[HN Gopher] UC secures landmark open access deal with world's la...
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UC secures landmark open access deal with world's largest
scientific publisher
Author : SubiculumCode
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-03-16 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.universityofcalifornia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.universityofcalifornia.edu)
| lalaithion wrote:
| The United States (or any government) should require that
| scientific papers funded in part or in whole by Government funds
| should be available to all citizens and residents at zero cost.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Cannot do that - too much classified work :)
|
| Also, some places where funding matches are used to bring stuff
| to fruition would lose significant funding from both sides:
| private would not in many cases invest where the results would
| be given away for free, and govt could not invest or match to
| help bring things to market.
|
| For example the SBIR program would face significant problems,
| and it's responsible for a lot of good research and products.
| DARPA stuff would face the same issues.
|
| Or, to keep such stuff not public, groups that currently
| publish would simply not publish in order to get funding to
| continue working. Then the public again loses access to
| knowledge.
|
| Also, there is no such thing as zero cost - someone is going to
| have to pay to make such materials available - and that cost
| (even though small) will likely be borne by the taxpayers. For
| example, arxiv costs a few million a year to run.
|
| Such solutions are unlikely to yield the results you want.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Simple fix: anything govt funded that's published (say in a
| journal) must be made open access. Anything that's not
| published is not affected. This deal doesn't sound so great
| for UC. It doesn't appear to apply to the traditional closed
| journals which includes most of the high prestige ones. UC
| was doing fine with no active subscriptions, per a thread a
| few days ago.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| It seems like copyleft is a solution to that sort of problem
| in the software domain but obviously not really in this
| context.
|
| Another issue is that animal researchers are at risk of being
| targeted by a smear campaign by anti-animal research groups
| as they often take advantage of sunshine laws to cherry pick
| less than flattering footage.
|
| This has led to a weird culture of where scientists are very
| hesitant to share any data with other scientists at public
| universities.
| limbicsystem wrote:
| Kind of like this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I am for open science in general, but I cannot help but worry
| about how this disincentivizes research funding. Why? If the
| U.S. did adopt such a policy, then all funded research does not
| just benefit the United States, but every nation. Nothing wrong
| with that, but then those other countries may feel that there
| is less need to fund their own science programs because they
| can leech off the United State's investment. Other countries
| might even close access to their science, and they'd receive
| benefit from our investment, but we would not benefit from
| theirs. Alternatively, we can take the view that it is not zero
| sum, that interactions in open science always makes it the
| rational decision to keep science open and to fund it.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| This is a bizarre argument. Are you seriously saying that by
| not forcing universities to pay a for-profit European
| publishing conglomerate, the US is _disincentivizing_
| research?
|
| Countries don't fund research because of what shows up (or
| not) in scientific journals from other countries that they
| can somehow glean. They fund _researchers_ to do research in
| their countries because the trickle-down effect of PhD
| students, graduate students, prestige, and ultimately spin-
| off companies and economic benefit that comes from doing so.
| PeterisP wrote:
| This has nothing to do with research funding. Money paid for
| access to papers goes to publishers.
|
| It's not like in music where the publishers get the lions'
| share and the artists get a fraction of that - in academic
| pubishing, it's 100% to publishers and _not a single cent
| ever_ of the proceeds goes to authors or reviewers or to
| funding science programs.
|
| And "closed access science" produced by USA is still
| available to researchers in every country despite the
| paywalls, all the serious universities have arranged
| subscriptions, it's just that currently they are paying a
| large fee to unnecessary middlemen (e.g. Netherlands'
| Elsevier) for that privilege.
| jsilence wrote:
| Very unlikely. There are a lot of other benficial effects
| from research and applied research, beyond its publications.
| A well running academic body is also a job motor and
| entrepreneurship driver. Usually the methods and materials
| section of papers is so thin that they are hard to replicate
| anyway. As a nation you'd rather have the scientists than the
| papers of foreign scientists.
| omginternets wrote:
| By that logic we should either stop training scientists or
| prevent people with Ph.Ds from working for non-US
| institutions.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yes but how about foreigners?
| omginternets wrote:
| I don't think the US government has any moral obligation to
| foreigners in this regard. Don't get me wrong: it would be
| wonderful to provide open access to all, but I don't see an
| ethical problem with drawing the line at "those who paid for
| it", which is to say "those who pay taxes in the US.
|
| And of course, feel free to substitute US with $COUNTRY.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| TLDR: Elsevier caved, big time. This is a big win for open
| science, imo.
| lacker wrote:
| It is unclear to me what the real impact of this deal is. The
| article spends about one sentence describing the deal directly:
|
| "All research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier's
| extensive portfolio of hybrid and open access journals will be
| open access by default."
|
| There are a lot of caveats here. It sounds like this only applies
| to some journals and some articles. There are a whole lot of
| vague quotes about how great this is though. I'd be interested to
| see a more detailed analysis of the impact this will have.
| pfortuny wrote:
| A mutually beneficial agreement with Elsevier contains a huge lot
| of amount of very big money. For sure.
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| I am genuinely surprised that the UC was able to get Elsevier to
| agree to this much, even if it does come up well short of their
| original list of demands [1].
|
| I do wonder what this means for researchers, in particular there
| was no mention of publishing fees. Generally in hybrid journals
| there is a hefty price tag for open access (basically -- you are
| paying for the expected revenue generated by your paper...) so I
| could see that this means the publishing fees for a top Elsevier
| journal upwards of 5 figures--a price that research groups will
| now need to cover. I was at a talk by Nature about their Nature
| Photonics journal, and when asked if they would ever consider
| doing open access for Nature Photonics they said they have
| thought about it, but that it would cost them about $40,000 per
| paper for it to be commercially viable. Even though the peer
| review is free, they have a team of editors that need to get paid
| and they only publish 10-20 papers a month.
|
| Also -- see the previous discussion with more focus on Elsevier's
| side of the story at [2]
|
| [1]
| https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/rm-...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26379954
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