Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

by sohkamyung • 8 years ago

509 137 8 years ago

Vinnl6• 8 years ago

This is a fantastic step forward, and the most drastic of measures I've seen so far. The most important part, in my opinion, is the exclusion of hybrid journals, which do not help at all in the transition to open access other than extract even more public money.

Other important steps:

- Abolishing copyright transfers

- No more embargo periods

- A cap on publication fees ("Article Processing Charges")

SOLAR_FIELDS• 8 years ago

This is the closest I've seen to people attacking the problem at its root. Academics need grants to survive, and they will go after them even if it means being forced to publish in a lower-tier journal. Over time the lower-tier journals gain more status since the high-dollar grant chasing academics start publishing high quality research in them. The paywalled journals ideally subsequently either diminish in quality, lowering the incentive to publish there or switch to an open-access model.

btrettel• 8 years ago

With regard to copyright transfer agreements, I have found one publisher willing to publish an article I retain copyright of. I asked at a conference. I have not yet published in a journal, as I am not willing to transfer copyright and find conferences acceptable, but when I do, this will be how. Then they won't be able to stop me from publishing the final version of the paper on a preprint site (for free access), and I still get the benefits of my research being in a journal.

crankylinuxuser• 8 years ago

Perhaps you could assign rights to the FSF. I'm not sure if they're prepared for that kind of battle, but my gut indicates they might be in a better place than the rest.

And, they have 35 years of history showing they wouldn't sell your content under the bus.

Fordec• 8 years ago

"As written, Plan S would bar researchers from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science." - Nature

Conflict of interest with this reporting much?

apetresc• 8 years ago

Considering that the article is clearly sympathetic to the idea, I don't really understand how you think this conflict of interest is manifesting itself.

GuB-42• 8 years ago

There is an obvious conflict of interest. However I see nothing wrong with the article. What is written here is a fact. 85% of journals don't match the criteria for Plan S and Nature and Science are definitely influential.

Arguments of both sides are presented, not too much sensationalism, that's better journalism than many so called "independent" newspapers.

dwheeler6• 8 years ago

Oh, the text is biased. E.g., the word "radical" is not emotion free, it is clearly selected to suggest that this is a bad idea. They also emphasize strongly the number of journals that do not meet this criteria, without noting that changes are absolutely possible. The percentage is so small because of the strong armed resistance of organizations like theirs. We should not expect that an organization used to free money would be happy about losing their exclusive access to hard work that was paid for by the public.

sohkamyung2• 8 years ago

On occasion in its news articles, Nature News has stated that it is editorially independent from the rest of Nature. I don't have a link to that statement, unfortunately, but I have seen it when Nature News has to discuss items that impact Nature publications.

Edit: here's a statement from a 2016 article: Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of the publisher’s research editorial teams [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/open-peer-review-finds-more-take...

l9k• 8 years ago

It's also directly stated in the article under the "Publisher concerns"paragraph": Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher

denzil_correa• 8 years ago

Great step forward IF the Open Access fee is rationalized. Take for example, Nature Communications - which only publishes OA. The OA fee for one article is €3,850! [0]. Why should tax payers pay two times - to conduct the research, to access the research - to access the research which they fund? Specially, when most of the work is done by the researchers themselves. And before someone talks about journal costs etc. I have been a reviewer for different journals and conferences for many years now. I haven't received a single penny for peer reviews. I highly doubt hosting a PDF on a server takes € 3,850.

[0] https://www.nature.com/ncomms/about/article-processing-charg...

spacenick88• 8 years ago

I think the solution isn't to change the publishers it's to let them go bankrupt. In my experience in Computer Science most papers are at conferences and if those simply focused on the conference itself and maybe a website linking to the arxiv versions of the accepted papers there simply wouldn't be a need for any other publishing. As it stands 99% of the burden is on the scientific community anyway, that leaves publishers with abysmal editing and extortion.

klmr4• 8 years ago

I agree but to be fair the editing done by journals does provide some value: Most researchers, in most fields outside of mathematics, physics and computer science, have rudimentary editing skills at best. Many very good biologists I know outright refuse to learn LaTeX, decrying it as a waste of time. Of course this isn’t an insurmountable problem but at least for now there’s a clear demand that journals fill; take a look at manuscripts submitted to bioRxiv. The average quality is a lot worse than CS conference papers or arxiv submissions — not just in terms of text layout and formatting but also for rudimentary language editing etc.

yreg• 8 years ago

From my limited experience math/comp-sci paper drafts tend to be available for free. Totally not the case for e.g. neurology sadly.

rocqua3• 8 years ago

The value from journals isn't so much in editing as it is curating.

hannob• 8 years ago

In my experience in Computer Science most papers are at conferences and if those simply focused on the conference itself and maybe a website linking to the arxiv versions of the accepted papers there simply wouldn't be a need for any other publishing.

Actually some conferences come with "publishing fees" in the form of "if you want to publish at our conf of course you'll have to present here, which means you'll buy a ticket, which is veeeeery expensive".

Eridrus• 8 years ago

I think it's disingenuous to say the cost is just hosting a PDF, but even that can be challenging for those without any IT background.

I think these science funders should make some grants available to build some high quality digital tools for fields outside of CS to make journal creation and maintenance easier.

dumbmatter• 8 years ago

What does "rationalized" mean? Highly respected open access publishers like PLoS charge similar fees https://www.plos.org/publication-fees - maybe that's just what it costs to run a journal? If not, PLoS must be some ridiculously profitable scam.

klmr4• 8 years ago

Why a scam? And why only PLOS but none of the other commercial publishers?

But yes, the (well known) profit margins of some of these publishers are quite simply obscene.

IanCal11• 8 years ago

Nature (so I expect Nature Communications as well) has paid editors AFAIK, but more importantly the charge is only paid by successful papers. I can't find the NC acceptance rate but for Nature it's in the region of 4-5% IIRC.

That means all successful papers are paying for any costs incurred for the review (editor or peer) of 20.

You can look at non-profit journals like the PLOS journals, they still have charges in the region of $1600-3000.

disclaimer - work in the field for Digital Science, which is part of Holtzbrinck

dagss3• 8 years ago

...but the reviewers don't see a penny. It is all just to organize the reviews. All that activity the journals do prior to publication can probably be streamlined and solved a lot more efficiently by some computer program/social platform.

If reviewers were paid you would have a better point IMO.

John_KZ• 8 years ago

That's great, and definitely better than paywalls, but how are we going to fund the work of good reviewers?

foxes• 8 years ago

Most reviewers (at least from my experience in maths and physics) don't get paid.

georgeam• 8 years ago

Computer Science too don't get paid from my experience either.

mvonthron• 8 years ago

reviewers are not paid by the publisher in the current system either

basically:

  - authors pay to publish their work
  - readers pay to read the articles
  - reviewers review pro-bono

now you are thinking "well where the hell goes the money" and you are in the same situation as 99% of scientists

ethanwillis2• 8 years ago

It goes to funding distribution models that can't deliver unicorns, rainbows, OR puppies to your doorstep. See the following quote from William Gunn, Communications head at Elsevier.

  When one user argued that people in rare-disease 
  families “shouldn’t have to jump through additional 
  hoops to access information,” Gunn responded, “Yes, 
  everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies 
  delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y’all keep 
  wishing for that, I’ll keep working on producing the 
  best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.”

https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-re...

jcranmer2• 8 years ago

It is actually quite time-consuming to do the editorial tasks of a journal:

* Ensure that the content of a submission meets minimal guidelines for submission.

* Figure out who appropriate reviewers might be. This means figuring out which research areas are relevant, filtering out reviewers who might have conflicts of interest (same institution, previous advisor/advisee relationship, recent collaboration, etc.). You also need to ensure that you load balance reviews across reviewers.

* Appropriately double-blind the submission so that the reviewers don't know who submitted the paper, and the authors don't know who reviewed the paper. You are now an intermediary for all of this communication.

* Make a judgement call of which papers will be accepted for publishing.

* You need to facilitate necessary edits from the authors to get it ready to publish.

* Convert paper formats, supplementary data, etc. for uploading. Basically all the editing tasks that you probably thought was the only thing on this list.

* Oh, and reviewers and authors are likely professors who are horribly oversubscribed in terms of their time, so you need to play babysitter to make sure that the tasks actually get done in a reasonable manner.

When you consider how few papers actually get published, and just how much administrative work is required to publish a paper, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish a paper is not unreasonable.

jpeloquin• 8 years ago

To give an idea of how much pro-bono review costs the rest of the system: A thorough review of a journal article takes 6-12 hours. If the paper develops novel theory it is more likely to take ~ 24 hours to understand and check properly.

The average return on 1 hour of grant writing for a PI or experience staff researcher is ~ $300, averaged over the year. One 10-hour review therefore has ≥ $3000 opportunity cost to my lab.

Looking at the opportunity cost to my funders due to spending time on a review instead of on research, funders presumably believe that research is at least as valuable as the how much they pay to support it. At the rates I'm familiar with, the opportunity cost to them is therefore at least $800 for a 10 hour review. Worse, a portion of every grant from the NIH or NSF is filtered through the university system as "indirect costs" and paid to the publishers as journal subscription fees. (The amount paid in subscription fees is hidden behind NDAs.)

There are 2-3 reviewers per paper, and a paper may be rejected and resubmitted 2-4 times. Reviews don't follow a paper between resubmissions—the whole process starts again from square one with new reviewers. So multiply the per-reviewer costs above by somewhere between 2 and 12 to get the total cost.

One could counter that review generates similar value as other research activities. I doubt this. The cost-benefit tradeoffs involved in review strongly incentivize cutting corners or delegating the task to inexperienced workers, which lessens the average review quality. The median review is a list of gut reaction bullet points rather than an evidence-based critique. This promotes an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors. Of course there are many idealistic people who fully commit to the process anyway, but the system as a whole is costly and wasteful.

(All of this is based on my experience doing academic biomedical research in the US. It is probably laughably wrong for other fields or other countries.)

ethanwillis2• 8 years ago

Yea reviewers are not paid. Publishers basically get to have their cake AND eat it too.

thechao• 8 years ago

This is a great idea. Even better if they applied the requirement retroactively.

pbhjpbhj3• 8 years ago

I don't understand the "bar publishing in 85% of journals" part; presumably they mean "exclusively".

That actually means that papers (and research data hopefully?!) can be published for the people who bought the research to be able to legally access it; but journals have opportunity to prove their added value still. And if they do add value, the market can provide a price for it.

So non-OA journals can still curate, review, typeset, index, etc., just not lock the publicly funded research itself away.

IanCal11• 8 years ago

It depends on how you read part of the EU statement, but there's a note about not accepting "the hybrid approach". If this refers to hybrid journals, then that would be the barring of publishing in large numbers of journals.

pbhjpbhj3• 8 years ago

So if commercial services can add something -- on top of full, open disclosure of research findings -- they're going to make that unlawful? That seems strange: what does the public gain from that?

Vinnl6• 8 years ago

Researchers funded by the participating funds are not allowed to publish in journals that do not make all of their research freely available, which indeed excludes many a popular journal today - unless they change their business model, which this plan appears to aim for.

pbhjpbhj3• 8 years ago

You can require all footpaths to be mapped, and make those maps publicly accessible (for free), without having to make it illegal to sell a footpath map.

That means the public can find all the footpaths, but if someone creates an innovative map, or a useful compendium they can still sell that.

PeterStuer• 8 years ago

Been a while since I left academia, but certainly at the time this would open the door wide for atrocious publication fees as long as quantitative productivity ranking based on Science Citation Index was upheld.

Since the publication fee is covered as direct costs in research grants reimbursed at 100% by the funding authorities, there is no incentive for writers to be price conscious while at the same time being strong-armed to publish in those journals or lose their job.

Vinnl6• 8 years ago

That's mostly still the case, and they're hoping to mitigate that by capping publication fees. I do think a change in incentive structures, where you need to publish with certain journals to advance your career ("pay to promote"), is still needed though.

StreakyCobra• 8 years ago

In complement to the Nature's article: The FNS/SNF (Swiss national science foundation) explains on its website the reason for not signing it (yet): http://www.snf.ch/en/researchinFocus/newsroom/Pages/news-180...

buckminster• 8 years ago

"We have a different plan and we're sticking to it" is not much of an explanation.

(I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it.)

Vinnl6• 8 years ago

To be fair, it's more like "we committed ourselves to a different plan to other stakeholders, and we're sticking to it until we have convened with those stakeholders whether they're OK with us joining this plan".

undreren• 8 years ago

This could be great for replication studies, as they are really hard to publish under the current model.

buboard6• 8 years ago

This is not about publishing itself, but about access to published articles. Journals will keep wanting to maintain prestige and be picky, so guess which studies are not going to be accepted.

dwheeler6• 8 years ago

It's about time. Currently governments fund most of the research, and then constantly have to pay exorbitant fees for every copy of the resulting work. This will also have a tremendous positive effect for the public, Who currently do not have easy access to the work that they're paying for, and in many cases the only stuff they can easily get is quackery or old things. The only thing this is bad for is the Publishers who do not want to adjust to the internet.

phoe-krk2• 8 years ago

I find it funny that this article, or even the HN comments at the moment of me writing this one, do not mention SciHub. It's effectively the most radical open-access plan for science paper nowadays after all.

SciHub is the original reason why open-access plans like this one have a chance of working at all. The authors of this paper simply announce that the SciHub approach has won and it's time to stop pretending otherwise and break the status quo of modern science publishing.

vanderZwan• 8 years ago

Then again, isn't that always the case when a system is rotten but those in power have no incentives to change, and eventually said change is accomplished through a form of civil disobedience?

rotskoff• 8 years ago

While sci-hub undoubtedly plays a role here, in my field the arXiv is really what has obviated the necessity of journal subscriptions. Essentially all math papers, in both the preprint and post-review form, can be found on the arXiv. I would also emphasize that, with regard to decisions involving journal subscriptions and access, authors generally have very little power. As a researcher, if you have the grant money, you can pay to make your work open access; alternatively, you can restrict yourself to only open access journals (which in some fields, could come at significant opportunity cost).

phoe-krk2• 8 years ago

arXiv is a very important entity here, correct. It performs a different role though.

arXiv positions itself in a place before the journals in the food chain; anyone can upload a paper there, including authors who submit to journals, but all of these papers are "preliminary", as in, "before journal edits". It's questionable if journal edits actually bring any value, but nonetheless, their status is that they're going to be "likely different in some way" than whatever journals publish.

SciHub allows free access to the "final" pieces of work, even if they're equivalent (or even equal) to the "non-final" ones available on arXiv. That's a big mental difference.

icc97• 8 years ago

Probably worth mentioning Andrej Karpathy's http://arxiv-sanity.com as the flood of papers to read keeps growing

IanCal11• 8 years ago

SciHub is not open access based on the usual meaning of the term. SciHub doesn't give you reuse rights, or any rights at all.

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiativ...

windows_tips• 8 years ago

Doesn't SciHub source its articles from journals though?

Brakenshire• 8 years ago

SciHub started long after the move towards open access was underway. The campaign, and ongoing incremental steps by funding agencies, has been going on for 15 years.

TeMPOraL2• 8 years ago

Yes, and SciHub single-handedly achieved more for the cause that all those other efforts did for the past 20 years. People working on those efforts admit it:

http://sci-hub.tw/http://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1116

bigmit2011• 8 years ago

I'm taking a look at SciHub based on your suggestion. I see that they have journals for various biology related fields.

I decided to take a look at the biotechnology journal https://scihub.org/ajbms/current-issue/

However, it seems the current issue is July 2017? Is it not updated frequently?

Thank you.

goldfeld• 8 years ago

"Rent-seekers could lose their privilege and everyone else could win indirectly."

ricksebak• 8 years ago

Aaron Schwartz is like "wait, what was I on trial for again?"

SimplyUnknown• 8 years ago

How is this radical. People who have invested in knowledge (e.g. via taxes) should be able to access that knowledge, i.e. reap the benefits of their investment. There is nothing radical here.

Sure, I get that this is radical in the sense that some leeches' industry will dry up. That's a good thing but it puzzles me how we got in this situation in the first place.

ericb• 8 years ago

I'm curious, can anyone update me on the related problem of whether it is still the case that failing studies are rarely published so there's a potential for duplication and misreading of significance--because if 101 studies are run and publish the one time it hit p 0.01 you got what would be expected by chance.

Are the structural problems inherent in publish-or-perish mitigated in any way yet?

Vinnl6• 8 years ago

Yes, that is still the case, and while a problem, it's a different one than the problem of restricted access to research.

dschuetz• 8 years ago

Finally a legal way to find and read and cite publicly funded scientific papers. What a time!

bmurray7jhu• 8 years ago

Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper, verify compliance with the journal's house style guide, manage the interactions with reviewers, etc.

For high impact journals, it may be possible to find enough volunteer editors who are willing to accept compensation solely in the form of a line of their CV. Less prestigious journals need to provide additional incentives to editors, and cash has a proven track record of motivating people.

Perhaps academic publishers collect to much rent from their pseudo-monopolies on specific publishing niches, but it is difficult to escape the basic economics of publishing.

eslaught• 8 years ago

I just don't get this. I was involved in a conference committee this year (CS is published in conferences), and as far as I know everyone from the general chair on down was a volunteer. There were some costs like conference space for the program committee meeting that had to be covered via the cost of admission to the conference, but in a journal presumably even those would not exist since you don't need reviewers to meet in person.

As far as I know, the only ongoing costs for the publisher (not immediately recouped via conference admission) would be running their own website and providing downloads. These hardly seem like massive expenses to me.

I don't see any fundamental reason why the model in CS couldn't work for other disciplines even if you don't want to adopt conferences; people are willing to step up and do the work, so why is so much money going to the middle men?

untilHellbanned• 8 years ago

so why is so much money going to the middle men?

Because the scientific community hasn't put forth an alternative.

dwheeler6• 8 years ago

why is so much money going to the middle men?

Because the middle men like getting free money, and it's not other people's jobs to fix the problem. If you're an academic, your job is to produce papers that get published, not fix the publishing system. If you're a library, your job is to make materials available to patrons, not fix the publishing industry. In contrast: If you're a for-profit publisher, your job is to maximize profit, which means minimize your costs and maximize your income.

What's changed is that the costs are now so steep, and the value provided by publishers is so little, that it's become painfully obvious that scientific journal publishers don't provide value compared to the rent fees they charge everyone else.

dwheeler6• 8 years ago

Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper, verify compliance with the journal's house style guide, manage the interactions with reviewers, etc. For high impact journals, it may be possible to find enough volunteer editors who are willing to accept compensation solely in the form of a line of their CV.

It's true that there are some editorial costs, but most open access journals have a one-time editorial cost that cover this. Since it's one-time, the total costs to society are far, far less. Currently governments pay hundreds of thousands of times to access each article (via library subscriptions), instead of paying once to have it published. And since the public is paying for this research, it makes sense that the public should get the result.

Mediterraneo10• 8 years ago

Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper

Many journal publishers do not even provide proofreading or editor services any more. The author is expected to do all that on his own, and then provide camera-ready output. In the case of for-profit publishers, about the only thing that they provide is the actual printing and distribution, not anything editing-related, and so you can imagine their profit margins.

Less prestigious journals need to provide additional incentives to editors, and cash has a proven track record of motivating people.

Again, at least in my own field all of our journals, regardless of prestige, are produced on the part of volunteer labor. Where are you that people are being paid to serve as editors or reviewers?

buboard6• 8 years ago

Its a little confusing because the declaration of the initiative says that the "hybrid" model is not acceptable yet just before that it says that they will pay open access fees up to a specific capped amount throughout Europe. Which one is it?

In any case, some disciplines in life sciences pay the fee to commercial publishers in order to avoid their own internal politics. Open access publishers can have their own problems with politics and transparency which are at this time masked because everyone publishes in high-impact third party commercial publishers. It is a little more difficult to trust the publication record as a proxy for value when you know that e.g. connections have played a part in it.

IanCal11• 8 years ago

Paying for OA is not hybrid.

Hybrid usually refers to journals that have some OA and some non-OA content.

However, I'm not sure if the initiative is talking about not publishing in hybrid journals at all, or that publishing non-oa followed by later paying for OA is not acceptable.

In any case, some disciplines in life sciences pay the fee to commercial publishers in order to avoid their internal politics. Open access publishers can have their own problems with politics and transparency which are at this time masked because everyone publishes in third party commercial publishers.

I'm not sure if I understand right, but there's no distinction between OA publishers and commercial publishers. OA really just refers to the rights of the final paper, not whether the publisher turns a profit.

buboard6• 8 years ago

OK that makes sense, but that's a tiny distinction. Paying for open access used to be optional (like in Cell) now becomes mandatory (like in Cell Reports). The scientist still pays a hefty fee ($5000) to publish a paper. It's probably more economical for the Funding bodies to pay the OA fee rather than paying the subscriptions, but it still foots a bill.

I'm not sure if I understand right

I was making a point about how impact factors are used as proxy for value in life sciences. Because life scientists have done that, they are now dependent on a model in which a third party (the commercial publishers) is judging their work. Going fully open access means the journals will more or less have the same impact factor, because the strong incentive to work towards increasing it (more paid subscriptions) has gone away. So , at least in life sciences, academics will have to learn to evaluate the work of each other more openly, something that other disciplines have achieved long ago (e.g CS, math , physics).

j0e12• 8 years ago

Does anyone know of any open-source arXiv like frameworks that can be self-hosted?

T-A• 8 years ago

Maybe one of these?

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Free_and_open-source_journal_...

j0e12• 8 years ago

These are great! Thanks for pointing them out!

mjfl• 8 years ago

Does anyone else find this ironic that this article is published in Nature, a subscription journal?

mark212• 8 years ago

The solution here is easy and obvious. The Nobel Committee should adopt a rule saying that any research first published in a pay-walled journal will not be considered in evaluating a candidate for any of the Nobel prizes.

That would stop publication in a day. Or less.

pdfernhout• 8 years ago

Thank Goodness. I've been advocating for funders to insist on open publication of results (and more) for over a decade: https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Longer version: https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

Related pledge for organizations: https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-to-only-fund-and-create-free-w... "Our organization, ______, pledges to our our stakeholders and the people of the world that from this date forward, ________, whenever we use charitable or public dollars to fund or create any new content, software, or any other sort of copyrightable or patentable materials intended for public distribution and public use (or substantially modify existing public content), we will ensure those works will be distributed to the public under free/libre licenses. Free/libre licenses means those who receive the works have the freedom to use, run, copy, study, change, improve, redistribute, and/or distribute modified versions of the works without paying additional fees or obtaining additional permissions."

syntaxErr• 8 years ago

There are alternative ones which are using blockchain technology. I know Pluto project(https://pluto.network) and ScienceRoot project(http://www.scienceroot.com/). It's not exactly same with open-access(they insist a fair rewarding system.)

amai• 8 years ago

In the meantime Germany and Sweden are having fun with Elsevier: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/universities-in-g...

Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions

Related Stories