Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

Slowly and almost imperceptibly if you look at it day-to-day, public research repositories like arxiv and biorxiv, along with public code repositories like github and gitlab, are becoming or maybe already are <i>the world&#x27;s most important academic &quot;journals.&quot;</i><p>All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. Reviews take place over the Internet via both public and private forums.<p>Gatekeeping power lies more and more in the hands of a global, distributed scientific community open to anyone willing and capable of doing and reviewing the work. It&#x27;s fabulous IMHO.

Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live.<p>That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per &quot;page&quot; even now that you get things electronically and the cost is near zero:<p>There&#x27;s a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can install a browser extension which automatically copies anything you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays, and the rest get it free.<p>It is amazingly complete, much more than you would think. For instance, here&#x27;s the entry for the Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) trial:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com&#x2F;docket&#x2F;7185174&#x2F;united-states-v-holmes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com&#x2F;docket&#x2F;7185174&#x2F;united-states-v...</a>

A good development - depositing papers in OA journals is extremely expensive and internationally, most funding bodies requiring OA don&#x27;t give you money to publish OA. For example, Nature Communications charges around $5,000 for a single paper; I can send a student to an overseas conference for that kind of money!<p>Public repositories like arxiv or biorxiv are free.

Can we get ISO to make all papers free next...? You know since moat industries need to abide by their standards but they refuse to freely make available these standards...

Seemingly as part of the same push, the UKRI announced funding for an open research project I&#x27;ve worked on before: Dr Alex Freeman&#x27;s Octopus [0], a more radical software platform that splits research projects into smaller components. It&#x27;s good to see that the openess of research is finally getting to be a priority of the funding bodies.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science-octopus.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science-octopus.org&#x2F;</a>

&gt; “When versions of articles are made available too soon, this undermines the need to subscribe [to journals],” wrote a spokesperson, Amy Price, in an email to Science.<p>Yes, Ms. Price, <i>that is the point</i>.

A remarkable thing about the COVID crisis is the unprecedented close cooperation and data sharing by widely disparate scientific communities.<p>The obvious global benefits may also be driving cooperation and sharing in other fields, including (and perhaps especially) publishing. Closed data has no beneficiaries except commerce - it&#x27;s being seen as a dead model. Finally.

Immediately means the time span between publication and open access, not the rule, which starts April 2022.

This is so right. It used to be theoretically justified to charge a cost for editing, reviewing management, and printing costs of a paper journal but most paper journals have disappeared and the paper format is useless today. High tech has made these journal companies giant vampire squids poking their blood funnels into academia to suck the life out of mankind&#x27;s progress!<p>But down the road I can see that academic research publication will become like Facebook - loaded with bullshit promoted by hypesters - wasting time and killing thousands - and no one to enforce sanity in that lunatic wilderness!<p>If the 19th century journals would get with a program they would become science repos with a much smaller stuff and light fees (enough to support one staff managing editor per journal) for the review process! Publishing a paper in this model should probably cost about $1000 - $2,000, about the same as it cost the last time I was in academia...

In case someone has some direct knowledge or credible sources: I&#x27;m not sure what is stopping reform at a political level. Who is the political constituency that obstructs open access? The publishers seem too small, and the science and higher ed constituency too large.

Now we need to get the Nobel Committee to say they will only read open source papers - this is a valid option as the paywalls have denied most of the world&#x27;s &#x27;second tier&#x27; countries access for their scientists (to say nothing of interested science readers wherever they are) so going open source will only add to the common pool of knowledge

I know it&#x27;s in the original title, so I&#x27;m not criticising OP the submitter, but this has to be the first time I&#x27;ve ever seen &#x27;U.K.&#x27; as dotted intials like that! Seems oddly funny, I don&#x27;t know why really.<p>Wiktionary notes it&#x27;s customary in legal case notes, but gives no other usage, which I suppose supports it being a first for me.

Are there any incentive for the researcher to not make the research paper free? AFAIK most prestigious journals allows researchers to publish their preprint papers in arxiv&#x2F;the researcher&#x27;s site.

Another point about peer review:<p>It sounds good but has become hopelessly corrupted in many fields. Cronyism (&quot;I&#x27;ll pass your paper if you pass mine&quot;), conformity (&quot;This isn&#x27;t what the Cool Kids have agreed to, so you can&#x27;t publish it&quot;) and also &quot;This is too readable. Needs more jargon!&quot; have taken over. Does this mean it should be thrown out altogether, or just reformed? I&#x27;m not sure.

One point to my others and pretty orthogonal to them:<p>I was a tech assistant in Google Patent Litigation. Part of my job was to bust patents (a dream job, right?), and for that, I would scour the Internet for literature to invalidate a patent being asserted against us.<p>I would <i>constantly</i> see articles behind some paywall, and I would never, never click through. There are reasons you can imagine, like (1) I didn&#x27;t want the hassle of justifying the expense, and (2) I hate those publishers. Both true.<p>However, the biggest reason was:<p><i>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s any good until I read it.</i><p>The vast majority of articles are not helpful for my purpose. I can&#x27;t tell if they really are until I read them. If it turns out that some article is the killer, then of course Google would pay for it. But for the 1000&#x27;s that are not -- well, why waste the money? I can almost always find the same information somewhere else, for free.

question.<p>Do peer reviewed papers make the reviewers public?<p>That would be an interesting angle if not. Allow anyone to publish, but they compete for high-status reviewers. Also, the reviewers have some skin in the game so far as correctness.

&quot;Pay journals for “gold” open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher’s website, or choose the “green” route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year.&quot;<p>yeah, that kind of free huh. Sick.