
All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020 - whazor
http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european-scientific-articles-to-be-freely-accessible-by-2020
======
WhoBeI
I think this is a really good move.  About bloody time to.  I shouldn't have to
pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be
paying a private company for it. 

EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly
funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available.  This
means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget
are public funds it's basically going to be paid for by the EU in most cases. 

The "when and if" means that you can choose not to publish or you can choose
to publish after you have sought protection (patent).  You can also, as a
publisher, have a wait period before research papers become "open access" to,
I don't know, be an asshole I guess. 

Reference (pdf):
[http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...](http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-
oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf)

Edit: The little pdf warning. 

~~~
tunnuz
Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for
the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more
significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating
state of research literature nowadays. 

On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication
cap (3 papers) for researchers.  Less burnout, less "superstar" researchers
that "contribute" to 20+ papers a year (except for the fact that they have an
army of Ph.D. students slaving off for them). 

~~~
a_bonobo
As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and
the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications
and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen. 

We'd need a different way to judge someone's scientific output which is
definitely hard - do we start to check Twitter or blogs for scientific
outreach?  Do we judge scientific "novelty" (of which maybe only the author
herself/himself is the expert in, so only s/he can properly evaluate)?  Do we
start to evaluate preprints (biology doesn't do this much)?  Many open
questions, and not much is happening in terms of change. 

(Edit: This is, by the way, one of the reasons why there is so much more
Arabidopsis than Wheat research - Arabidopsis is easier to manipulate and
grows faster, so you can get more publications out for the same amount of
work)

~~~
wongarsu
>As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers
and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your
publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this
won't happen. 

Having seen this evaluation process from the inside, it would still work if
everyone was limited to ~3 papers per year.  In my experience sheer quantity
doesn't land you a job, because quantity usually is a detriment to quality. 
More important factors are the prestige of the journals you published in,
whether those journals are relevant to the position, how consistent your
publishing record is (is there a five year break?,  have you even stopped
publishing?).  In CS "best paper" awards from conferences also have significant
weight. 

Add to that that fewer papers make it easier to asses their quality, and being
limited to three high-quality papers a year isn't a detriment to hiring. 

------
intrasight
What does this mean in practice?  Will the EU force the publishers to make them
freely accessible?  Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open
journals?  Europe indirectly funds a lot of research.  This will bleed into the
workflow of scientists worldwide. 

~~~
maerF0x0
I bet, in practice, this will mean some researchers will avoid public funds as
it will come with overhead they do not want (publishing rules).  But for most
this will be a big win. 

~~~
merijnv
Ahahahahaha. 

First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never
enough money. 

Second of all: Most researchers _HATE_ academic publishers and being forced to
sign over their copyright to a paywall in exchange for nothing.  But
institutional evaluation criteria force you to do so. 

EU banning non-open publications will force publishers to allow open access OR
force universities to revise their criteria to accommodate the inability to
publish publicly funded work in non-open journals. 

I think all of my colleagues think this is a great thing.  As do I. Elsevier
can go blow a goat with their copyright assignment BS. 

~~~
igravious
> Elsevier can blow a goat

I'm into the history of logic at the moment.  As in not the filtered oh-so-neat
version that is presented at third-level but the nitty-gritty twists and turns
from Ancient Greece (go team Aristotle!),  Indian, Arabic, Scholastic,
Medieval, Pre-modern, the rise of symbolic/algebraic logic,
Kant/Hegel/Trendelenburg, on to Frege and then the multiplication of logics
(modal/tense/deontic, …) in the 20th century ending with type theory. 

Recently Elsevier contracted top logicians to produce a Handbook in the
History of Logic.  It runs to 11 volumes, each volume north of $300.  So folks,
if you want to get acquainted with the complete history of what is supposed to
be a formalisation of rational thought it can be yours for $3,300 or
thereabouts.  There is no reason this should not be in the public domain, it's
too fundamental and central to history of ideas.  I could buy two cheap second-
hand cars for that price. ( Personally I have used SciHub to have a look and I
don't mind saying so.) 

Now I would like to think that top logicians are not complicit in this scam,
but I fear they are.  I have a burning desire to crowd-source a website that
provides the same information.  >95% of the papers/texts are out of copyright. 
These academics already have very lucrative salaries and grants.  I don't think
we can point the finger exclusively at the Elseviers of this world, they have
had a little bit of help along the way.  Here in HN we have a bit of an open-
access echo chamber.  Some academics are very happy with the status quo, and
who wouldn't be with those prices?  I think it's _insane_. 

I'll post names and links of the details if people are interested. 

~~~
gherkin0
> Recently Elsevier contracted top logicians to produce a Handbook in the
> History of Logic.  It runs to 11 volumes, each volume north of $300.  So
> folks, if you want to get acquainted with the complete history of what is
> supposed to be a formalisation of rational thought it can be yours for
> $3,300 or thereabouts. 

Unless you're leaving out important details, that strikes me as a completely
reasonable and uncontroversial thing for Elsevier to do.  If they're going
privately fund the creation of an original specialist work, I think they can
charge whatever they want for it.  That's worlds away from how they they've
subverted the primary scientific publishing process for private profit. 

------
brodo
Under the Horizon 2020 programme, open access publishing (green or gold) is
already mandatory today for all EU/EC funded projects.  Grant proposals must
incorporate open access fees in order to be accepted.  It's not much money for
most project consortiums as the EU tends to fund big projects with budgets of
~10 million € and more as the norm (there are smaller ones, but ~2 million is
really as small as it gets as far as I know).  So a couple of 10K€ won't make
that much of a difference.  If it would become mandatory for all publicly
research in the EU, the problem would be quite different.  There are really
small grants (50K€ and smaller) and if you have 2 publications out of that
grant, you now pay 10-20% of your grant money for publishing fees. 

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Gold open access needs to die, and "open access fees" with it. 

Seriously, there is no STEM field I know of where you can't find good journals
that allow posting of preprints. 

Green open access solves all the problems at zero additional cost. 

~~~
tmalsburg2
Gold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access
publishing.  I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the
best approach.  The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge
for that.  Very simple. 

~~~
semi-extrinsic
The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane.  Publishers
currently have ridiculous profit margins, and of course they're going to try
and maintain them. 

Unless some US/EU regulations kick in and set a reasonable max limit to open
access fees, the situation is just as bad (perhaps even worse) than the status
quo:

Now, researchers from "poor" universities, small research institutuons, third
world countries etc.  don't get full access to the published literatute.  But at
least they can publish freely.  If gold open access becomes the standard, they
won't afford publishing anymore. 

~~~
tmalsburg2
> The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane. 

I'm confident that the market will take care of this.  If there are people who
can't or don't want to pay $3000 for an article and the profit margins are
huge, there is room for journals who offer a better deal. 

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I don't think so.  The problem is that the market is completely dominated by a
few big publishers, and that it's a really hard market to disrupt because
everything is about prestige. 

~~~
tmalsburg2
The market has already started to change with new players like PlosOne and
Peer-J successfully competing with the more traditional publishers. 

------
alaskanloops
This is one of those things thats just so common sense, its hard to imagine a
solid argument against it. 

Hopefully it will encourage the US to follow, although I'm sure publishers
will dig their feet in and make up some bullsh*t reason why it would be a bad
move. 

~~~
mrweasel
>This is one of those things thats just so common sense

It really is, the public paid for the research, it rightfully belongs to the
public. 

~~~
edwinksl
Except it hasn't been like that for decades. 

~~~
alaskanloops
What happened?  Where/why/how did it change? 

------
dandelion_lover
I wish the same happened with the software written using public funding. 

------
Fomite
"From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded
research must be freely available."  is not "All European scientific articles". 

I've got at least three papers that wouldn't fall under that heading. 

~~~
kriro
It's a matter of perspective.  I'd argue most European research falls under
this.  If you work at a public university and are paid for it and do research
during that time and publish it that should be covered.  It would be pretty
lame if only stuff that was explicitly funded in a research project would be
covered. 

~~~
Fomite
Research done on unfunded projects as part of a hard money position is _super-
tricky_ , which is why for a lot of things the restriction is funded research
projects. 

For example, if your position is at a public university, but funded by an
endowment from a private foundation, is it covered? 

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
If your position is at a public university, you probably work at a publicly-
funded building, using publicly-funded electricity and heating, and publicly-
funded office material.  So I'd say it should be covered. 

~~~
Fomite
The building I work in was built using money from two foundations.  The
electricity and heating, as well as office material, theoretically comes from
grant indirects - which at the moment for me come entirely from private
industry. 

~~~
Scarblac
In Europe?  I always thought that that sort of thing was common in the US, but
it's surprising that it happens to that extent in Europe. 

------
kriro
Seems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to
the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law.  Either way I hope
it also extends to the member states level eventually.  The circus of avoiding
conflict between EU funding and member state funding is often quite amusing so
this will be interesting. 

It feels almost ethically self evident that any research funded by citizens in
any way should be made available to said citizens (and that's more or less
100% of research in Europe).  Lets step in that direction. 

~~~
ikeboy
What would the law say, and how would it prevent publishers from demanding
money to publish now that their other sources of income have been cut off? 

~~~
lrem
But they are already cashing in for publishing anything, with additional small
charges like few hundred bucks for going over the page limit and big charges
like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible. 

~~~
ikeboy
" big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly
accessible." 

Yes, if you don't want them let them make money off your work, they won't
subsidize publication and you'll need to pay.  No law can change basic
economics. 

~~~
lrem
Yet somehow there are so many platforms that will happily subsidise open
publication without even taking the initial thousand bucks for letting me in,
like Medium, Wordpress, Blogger...

Seriously, the only reason why academic publishers can charge anything is
their established position, where they are a proxy for gauging researcher's
output by administration.  Peer reviews are done by volunteers, discovery is
provided by Google Scholar and everybody uses PDF anyways (usually printing it
out, still orders of magnitude faster than fetching from a library). 

~~~
ikeboy
Those have nowhere near the costs of academic publishers, which are usually in
the thousands per paper.  There's a reason papers aren't published on medium. 

------
return0
> must be freely accessible to everyone

When?  Open access after 12 months has different cost than immediate open
access, and, at the pace of today's research, is not open access at all.  And
ERC funded research already requires open access publishing anyway. 

Why not demand publishing to open access/nonprofit journals instead?  Why does
EU have to pay elsevier $2000-5000 per article? 

This does not seem significant to me. 

------
a_imho
>unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so

backdoored by default.  Any reason why it is 2020 not sooner or later? 

------
norswap
To contextualize the discussion on "open access" (the practice of editors that
ask for a sum of money in order to make the paper available).  It costs a lot:
about 1k for ACM venues.  Currently I have to pay for this out of my own
budget, and I don't have that kind of money (I'm a PhD student, and in
addition to my scholarship (1.8k€/month net of tax, in Belgium), I get a 5k€
budget for two years that must cover material and travel -- I can also get
about one additional travel grant per year). 

Publisher have about zero added value except fixing the odd latex issue. 
Actual editorial work is assumed free of charge by professors.  Other venues
such as Arxiv and CiteSeerX do a better job of distribution for free.  Science
publishers are leeches in the system and should be removed. 

I think the EU a measure will precipitate the current movement against such
predatorial publishing practice.  Already, publishers are walking on eggs.  They
move against sci-hub but they'd never dare to go against the common practice
to just host everything one publishes publicly, license notwithstanding,
something almost everyone does in the CS field -- maybe they say it's a
"draft"... (meaning there isn't a copyright notice mostly). 

------
sndean
I'm not as familiar with European journals, but if this happened in the US
(more or less forced open access) it'd possibly mean that every time we want
to publish it would cost researchers ~$3000. 

Hopefully this (and similar) legislation comes along with a statement
regarding who's supposed to cover that cost.  Because some of us avoid that
price tag by publishing in non-open access journals. 

~~~
takluyver
I haven't read the specifics of this, but typically these kind of mandates
come from funding bodies to cover the work they fund.  So they're expecting
that publication fees will be a budget item in grant applications. 

------
alex_hirner
To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong
councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain.  The
current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian. 

~~~
tmalsburg2
Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're
supposed to use when we make research data public?  Sounds like a recipe for
disaster.  I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open
science at this stage.  Over time, each research field will identify an optimal
approach for their purposes and that approach will win.  I just hope that the
winner is not going to be GitHub which is becoming more and more popular at
least in my field.  GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what
happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...?  GitHub is just not
made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run
for profit.  Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten
which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record. 

~~~
witty_username
> GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they
> shut down or change their pricing or ...? 

Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be
easy to migrate your repository. 

~~~
tmalsburg2
Many people leave academia after a post-doc or two, most actually.  These
people will not have any incentive to manage their research data for the rest
of their lives and the data will eventually be lost, unless GitHub continues
to exist in its current form for the next half century, with is rather
unlikely.  For this reason we need dedicated research repositories that are
managed by publicly funded non-profits.  Zenodo.org is one example but I'm not
sure if they have long-term funding. 

~~~
witty_username
The whole idea of git is that it is decentralized.  So, even if GitHub
instantaneously shut downs and erases all data (unlikely, they'd probably give
a few months for people to move their repos), people's copies of the repo can
be uploaded to servers. 

------
flexie
Only articles based on EU funded research or also articles based on research
funded by member states? 

------
Aelinsaar
Good.  With whatever limitations, this is still good.  It's not enough, but this
is going to be a long LONG fight. 

~~~
xiphias
It at least partly legitimizes sci-hub in EU

~~~
takluyver
Not in any legal sense - it applies to new, publicly funded research from
2020, not existing papers.  Whether it legitimises Sci-hub in popular awareness
is debatable. 

------
lomnakkus
If this actually pans out, it could be incredible.  It always saddens me to get
a link to a scientific paper and to hit my head on the paywall. 

There's of course the "(partially) publicly funded" qualifier, but I don't
remember too much privately funded research in the journals that _I_ read as a
CS undergrad, so hopefully it won't matter too much. ( I guess other areas such
as Chemistry, Biology might be more prone to falling under this qualifier?!?) 

~~~
cyphar
What's even more frustrating is when you're a student at a university and you
_still_ can't get access to a paper because your library doesn't have a
subscription to that specific journal.  arXiv was the best thing to happen to
physics papers, and SciHub is doing the same (but less legal). 

------
dadkins
Interestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public
domain.  Journals have no problem publishing those.  I think one direction this
could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put
their work in the public domain. 

Journals don't need copyright to function.  There's still value in editing,
peer review, and distribution.  They're just being greedy by insisting on it. 

------
hackuser
Aren't they already required to publish on Sci-hub? 

------
mablae
And Aaron Schwartz is dead.  RIP

~~~
ralucag
I was just about to say that, he would have been proud. 

------
iangpmulvany
Slightly related, I just took part in a workshop of experts who are tasked
with advising the commissioner on policy decisions for making open science
happen in the EU, I've written up my notes:
[https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a](https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a)

------
graffitici
Does anyone have any insights regarding the "foreign startup visas".  Does that
legislation have a name I can use to track progress? 

It's quite annoying to have to apply for week-long business visas every time I
have to travel to Europe.  Especially in the summer, when it takes 2 months
just to get an appointment with the consulate..

------
jwildeboer
Next step: As they have an exception for "IP" (intellectual property rights
like patents) we must promote the logical consequence.  All publicly funded
research must mean all "IP" must be made available to anyone for free. 

~~~
WhoBeI
Nope.  You can seek protection (patent) before publishing your results.  See
page 3 in the linked pdf.  The paragraph begins with "misconceptions about open
access.." in bold. :) 

[http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...](http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-
oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf)

------
88e282102ae2e5b
Has it been stated anywhere that they won't allow a temporary embargo after
publishing?  Like how some funding agencies allow papers to be behind a paywall
for 12 months and only then require that it be open access? 

------
ShaneBonich
Once again Europe shows the way

~~~
Fomite
The NIH mandate for open access after six months has been around for _years_. 

------
desireco42
Why wait if you know it is inevitable? ( as would say Richard Bandler)

------
known
Too little; Too late;

------
partycoder
I can see the evil people behind the TTIP getting in the way of this.  Before
this goes into effect, the US will execute order 66 and take all the articles
down. 

~~~
T-A
Would the US be doing this to protect the profits of Reed-Elsevier (based in
London), Springer (Berlin) or the Nature Publishing Group (London)? 

~~~
partycoder
Or they can start pulling arguments from TTIP provisions and get away with
blocking parts of the initiative.  Now it's good this comes from the
Netherlands (Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands). 

~~~
T-A
(Elsevier is funny.  Technically it's a subsidiary of the RELX group, aka Reed
Elsevier, which is headquartered in London.) 

------
daveheq
But wait, scientific articles are hoaxes made for tax money, so now the lies
are freely available to anybody!!!  We need to cut more taxes on billionaires
and publicly fund more oil projects so we can get these inconvenient science
articles out of our way.  Where's my next iPhone?! 

------
ivan_gammel
Some public funding of copyrighted art work purchases would be also useful, if
that's the only viable alternative to decreasing copyright age to some
reasonable 20-30 years. 

------
MrBra
My thoughts are for those that are not with us anymore that helped make this
slowly happen... I say thank you, but if I could choose I'd rather have them
back and get to this results a bit later. 

It's nothing new that in this field sometimes people have a tendency to put
their ideals of progress before their own life. 

No matter how strong is your love for your world changing ideas, YOU as a
person come first. 

Unless (but you could also argue about that) without your sacrifice the whole
world population would be at immediate risk of extinction..

------
iangpmulvany
Of related interest, I"m just back from a workshop on Open Science from a
group that advises the commissioner.  I was an invited expert in to the
workshop.  This is part of the route through which announcements like the one
linked here get made.  I've written up my noted
[https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a](https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a)

------
maerF0x0
If trump wanted to help win over the science crowd, he could make this an
issue.  Seems more likely to come from Bernie though. 

~~~
fredoliveira
I struggle to see how or why a candidate who's proven to not necessarily have
a stance on _any_ issues would want to do something like this to appeal "to
the science crowd". 

In fact, that's exactly the crowd I'd consider the hardest to win by a
candidate such as Trump.  You know, critical thinking being a thing and all. 

~~~
maerF0x0
Fair enough, I should have known that putting the words "Trump" in the first
100 words ofa post would be auto downvotes.  I meant it to say that this is one
way that candidates, particularly those who have most estranged the scientific
communities, could shore up or make amends. 

~~~
scrollaway
I don't think your downvotes have much to do with trump - more with the post
being irrelevant to the conversation.