never dare to go against the common practice to just host everything one publishes publicly, license notwithstanding, something almost everyone does in the CS field -- maybe they say it's a "draft"... (meaning there isn't a copyright notice mostly).

dadkins• 10 years ago

Interestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public domain. Journals have no problem publishing those. I think one direction this could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put their work in the public domain.

Journals don't need copyright to function. There's still value in editing, peer review, and distribution. They're just being greedy by insisting on it.

All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

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