Free access to British scientific research to be available within two years

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research

by tomgallard • 14 years ago

47 7 14 years ago

guardian.co.uk

Qworg• 14 years ago

If there is anything that will kill free access, it will be this: "British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article."

APCs just murder the desire to publish at all.

gridaphobe• 14 years ago

I believe the idea is that future grants would stipulate that some percentage of the grant be used to cover publishing costs, whereas current grants include some money for subscribing to journals. That way the publishers are still guaranteed to get money, but anyone can see the results of the research. Certainly less ideal than circumventing publishers entirely, but hopefully a step forward.

czr80• 14 years ago

I'm curious how this will work - who knows exactly how many papers they will publish at the start of a grant? And what about fields with low grant amounts (mathematics, humanities, etc?)

jessriedel2• 14 years ago

> whereas current grants include some money for subscribing to journals.

No, individual academics don't subscribe to journals, the university libraries do. This will result in slightly more money for universities, slightly less money on grants for research.

> Certainly less ideal than circumventing publishers entirely, but hopefully a step forward.

Publishers are still useful, so I don't really see a reason to advocate circumventing them. Physicists have had the ArXiv for two decades, but that hasn't stopped them from publishing.

tinco• 14 years ago

No it won't because universities have an intrinsic motivation to publish, it is their life blood.

As a researcher at a university you usually have an _obligation_ to publish at least x articles per year.

In the best case, if 200m gets reduced to 0, under this scheme the universities would be able to publish 100_000 articles per year for the same price.

Ofcourse the universities will still require a whole bunch of subscriptions, but if the world would follow suit, this would be very awesome and good for science in general.

jessriedel2• 14 years ago

> The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

> APCs just murder the desire to publish at all.

Depending on the field, articles typically cost $50k-$100k. £2k/$4k really isn't that big of an amount. I guarantee you that the pain of writing the paper in the first place is way more of a disincentive for academics to publish than a mere $4k charged to the grant. But they continue to crank out huge numbers of papers for the obvious reason: their jobs depend on it.

Free access to British scientific research to be available within two years

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