[vox_mundi]

Radical Open-Access Plan Could Spell End to Journal Subscriptions

Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers.

... “Paywalls are not only hindering the scientific enterprise itself but also they are an obstacle [to] the uptake of research results by the wider public”

The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication. The papers would have a liberal publishing licence that would allow anyone else to download, translate or otherwise reuse the work. “No science should be locked behind paywalls!” says a preamble document that accompanies the pledge, called Plan S, released on 4 September.



As written, Plan S would bar researchers from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science. According to a December 2017 analysis, only around 15% of journals publish work immediately as open access (see 'Publishing models') — financed by charging per-article fees to authors or their funders, negotiating general open-publishing contracts with funders, or  through other means. More than one-third of journals still publish papers behind a paywall, and typically permit online release of free-to-read versions only after a delay of at least six months — in compliance with the policies of influential funders such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)



Under the initiative, funding agencies including UK Research and Innovation, Science Foundation Ireland and the Research Council of Norway will require grant holders to publish only in journals that offer immediate open access, and under a licence that enables anyone to freely reuse and distribute the material.

The European Commission and coalition of national research funders in Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK will implement the new policy from 1 January 2020.

[KaiserJeep]

Then there are the things that are politically incorrect, some of which come from publicly funded R&D, but for which the published results are politically incorrect.

The one we explored most recently were the major derivations from the Human Genome Project. There in fact are measureable differences in agility, strength, intelligence, and many other things, and they can be linked to the presence and absence of certain genes and gene clusters.

The HGP was conducted from 1990 to 2003. The raw data itself is all online. The derived results linking various abilities to those gene clusters is almost all paywalled. In fact, some of it is only available to anthropologists and human biologists and the like. Because you see, just because you paid for the HGP, doesn't mean you can handle knowing the results:

...not to mention, such results throw into peril such government programs as Affirmative Action and Headstart. Because the government is in fact spending your money to eliminate differences that arise in the DNA of the people involved.

[onlooker]

We live in an age where certain things have been dumbed down and it is easy to access lots of information but not necessarily the right conclusions from it. It goes back to our basic education which is geared to rote memorization and passing exams and acceptance of the "official facts". It is NOT stressing critical thinking skills. The capacity to connect dots to arrive at revelations and conclusions. And yes Science is a basic foundation of information that should be available to all. But many things in the world are far from perfect, no sense in trying to wish it away.

[Cog]

Without paywalls how are you going to pay the editors and peer review folks who work for the magazine or journal? Perhaps in the world of the left money is just wished into existence but no one works for free.

[KaiserJeep]

I understand what you are saying, onlooker. But in the sense that Science (with a capital "S") has proved that certain abilities are related to genes, can we not stop trying to make everybody equal?

We spend a lot of time here talking about the "1%", which in fact hardly matters. The top 10%, the new American aristocracy, certainly matters a lot more. In fact a majority of regular posters here, being of or near retirement age, admit to being in the 10%. This apparently makes many people uncomfortable, and those folks continue to rail against "the 1%".

Among the top 10% in income are certainly those who are the stars of professional football, basketball, and baseball. The HGP derived studies show that Blacks have greater strength, speed, and endurance. They certainly dominate these sports, in spite of being a minority group. Why then do the White players not ask for "Afirmative Action" until they are represented in USA professional sports in proportion to their percentage in the population at large?

After all, Colin Kaepernick proved that you can attract attention to a cause that way....


....as long as you don't mind losing your meal ticket.

[onlooker]

I understand what you are saying, onlooker. But in the sense that Science (with a capital "S") has proved that certain abilities are related to genes, can we not stop trying to make everybody equal?
.

I am in favor of publishing and making available any and all results that have been attained utilizing the scientific method. That should be sacrosanct. It should be a public right. The point Cog bought up is consistent with the hyper profit making environment in the US. I think we see less of that in Europe with their hybrid Socialism emphasis. It all goes back to what Pops has said, that ideally Capitalism functions best when properly regulated for the Public Good.
By the way where has he gone?

[rockdoc123]

Without paywalls how are you going to pay the editors and peer review folks who work for the magazine or journal? Perhaps in the world of the left money is just wished into existence but no one works for free.

which has always been the argument as to why scientific journals must collect fees. In my experience this is mainly a barrier to scientists who are working in industry, not those in academia. Universities usually keep subscriptions to the vast majority of scientific journals and anyone can access them through the university library. Large companies have access to individual articles at reduced rates or subscriptions for select journals at discounts.

The problem is for scientists who are out there working on their own or being supported by small industry grants or for the general public. The general public seems to avoid reading journal articles, preferring to get their douse of science from what are often suspect secondary sources (BBC etc).

From what I can see is that in the future there will be a hybrid of publications. Much science will still appear in reputable journals but a greater amount will appear online without any purchase fees. This will, of course, put pressure on the paper publications but I think there needs to be fewer of those than there are now, some consolidation would be worthwhile.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Any research which is publicly funded should be publicly available at no fee.
It makes no sense for public to sponsor work, which is then copyrighted by shabby private entities who have no input to work itself at all and yet somehow restrict access to the results by those who actually did contribute to work by paying taxes.
So lets dispose off publishers or relegate them to niche markets like paper copies of journals.
It may not be as simple as that but certainly doable, particularly that these are unassociated members of public or small organizations who suffer the most.
Publishers are an important part of information control cartels, who are trying to keep all what is relevant within large corporate structures and academia.
In the era of internet they are disposable.

[KaiserJeep]

This is an interesting topic. In fact I have given a lot off thought to it in the recent past. The context was I recently read this book:

Lee Berger is the "Research Professor in Human Origins and the Public Understanding of Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa" who led the teams that discovered not one but two species of fossil primates. His co-author John Hawkes is the "Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison".

I should mention that I would call Paleo-Anthropology the most hide-bound of sciences. The long-standing practice which came about in the 19th Century is to announce the discovery of new fossils (as in the hundreds of Neanderthal sites discovered in Europe) and then to spend DECADES studying the bones, before publishing individual papers in sequence.

Berger and Hawkes violated tradition by wiring the cave where they discovered Homo Naledi and then streaming fossil recovery live. Then they filled a room in Witwatersrand with grad students who studied the bones, and interacted online with their peers all over the world. Furthermore they put all the test results, from MRI scans of the bones to radioactive dating of the limestone strata to determing ages online. They completely violated prior practices, and the indignant "peer reviewers" were so annoyed that they refused to critique.

As a result, both Science and Nature refused to publish the papers written by Berger and Hawkes. They ended up publishing in an obscure online journal, for the crime of violating established canon and sharing information in real time. IMHO they also demonstrated a superior way of acquiring more knowledge in less time.

I reccomend the book, BTW. I read the online version.

[EnergyUnlimited]

...not to mention, such results throw into peril such government programs as Affirmative Action and Headstart. Because the government is in fact spending your money to eliminate differences that arise in the DNA of the people involved.

Racial IQ data *is* available for those who have IQ above 80 (so are able to make sense of written text) and bother to look for it:
https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
However prevalence of mutations related to IQ across racial spectrum, which you have included, is interesting.

[Plantagenet]

As someone who has successfully published scientific papers in existing scientific journals like Science and Nature, I have to say I'm not a fan of this idea of open access publishing. Not because I oppose the idea of open access publishing----every scientist would love to have their work be accessible to more people----but because I worry about the degradation of the current system of peer review.

There already are a large number of "open access" scientific journals now. But they tend to be very low quality, with extremely poor reviewing processes. Some of the "open access" journals are just money-making ventures. They will publish anything---even flawed scientific work ---- as long as the scientists pay fees for their work to be published. And most university libraries just buy "flat rate" bulk subscriptions that allow faculty and students to read all the articles in the top journals now. Individuals never actually pay those hefty subscription fees that supposedly are the problem---you just log in through the library and read everything for free now.

The existing scientific publishing system has taken a century to develop and it works very well, IMHO. If there is an extremely important piece of research, It generally gets through review and gets into Science and Nature. If its isn't so important, then it can usually get into a second tier journal or into a regional or discipline based journal.

The existing system is a hierarchy, and the publishers have established a system that encourages scientists to do ground breaking work that will get into the top journals like Nature or Science. Opening everything up and allowing people to publish whatever they want in unheralded "open door" online journals without peer review has the risk of opening up scientific publishing to mediocrity and bad science.

And we don't want that.

Cheers!

[KaiserJeep]

EU, It's not exactly a "paywall" I am talking about, either. From 2013-2015 I assisted one of my daughter's friends in an academic study of online behaviors. Through me she injected information into the Peak Oil Forum and studied the results. Her dissertation was on those oddball humans who seem to interact online almost exclusively.

Anyway she shared some of the more controversial analysis of the HGP. Having a map of the Genome was completed in 2003. Figuring out the implications of what genes cause what to the individual is just in it's infancy. Those sorts of things are restricted to those with subscriptions to obscure publications in Anthropology and Biology.

Such barriers are working in the sense that not many people are even talking about the implications of associating gene groupings with physical or mental capabilities. BTW, the chart above omits the group with the highest median IQ, which is the Ashkenazi Jews, at 108. The Mitochondrial DNA says they originated in the Caucasus Mountains as did most Europeans, but took a less typical side trip through the Middle East.

Plant, I hear you. The flip side of the coin is in the book above. Or in the online NOVA video from June 2018:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/dawn-of-humanity.html
or the update that Hawkes posted online : https://www.pbs.org/video/how-homo-naledi-is-changing-human-origins-kcbova/

Berger and Hawkes made far more fossil discoveries (thousands of bones, in fact), including one species of primate (Australopithecus Sediba, 2008) and one species of primitive man (Homo Naledi, 2015) than had until that time existed in the entire field of Paleo-Anthropology, except for the huge abundance of Neanderthal fossils from Europe. However, because the data was shared before publication, the two were snubbed by the two premier publications Science and Nature. Which meant that they could not get peer reviews, didn't it?

By contrast, the more traditional Leakey's dug up a handfull of bones at Olduvai Gorge and were still publishing 40 years later. To my way of thinking, that is moronically slow. Experts in all the obscure branches of Geology and Paleontology need to give feedback before the dig ends, it's just better science.

[rockdoc123]

If there is an extremely important piece of research, It generally gets through review and gets into Science and Nature. If its isn't so important, then it can usually get into a second tier journal or into a regional or discipline based journal.

Hardly. Science and Nature have a number of sub-publications these days, some are good for certain subjects but are not good for other subjects. Neither are infallible given the number of retractions that have occurred in both over the past number of years. Many of the geoscientists I know who are still publishing wouldn't even bother with Science or Nature as neither attracts their target audience, better choices such as Journal of Geochemistry, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Geology, GSA Journal, Geologische Rundschau etc exist. The same can be said for the field of medicine and biology.

Having a glossy, well-advertised journal that draws a significant number of citations per paper does not guaranty the published articles are either quality or reliable. Like all journals they are at the mercy of the associate editors and who they choose for peer review. Peer Review can have issues as has been outlined in a number of articles over the past few years. Problems with peer review due to reviewers not adhering to the original principles and instead using it as a means of "filtering opinions" has lead to a large number of scientists who are now looking to publish online. Their view is if you are going to be subject to poor peer review that is neither independent nor unopinionated why bother with the normal 6 month to 1 year delay in getting your research published, skip the paper journals, publish online and let the masses perform their own review and judgment.

Opening everything up and allowing people to publish whatever they want in unheralded "open door" online journals without peer review has the risk of opening up scientific publishing to mediocrity and bad science.

unfortunately, there is a significant amount of "mediocrity and bad science" that gets through peer review due to it's poor implementation in many journals. Believing the something is somehow correct because it was published in a peer-reviewed journal is just asking for trouble. If this was not the case there would be a paucity of retractions, which certainly isn't the case.

[Plantagenet]

Many of the geoscientists I know who are still publishing wouldn't even bother with Science or Nature as neither attracts their target audience, better choices such as Journal of Geochemistry, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Geology, GSA Journal, Geologische Rundschau etc exist.

You are way out of date.

Far from not publishing important papers in the Geosciences there is now so much interest in geosciences at SCIENCE and NATURE that a few years ago Nature started a companion journal called NATURE GEOSCIENCE which publishes ONLY GEOSCIENCE and specially targets geoscientists. Your claim that geoscience articles published in SCIENCE, NATURE and NATURE GEOSCIENCE don't attract the target audience of geoscientists is silly, given the success of these journals and the high citation rates and impact factor of geoscience papers published in these journals. Now it is possible that you and/or your fellow corporate minions laboring away in the lower echelons of the oil biz didn't spend much time reading Science and Nature, but in the actual geoscience scientific community these journals are the top, just as they are for other scientific disciplines..


Nature now publishes a journal called NATURE GEOSCIENCE to reach their target audience of GEOSCIENTISTS

Cheers!

[rockdoc123]

Far from not publishing important papers in the Geosciences there is now so much interest in geosciences at SCIENCE and NATURE that a few years ago Nature started a companion journal called NATURE GEOSCIENCE which publishes ONLY GEOSCIENCE and specially targets geoscientists. Your claim that geoscience articles published in SCIENCE, NATURE and NATURE GEOSCIENCE don't attract the target audience of geoscientists is silly, given the success of these journals and the high citation rates and impact factor of geoscience papers published in these journals. Now it is possible that you and/or your fellow corporate minions laboring away in the lower echelons of the oil biz didn't spend much time reading Science and Nature, but in the actual geoscience scientific community these journals are the top, just as they are for other scientific disciplines..

You are an idiot. Nature Geoscience does not specially target geoscientists...if it does they have failed because very few publish there. It is a thinly disguised climate change publication, which is fine but it certainly is not somewhere where anyone serious about publishing articles on sedimentology, stratigraphy, whole earth geophysics, plate tectonics, structural geology etc would publish. At least not someone who hadn't already tried to publish said research in the more appropriate journals.
Lets look at an example from the June issue of Nature Geoscience

the Editorial is titled:

Limits to protection
Marine protected areas can support ecosystem resilience in the face of environmental stress, but only up to a point.

In the comments section:

Beyond carbon budgets
The remaining carbon budget consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C allows 20 more years of current emissions according to one study, but is already exhausted according to another. Both are defensible. We need to move on from a unique carbon budget, and face the nuances.

Politically informed advice for climate action
Upward estimates for carbon budgets are unlikely to lead to action-focused climate policy. Climate researchers need to understand processes and incentives in policymaking and politics to communicate effectively.

In News and Views

The rise and fall of the Great Barrier Reef

Tree height matters

Rainfall and climate feedbacks

In Review Articles

Global energetics and local physics as drivers of past, present and future monsoons
The creation of an energetic framework for monsoon systems is needed to fully understand past and future variations in tropical rainfall, according to a literature review.

In Articles

Tall Amazonian forests are less sensitive to precipitation variability

Continental-scale decrease in net primary productivity in streams due to climate warming

Global lake evaporation accelerated by changes in surface energy allocation in a warmer climate

Global diffusive fluxes of methane in marine sediments

Carbon budgets and the 1.5 °C target

And I was talking from the perspective of the folks I know in academia (which is still a fair number). If you are working in the area of Sedimentology you do not look to publish in Science or Nature, you publish in Journal of Sedimentology or Journal of Petrology or if it is more general GSA Bulletin or Journal of Geology. The reason is that is where your peers publish, that is where your peers look to read science in their particular field. If you are working in the area of Structural Geology you publish in the Journal of Structual Geology or the Journal of Tectonophysics, not Science or Nature. The target audience isn't Joe Blow on the street the target audience is your colleagues. If you look at the current issue of Science there is not a single paper dealing with the geosciences, on the contrary the Journal of Geophysical Research (which has been around for over a hundred years in one form or another) now has 7 separate journals, all which deal with specialized subjects related to earth sciences but one which is dedicated to earth geological sciences and is nothing but publications on that subject. When I look back at the geos I have known and some of them very famous even today, none published in Science or Nature even though some like Ray Price, J. Tuzo Wilson, Gerry Middleton were extensively published and won numerous awards for their work. They just did not see that either Science or Nature would get their message out to the right crowd.

fellow corporate minions laboring away in the lower echelons of the oil biz didn't spend much time reading Science and Nature, but in the actual geoscience scientific community these journals are the top, just as they are for other scientific disciplines..

As I said you have not a clue what you are talking about. The individuals I mentioned were not "corporate minions working in the oil biz" but lecturers at the university or employed by Federal research centres. If Science is so popular with Geoscientists then why are their no publications in there on this topic in the latest issue? Perhaps you can show us some ground breaking research by famous geoscientists that has appeared in Science or Nature. I can certainly point to hundreds of such documents in the other journals.

[Plantagenet]

Nature Geoscience does not specially target geoscientists..

Right-O. Other then naming the Journal "Nature Geoscience" and appointing a Geoscientist as the editor and dedicating it to publishing Geoscience papers written by Geoscientists for Geoscientists, there is hardly anything that indicates it is for Geoscientists.


Cheers!

[Cog]

If you are a geologist of a particular flavor you are publishing in the speciality journals that rockdoc123 referred to. They are also the source information you follow to keep up on current theory and advances.

[rockdoc123]

Right-O. Other then naming the Journal "Nature Geoscience" and appointing a Geoscientist as the editor and dedicating it to publishing Geoscience papers written by Geoscientists for Geoscientists, there is hardly anything that indicates it is for Geoscientists.

You could call it anything you want.....geoscientists in most fields aren't interested in publishing in either journal for a number of reasons I've already outlined. But don't believe me, there are groups that collect this information.

SCIMAGOJR is a group that makes statistical information on all of the scientific journals out there available. They rate journals with respect to various topics based on the number of documents published with respect to that subject matter, the total number of documents, references and number of times cited. Having a very brief look at the available geoscience categories:

under the term Geology the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking
under the term Geophysics the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking
under the term Economic Geology (meaning Mining Geology) the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking
under the term Organic Chemistry (in this case includes Organic Geochem) the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking
under the term Paleontology the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking
under the term Stratigraphy the journals Science and Nature (or any of the Nature sub-journals) are not ranked anywhere in the top 100 ranking

that pretty much covers it to my mind.

https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.p ... l_size=254

and appointing a Geoscientist as the editor

well that is a strange claim:

Chief Editor: Heike Langenberg
Heike heads the editorial team of Nature Geoscience. She has been a Senior Editor at Nature handling manuscripts in the broad area of the climate sciences since 1999. A graduate in mathematics of the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, she ventured into oceanography for her PhD at the University of Hamburg. Her postdoctoral research at various research institutes in Hamburg was focused on numerical simulations of the ocean and atmosphere at a regional scale

as I said .....focus is on climate change, not geologic processes.

[Plantagenet]

If you are a geologist of a particular flavor you are publishing in the speciality journals that rockdoc123 referred to. They are also the source information you follow to keep up on current theory and advances.

Not really. If a Geoscientist of any particular flavor makes a truly important new discovery, they are better served to get it published in a top tier journal like SCIENCE or NATURE or NATURE GEOSCIENCE. Of course, its very hard to get a paper accepted---the acceptance rate currently is about 6%, i.e. 94 papers get turned down for every 6 that get published, so only the very best and most important papers ever get into SCIENCE and NATURE.

Because of the severe competition to get published in SCIENCE and NATURE, these top tier journals can pick and choose the very very best scientific papers to publish, and inevitably many of the excellent papers they publish wind up being more important then papers that appear in the second tier journals, which are left with the less important papers. And the prestige of these top tier journals isn't just based on reputation---quantitative studies comparing different journals show that SCIENCE and NATURE have the highest numerical score in terms of Journal Impact Factor. That means that hard data shows that papers in these top journals get read by more people and are cited by more people when they write their own scientific papers. AND that means the papers good enough to get into SCIENCE and NATURE tend to be highly influential within the sciences and tend to be much more important then papers published in the second tier journals.

For example, Nature had an impact factor of 41.456 in 2014, while most second tier journals have much much much lower impact factors. The Journal of Geology, which xxx mentioned in his diatribe above, has an impact factor of 2.014----only about 5% of the impact factor of Nature. That means in comparison to NATURE very few people read the Journal of Geology and the papers in the Journal of Geology are only rarely cited by other scientists, i.e. they aren't terribly important when compared to the papers coming out in Nature and Science. If you write a paper and publish it in the Journal of Geology and almost no one reads it or cites it in their own scientific work then it isn't very important----how hard is that to understand?

Impact_factor

Another advantage to publishing in SCIENCE and NATURE is that scientists in other countries are much more likely to read SCIENCE and NATURE then they are to read the second tier journals. I've seen this in my own scientific career and in the careers of other scientists in the University world. Its better to do important scientific work that gets published in important journals then it is to piddle away at unimportant things that can only get published in second tier journals. How hard is that to understand?

I'm not saying the second tier journals aren't useful or important --- only that its pretty easy to get papers published in them so they publish a lot of lower quality work. Occasionally important papers paper do come out in the second tier journals, but usually they publish papers that weren't good enough to even be considered for publication in a top tier journal like SCIENCE or NATURE or NATURE GEOSCIENCE ---- its the job of the second tier journals to publish the routine specialty papers that don't make big breakthroughs for the few people interested in those topics.

This is why I don't like the idea of "free open source" publishing. IMHO the current system works just fine for publishing research in the GEOSCIENCEs and other Disciplines. Just about everything gets published, with the groundbreaking research going into the top tier journals, the more routine and specialty papers into the second tier journals, and if its really terrible it still comes out as what is called "grey" literature, i.e. unreviewed reports and personal web sites and lab data dumps.

The current system works, and If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Cheers!

[Plantagenet]

.....geoscientists in most fields aren't interested in publishing in (Science and Nature) ...

Thats a good thing because most geoscientists---- and indeed most scientists of all kinds--- work on mundane and often dull projects that would never be considered for publication in the top tier journals anyway.

Cheers!