Sunday, January 06, 2019
Simple, but could be even simpler
Tenure and publish-or-perish have led to a hugely profitable business in academic journals. Even after real publishing moved from paper to the web, the journal publishers are still making lots of money, and it's hard for students to access articles.
Recent discussion and "debate" was mostly pointless, but amazingly one plan that MAKES SENSE has emerged.
This new initiative, dubbed Plan S, mandates that starting in 2020, academics receiving grants from participating agencies—which include funders in the UK, France, and the Netherlands—must make all scientific articles open access immediately upon publication. The coalition also outlines 10 key principles, such as commitments from funders to help cover publication fees, provide incentives to establish quality open-access journals and publishing platforms, and a promise to sanction those who do not comply with the new rules.Simple. Since publishing is the PURPOSE and ENDPOINT of research, grants must include enough money to cover all costs of publishing UP FRONT so the readers don't have to pay. Could be even simpler and cheaper if you factor out the journals and the publishers like Springer and Elsevier. Just slap the result onto the web, on a website maintained by the university or the company where the research was centered. Since every university big enough to run research already has a website for press releases about new research, this wouldn't require a new office. Just more servers and bandwidth. Without the journals, the entire counterproductive structure of peer-review disappears. Everyone can evaluate the results independently. Also, a conflict of real vs legal copyright disappears. Under the current setup, govt sponsored research is officially public domain; but the Springer paywall imposes a practical copyright on it. You have to pay $40 to see an article that your taxes already paid for. If the university publishes the output directly, paid by the granting agencies, the official and practical are identical. Corporate-sponsored research is not public domain, but corporate research rarely gets published anyway. It's for internal use, protected against competitors by NDAs or patents. ¶ 6:58 AM
