Good News: Academics Can Make Their Articles Published In Top Journal Nature Freely Available As Open Access. Bad News: They Must Pay $11,000 For Each One

from the free-but-not-free dept

Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about Plan S, an initiative from top research funders that requires all work they support to be published as open access. It's one of the most important moves to get publicly-funded work made freely available, and as such has been widely welcomed. Except by publishers, of course, who have enjoyed profit margins of 35-40% under the current system, which sees libraries and others pay for subscriptions in order to read public research. But Plan S is too big to ignore, not least after the powerful Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation joined the coalition behind it. So publishers have instead come up with ways to subvert the whole idea of making knowledge freely available in order to maintain profits. The latest and perhaps most blatant example of this has come from Springer Nature, the publisher of the journal Nature, widely regarded as one of the top two science titles in the world (the other being Science). Here's what Nature the publisher is doing, reported by Nature the journal:

From 2021, the publisher will charge €9,500, US$11,390 or £8,290 to make a paper open access (OA) in Nature and 32 other journals that currently keep most of their articles behind paywalls and are financed by subscriptions. It is also trialing a scheme that would halve that price for some journals, under a common-review system that might guide papers to a number of titles.

OA advocates are pleased that the publisher has found ways to offer open access to all authors, which it first committed to in April. But they are concerned about the price. The development is a "very significant" moment in the movement to make scientific articles free for all to read, but "it looks very expensive," says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London.

The research will indeed by freely available to the world, but the authors' institutions have to cough up the massive sum of $11,000 for every article. That will make Nature compliant with Plan S, while ensuring that loads of money continues to roll in. It also means that educational institutions won't be saving any money when their researchers can read some Nature publishing papers for free, since they must pay out huge sums for their own academics to appear in these titles. This is a classic example of double-dipping -- what is more politely called "hybrid open access." Nature the publisher will get paid by institutions to make some articles freely available, but it will continue to be paid by subscribers to access material that has already been paid for. Plan S may mean that Nature and other publishers make even more money.

That's problematic, because more money for Nature and other journals means more money that the academic world has to pay as whole. One of the big hopes was that open access would not only provide free access to all publicly-funded research, but that the overall cost to institutions would come down dramatically. If they don't, then researchers in poorer countries are unlikely to be able to publish their work in leading journals, because their universities can't afford charges of $11,000 per article. Waiver schemes exist in some cases, but are unsatisfactory, because they effectively require researchers to beg for charity -- hardly what global access to knowledge is supposed to bring about.

At the heart of the problem lies the issue of a title's supposed prestige. Nature can probably get away with charging its extremely high open access rate because researchers are so keen to appear in it for the sake of their careers:

Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it is a "prestige tax", because it will pay for the journals' high rejection rates, but will not, in his opinion, guarantee higher quality or discoverability. "I think it would be absurd for any funder, university or author to pay it," he says.

A possible solution is to move to a publishing system based around preprints, which have proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way of getting important research out fast. With this approach, the issue of prestige is irrelevant, since papers are simply placed online directly, for anyone to access freely. That's going to be a hard transition. Not because there are deep problems with the idea, but because academics prefer to appear in journals like Nature and Science. Open access won't succeed until they realize that this is not just selfish but also ultimately harmful to their own academic work, which becomes warped by the perceived need to publish in prominent titles.

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Filed Under: academic research, copyright, costs, fees, knowledge, nature, open access, plan s
Companies: springer

After Plan S, Here's Plan U: Funders Should Require All Research To Be Posted First As A Preprint

from the instant-open-access? dept

Preprints are emerging as a way to get research out to everyone free of charge, without needing to pay page charges to appear in a traditional open access title. The growing popularity is in part because research shows that published versions of papers in costly academic titles add almost nothing to the freely-available preprints they are based on. Now people are starting to think about ways to put preprints at the heart of academic publishing and research. In the wake of the EU's "Plan S" to make more research available as open access, there is now a proposal for "Plan U":

If all research funders required their grantees to post their manuscripts first on preprint servers -- an approach we refer to as "Plan U" -- the widespread desire to provide immediate free access to the world's scientific output would be achieved with minimal effort and expense. As noted above, mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists have been relying on arXiv as their primary means of communication for decades. The biomedical sciences were slower to adopt preprinting, but bioRxiv is undergoing exponential growth and several million readers access articles on bioRxiv every month. Depositing preprints is thus increasingly common among scientists, and mandating it would simply accelerate adoption of a process many predict will become universal in the near future.

There is a precedent for mandating preprint deposition: since 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has mandated that all grantees deposit preprints prior to or at submission for formal publication. This requirement has been accepted by CZI-funded investigators, many of whom were already routinely depositing manuscripts on bioRxiv.

The proposal goes on to consider some of the practical issues involved, such as how it would fit with peer review, and what the requirements for preprint servers might be, as well as deeper questions about guaranteed long-term preservation strategies -- a crucial issue that is often overlooked. The Plan U proposal concludes:

because it sidesteps the complexities and uncertainties of attempting to manipulate the economics of a $10B/year industry, Plan U could literally be mandated by funders tomorrow with minimal expense, achieving immediate free access to research and the significant benefits to the academic community and public this entails. Funders and other stakeholders could then focus their investment and innovation energies on the critical task of building and supporting robust and effective systems of peer review and research evaluation.

Those are all attractive features of the Plan U idea, although Egon Willighagen has rightly pointed out that using the right license for the preprints is an important issue. At the time of writing, the Plan U Web site is rather minimalist. It currently consists of just one page; there are no links to who wrote the proposal, what future plans might be, or how to get involved. I asked around on Twitter, and it seems that three well-known figures in the open science world -- Michael Eisen, John Inglis, and Richard Sever -- are the people behind this. Eisen has been one of the leading figures in the open access world since its earliest days, while Inglis and Sever are co-founders of the increasingly-popular bioRxiv preprint server, which serves the biology community. That augurs well for the idea, but it would still be good to have the details fleshed out on a more informative Web site -- something that Sever told Techdirt will be coming in due course.

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Filed Under: academic research, open access, plan s, plan u, preprint, replication crisis, research, studies

Big Boost For Open Access As Wellcome And Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Back EU's 'Plan S'

from the no-embargoes,-and-cc-by dept

Back in September, Techdirt wrote about the oddly-named 'Plan S', which was nonetheless an important step forward for open access in Europe. As we remarked then, the hope was that others would support the initiative, and that has now happened, with two of the biggest names in the science funding world signing up to the approach:

To ensure that research findings are shared widely and are made freely available at the time of publication, Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have today (Monday) joined cOAlition S and endorsed the principles of Plan S.

An article in Nature on the move notes that Wellcome gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016–17, while the Gates Foundation spent $4.7 billion in 2017, although not all of that was on science. So the backing of these two organizations is a massive vote of confidence in Plan S and its requirements. Wellcome has also unveiled its new, more stringent open access policy, which includes a number of important changes, including the following:

All Wellcome-funded research articles must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC at the time of publication. We previously allowed a six-month embargo period. This change will make sure that the peer-reviewed version is freely available to everyone at the time of publication.

This move finally rectifies one of the biggest blunders by academic funding organizations: allowing publishers to impose an embargo -- typically six or even 12 months -- before publicly-funded research work was freely available as open access. There was absolutely no reason to allow this. After all, the funding organizations could simply have said to publishers: "if you want to publish work we paid for, you must follow our rules". But in a moment of weakness, they allowed themselves to be bamboozled by publishers, granting an unnecessary monopoly on published papers, and slowing down the dissemination of research.

All articles must be published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY). We previously only required this licence when an article processing charge (APC) was paid. This change will make sure that others -- including commercial entities and AI/text-data mining services -- can reuse our funded research to discover new knowledge.

Although a more subtle change, it's an important one. It establishes unequivocally that anyone, including companies, may build on research financed by Wellcome. In particular, it explicitly allows anyone to carry out text and data mining (TDM), and to use papers and their data for training machine-learning systems. That's particularly important in the light of the EU's stupid decision to prevent companies in Europe from carrying out either TDM or training machine-learning systems on material to which they do not have legal access to unless they pay an additional licensing fee to publishers. This pretty much guarantees that the EU will become a backwater for AI compared to the US and China, where no such obstacles are placed in the way of companies.

Like Plan S, Wellcome's open access policy no longer supports double-dipping "hybrid journals", which charge researchers who want to release their work as open access, but also require libraries to take out full-price subscriptions for journals that include these freely-available articles. An innovative aspect of the new policy is that it will require some research to be published as preprints in advance of formal publication in journals:

Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, these preprints must be published:

before peer review

on an approved platform that supports immediate publication of the complete manuscript under a CC-BY licence.

That's eminently sensible -- in the event of public health emergencies, you want the latest research to be out there in the hands of health workers as soon as possible. It's also a nice boost for preprints, which are rapidly emerging as an important way of sharing knowledge.

The Gates Foundation has said that it will update its open access policy, which in any case is already broadly in line with the principles of Plan S, over the next 12 months. Even without that revision, the latest announcement by these two funding heavyweights is highly significant, and is likely to make the argument for similar organizations around the world to align their open access policies with Plan S hard to resist. We can therefore probably expect more to join cOAlition S and help bring the world closer to the long-cherished dream of full open access to the world's research, with no embargoes, and under a permissive CC-BY license.

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Filed Under: academia, academic research, creative commons, eu, open access, philanthropy, plan s
Companies: bill and melinda gates foundation, wellcome trust

Europe's New 'Plan S' For Open Access: Daft Name, Great News

from the admirably-strong dept

The journey towards open access has been a long one, with many disappointments along the way. But occasionally there are unequivocal and major victories. One such is the new "Plan S" from the inelegantly-named cOALition S:

On 4 September 2018, 11 national research funding organisation, with the support of the European Commission including the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of one target and 10 principles.

cOAlition S signals the commitment to implement, by 1 January 2020, the necessary measures to fulfil its main principle: "By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms."

The plan and its ten principles (pdf) are usefully summed up by Peter Suber, one of the earliest and most influential open access advocates, as follows:

The plan is admirably strong. It aims to cover all European research, in the sciences and in the humanities, at the EU level and the member-state level. It's a plan for a mandate, not just an exhortation or encouragement. It keeps copyright in the hands of authors. It requires open licenses and prefers CC-BY. It abolishes or phases out embargoes. It does not support hybrid journals except as stepping stones to full-OA journals. It's willing to pay APCs [Article Processing Charges] but wants to cap them, and wants funders and universities to pay them, not authors. It will monitor compliance and sanction non-compliance. It's already backed by a dozen powerful, national funding agencies and calls for other funders and other stakeholders to join the coalition.

Keeping copyright in the hands of authors is crucial: too often, academics have been cajoled or bullied into handing over copyright for their articles to publishers, thus losing the ability to determine who can read them, and under what conditions. Similarly, the CC-BY license would allow commercial use by anyone -- many publishers try to release so-called open access articles under restrictive licenses like CC-BY-NC, which stop other publishers from distributing them.

Embargo periods are routinely used by publishers to delay the appearance of open access versions of articles; under Plan S, that would no longer be allowed. Finally, the new initiative discourages the use of "hybrid" journals that have often enabled publishers to "double dip". That is, they charge researchers who want to release their work as open access, but also require libraries to take out full-price subscriptions for journals that include these freely-available articles.

Suber has a number of (relatively minor) criticisms of Plan S, which are well-worth reading. All-in-all, though, this is a major breakthrough for open access in Europe, and thus the world. Once "admirably strong" open access mandates like Plan S have been established in one region, others tend to follow in due course. Let's just hope they choose better names.

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Filed Under: coalition s, europe, knowledge, open access, plan s, sharing