European Union backs open access of research findings

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/european-commission-embraces-open-access.html

by ananyob • 14 years ago

58 20 14 years ago

blogs.nature.com

danmaz743• 14 years ago

"But they do show the influence that the UK is having on international debates." Considering that the UK proposal was unveiled yesterday, perhaps this wasn't an influence - but an independent will?

Loic• 14 years ago

The author is from the UK. If you read a bit more, you discover that the EU has already been doing a pilot on the FP7 research framework for 20% of the publications and has already built the infrastructure to support the open access. A lot of universities all over Europe are also putting their research results in open access databases. So, take it as a bit of biased reporting in the middle of some really encouraging developments.

danmaz743• 14 years ago

That's what I was thinking about ;)

ananyob6• 14 years ago

Though the UK has been mulling the policy for quite a while too (as you can see from the links in the story). At least a year. (The UK also enlisted Jimmy Wales to work out its policy in May.)

zerostar072• 14 years ago

That's quite laughable given that the very article is written by the UK-based for-profit publisher (and part of the science oligopoly), Nature Publishing Group.

AkThhhpppt• 14 years ago

Nature has been an unapologetic advocate of open-access publishing for as long as I've been reading it.

cx912• 14 years ago

I'm curious what the remaining costs of publishing are under such an OpenAccess policy.

For the UK proposal, the Guardian article from July 15 [1] mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process. Of course, the peer-reviewing itself is done free of charge by fellow academics. The Nature post doesn't seem to address this point (unless this is what they refer to as "up-front publication costs" in the second paragraph).

Either way, charges around GBP 2,000 per article for processing are hefty (especially given that the bulk of the work is done by the academics for free). Maybe one should ask the question how this figure could be driven down?

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-br...

scscsc• 14 years ago

"mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process"

I would gladly (and highly profitably) run a for-profit which "manages the peer-review process" for GBP 1 per article.

ananyob6• 14 years ago

You'd be able to find 3 relevant peer reviewers for each article, get their comments, feed them back to the author, then make sure the article was appropriately amended prior to publication (or rejected if required) for £1 per article? Your time must be very cheap! Or am I missing something?

zerostar072• 14 years ago

I think that's what PLoS does. Their costs are here: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/

Their costs aren't low, and presumably they don't make profit either. It's fair though, although i might say a bit expensive for authors from developing countries. You want to have a barrier in publishing and a good review process, and it's more fair (esp. to students in the developing world) to charge the authors rather than the readers.

Hopefully, if we have competition among open-access journals even the costs may go down.

paulsutter2• 14 years ago

The current peer review process requires expert supervision (qualified reviewers need to be selected, etc), so a charge of GBP 2,000 seems reasonable to me.

In time we can hope for an HN-like system where publications are ranked immediately on publication. The algorithm would have to recognize the expertise of authorities when assigning the value of each vote. When this is possible, that cost should dissapear. But until such a system has been proven out, peer review should remain and a charge of GBP 2000 is reasonable.

cx912• 14 years ago

1) GBP 2,000 still seems steep to me. Assuming I'll have to pay an scientific editor (who selects reviewers, forwards manuscripts and decision revisions, etc) GBP 100 per hour, he could spend 10 work hours on the article -- total cost: GBP 1,000. I realize that there's a large variance on time required though, depending on how referees and authors agree, but 10 hours seems at the upper end of the spectrum. Of course, if we'll have to pay a typesetter + infrastructure, GBP 2,000 might be where we'll end up. However, I have the impression that these proposals offload all typesetting to the authors.

2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).

European Union backs open access of research findings

Related Stories