The term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
I am a mathematics researcher. I agree with most of what you say, but
> Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money
The only pressure I ever get is from editors (i.e., other mathematicians, who make all the final decisions), if I'm taking too long and they want me to hurry up.
If a representative of the publisher attempted to pressure me for any reason, then my response would be less than polite.
Occasionally I have gotten review requests from "pay to publish" journals which will publish pretty much anything, and which don't have any credibility within the math community. These, I simply delete as spam.
Just occasionally? I get at least 3-4 of those daily! They've become seriously annoying, and confused senior professors around me often fall into the trap.
It's possible for pressure to exist at a higher level. The editor simply stops asking reviews from people who reject papers above some threshold rate. Or at even a higher level, the journal replaces the editor who maintains a too low an acceptance rate.
These pressures are harder to notice, without population level data.
I reject the invitations too, but the fact is that they exist, there are (many) people who do them, the papers are published, they come up in searches, and the whole thing becomes a muddy mess.
Most people say “we’ll just don’t read/cite them” but the fact is that there is no clear red line; it’s all foggy. In order to look at a paper and say “I will not read you because you are crap” you need to spend some time with it, and if you have 2000 of them, that translates to a lot of wasted time. The reason why journals are supposed to do serious peer review was exactly so that we don’t have to do it ourselves.
Japan's initiative is focused on "green open access" which is different from pay-to-publish. I recommend the section titled "Green OA" in the submitted article. Relevant quote:
"Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on 'green OA' — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi.
Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities."
I think it applies to most STEM fields. I'm a reviewer for several journals in a STEM field (not AI/ML specifically, but some manuscripts do try to apply AI/ML to this field) and the vast majority of authors seem to upload their preprints to arxiv etc.
Social sciences may be behind though as you say, I do not know as I'm not in that field.
As someone with graduate degrees in both STEM (math) and social science (psychology) fields, it's true that social science is way behind STEM in terms of preprints to digital archives. It's possible there's momentum here in the last 5 or so years that I'm unaware of though.
That matters for a few reasons:
(1) the average person more frequently encounters psychological, social and medical issues more than they do math problems. And since the research in those fields tends to be pay walled, people are at the mercy of things like SEO spam medical and health sites.
(2) wrong ideas in medicine or psychology can (and have in the past) damaged entire generations of people. So in that sense their blast radius can be very large. This means that peer review is especially important and that there's a potential negative externality to posting preprints and drafts before they're finalized. I suspect we'd have to solve the peer review and quality problem before STEM-style preprint archives become the norms in all fields.
For Bioengineering it definetly is, but a lot of Medicine is still locked behind high impact Wiley and Sage publications, and for a lot of that research it's fairly easy to pay the $3-4k to make the article open access.
The truth is that OA is a childish illusion that got “absorbed” by the adults in the room who tapped the kids on their back and said “no worries, we’ll take it from here”. Then they turned traditional publishing, which was already an elaborate expensive ruse, into OA which is an even more expensive (but less elaborate) ruse. Now everyone is happy, except someone trying to do actual research and having to read 1000 meaningless papers a day.
Green OA is just as meaningless as—-or worse than—-Gold OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it. The vast majority of people will find the paywalled version before yours, and anyway there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF. Especially when performing systematic literature reviews where you need to document the sources of your references.
The current implementation of OA (any of them) is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy: we convinced ourselves that “publishers are evil” and impossible to get rid of, and now we are paying them so that they don’t have to do their job. We basically retired publishers early with an extra pension, all because everyone “wants to believe” in open access. But guess what? This is not disruptive. OA is just as “capitalist evil” as the usual publishing, or even more so. Do you want to be disruptive? The disrupt. Get rid of the publishers. Or at least constrain funding only to not-for-profits for example.
> You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it
There's no APC with Green OA, so what money are you talking about? Green OA is regular publishing, but with self archiving. There will be a version freely available, and the publishers aren't paid for that privilege.
If you want a route to the death of publishers, green OA is a promising one.
(I think the headline ought to emphasise that this is pushing green OA, which is the interesting bit)
Ah, I somewhat see the confusion. Green OA doesn't require the publisher to publish other versions for free, it just means you are allowed to publish them. Typically you'd publish them via an institutional repository, preprint server (often discipline specific), or in one of a number of free online services.
"there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF"
I think this is backwards. The definitive version that should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the paywalled version.
McGill and you got it backwards. Open Access has a quite clear definition.[0] Publishers have co-opeded the term and dopne everything to confuse the issue. All the so-called open access colours are mainly publisher made, to water down the true OA definition.
Sure, but none of that matters if the big publishers are the ones gobbling up the money anyway. For some reason it’s better to pay them a ridiculous amount of money to host PDFs than it is to pay for subscriptions? What’s the difference? Most university libraries have always had access to all the important journals and anyone can go there and do their research. The whole idea that subscription is evil and OA is good is ludicrous. We’re paying the same amount of money (or more) only to get a much, much shittier service, and a torrent of absolute meaningless “research” that only serves to drown out the good ones.
PS: And by the way, if you say that “not every country has access to these libraries” then think about whether they have money to pay for APCs.
> Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money
Prestigious journals have very low (single-digit percentage) acceptance rates.
One or two rungs down, the standard domain-specific journals are still rigorous, and you need to do substantial work to get published in them. It's a hurdle that any decent graduate student with a good advisor can pass, but it's not as if you can just write anything and get published.
There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.
> I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.
Doing a literature review is not that difficult. You begin with a few highly cited papers. Then you look at what papers they reference in the intro. You also look at the list of papers that cite them and sort by the number of citations. You can work in both directions and pretty quickly establish what the important papers in the field are.
Notice that the important thing here is to look at citations. Getting a paper into a journal is only the first, most basic step. Peer review is only an initial quality check. Over time, other scientists decide what papers are important and cite them. If a paper racks up 100 citations, that means a lot more than just passing peer review.
> There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.
Yes, but the point is not that the good journals are not there, it’s that the good ones are drowned out by the absolute humongous amount of garbage that comes out every day. If you do research you know that it’s not so simple like “oh I only read papers from journals X and Y”. Good research comes out everywhere, and if you don’t cite it people (I mean reviewers, if you can call them that) will complain, and anyway you’ll be putting yourself in a bubble which is bad practice. It used to be that journals would do the work for you to separate good from bad research, but nowadays it’s on the researcher to dig through 1000 papers to find a single good one. It’s ridiculous and meaningless. If we’re paying them and making them rich, at least I’d expect them to do their job.
In CS, it's widely accepted that you can publish your "drafts" publicly. Basically just the real deal without the notices of publication (I guess maybe legally you have to leave some differences in? I never bothered, and I doubt the publishers who everyone kinda hates would dare creating this kind of controversy).
As others have pointed out, some countries mandate national or institutional repositories.
A good grassroots way out of this is educating researchers to always take one of these options. Let publishers overplay their hand and get crushed.
Of course, it would be nicer if regulators realized how ridiculous this all is and crushed them without the need for public outcry, but one may dream.
When I published with an Elsevier journal they explained the "draft" thing pretty clearly. They said you retain copyright on whatever you write yourself. But once you have reviewer feedback and incorporate feedback from the journal editor(s) then it's no longer entirely your work and you couldn't distribute it at your own will. You could pay the journal a huge amount of money (in effect for the work done by the editors), and then the paper would be open access. The fees might not be reasonable (it's kind of hard to judge) but the overall logic made sense to me
So the first draft before review - the one you wrote all on your own - is what you can put up online. I'm not in CS but I assume the logic is similar in other fields.
They also provided a separate link of the final published PDF that you could use to distribute the paper to colleagues and interested parties. This link worked for a sufficiently long period of X amount of days/months. After that it was paywalled and in their garden
It would be nice to make a simple website that will list those repositories in easily discoverable way per country. Something akin to "Awesome Research" list.
I don't get it. Ditching publishers to fund expert communities? Shouldn't there be some form of organisation that connects those experts, selects some as journal editors, provides infrastructure for submission/review/paper access, etc? If yes, wouldn't "publisher" be suitable term for such an organisation?
There exist publishers that, instead of being part of big media outlets, a run by research organizations themselves (e.g. EMBO press). I agree that it would be nice if more would be published there.
I mean in the same way communities organize conferences regularly without becoming publishers. Anyway if you want to call them publishers fine, as long as they are not giant behemoths who feed on large amounts of public money to do nothing.
At least when publishing was an actual market (instead of being just a money sink) the publishers had to actually do their job to survive.
I struggle with this question. The editor plays a valuable role and it's not hard to swallow the argument that editors make science better, they're the front line filter. Employing them full time is a core value that the current system provides. I'm wary (but not close minded) to the idea that volunteer orgs could scale to the top echelons of scientific publication, which require a lot of filtering. Perhaps if we look to the conference paper model where funding primarily comes from the conference? The conference brings benefits beyond publishing. In that model publishing equates to financial discount or free entrance to the conference, so it flips the equation.
I work in CS and we do (mostly) conference publishing.
I could be wrong, but I don't think PC chairs are paid, by anybody. Maybe they get free housing at the conference, but this is more of a consolation prize given the amount of work involved.
Certainly the rank and file PC members don't get anything. I was on one PC mailing list where one of the organizers accidentally let slip that (some) organizers get free housing, and there was a big uproar in the PC. None of us get anything like that.
So this is literally a system where the expert reviewers get nothing, and even the chairs in charge do it nearly for free. What part of this needs to cost money?
The peer review comes from the community. The exclusivity and filter comes from the community. Even the funding comes from the community, because community members pay to go to the conference.
What the publisher does is, as GP noted, mainly to host PDFs on a website and make sure they stay up. That costs something, but nothing like what the licensing fees for these services are (or the so-called "open access" fees that we now pay).
> OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website
This is a choice that European countries are making that has nothing to do with open access. You can always choose to overpay well-connected insider contractors to accomplish any of the functions of government.
Gold OA is trash, don't confuse it with true OA modes:
1. Green OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author waives copyright
2. Diamond OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author KEEPS copyright
3. Black OA: free for readers, pirated by hackers; DISREGARDS copyright
See my other note where I argue that BOA is the most important one, since it does not depend on state funding or publisher largesse. It simply seizes the knowledge that must be seized.
No, you can invent this idea that open access is a boogeyman, but it’s flat out corporate lies. This is free speech. I’m allowed to say I think a statement is untrustworthy.
Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting).
I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences. It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data. And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.
it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.
We've had this system for years now and it feels like it barely made a blip.
>Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities.
One should note that this isn't too expensive because of associated costs: it's that the for-profit publishers keep ratcheting up the cost. Nature-group journals now take more than ten grand in OA fees per paper, which is not justified by any associated cost. They're typesetting a PDF and hosting it for ten grand a PDF.
This means that journals can't prevent you from uploading a preprint though. A few publishers do this [1]. Even if the upload isn't enforced it means the restriction can't be either.
But it's odd that the paper must be in the institute's repository and not one of a larger list of preprint servers. I would assume the authors would much rather put a paper on arXiv than on their shoddy university repository.
Having submitted to biorxiv before many times: oh yeah!!! the ease of submission there is second to none. For-profit publishers' submission process is an overcomplicated pile in comparison.
> Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting).
It’s more or less the same in the UK and France as well.
> I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences.
IIRC in the UK it does not count in the national performance assessment it if is not in an open repository.
> It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data.
Yeah. Data is a big problem. There are many different types that cannot be handled just like a pdf (tons of files in the same dataset, huge archives and everything in between). It’s a huge lot of storage space, the vast majority of which will never be even accessed, never mind used. I’ve been part of several initiatives and it is not easy to set up.
> And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.
That’s a damn shame. The British government is doing a lot of things right with their open access policy, but a thing that works quite well in France is that there is a single national repository ( https://hal.science : it voild be better indexed but it does show up on Google Scholar) and everyone uses it. This is the sort of things that makes sense at the national level. A myriad of small repositories on obscure university websites is not very helpful. That way it also does not depend on the (possible lack of) willingness of individual institutions to fund it and do it properly.
> it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.
If we’re really serious about open access, only articles in a public repository should count. All the legal issues there used to be were cleared up, the infrastructure is there (things like arxiv can be used as a last resort for governments or institutions that won’t get their ducks in a row). The issue is really lack of good will.
Theoretically, something like a national OPDS feed would be perfect for this: OPDS is a publication distribution feed protocol that allows to include other sub-feeds, making for a distributed tree structure. A country could publish a collection of individual university feeds, which in turn linked to the papers of their researchers.
> it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.
The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement.
My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.
I recall a paper that sought to explore how willing authors were to release data when they had published open access and stated 'data available on request'. Iirc it was below 50% that responded with data. See related here; https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/
Last year, my employer, the University of Tokyo, became the first Japanese university to sign the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [1]. Like open access, that initiative is a positive move toward a better research environment, and it would be great if more institutions committed to it.
By signing DORA, the university leadership has stated support for a principle about how hiring and promotion decisions should be made. But it may take a few years before that principle is fully absorbed by the faculty committees who actually evaluate candidates.
Playing the Devil's advocate for a sec, I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in perpetuity? And to answer my own question, I think we should demand that scientific papers are made available for free by publicly-funded scientific libraries.
So many problems with the existing process but questions could include
-is anyone going to take down bad quality or fake research
-is there a way to update published papers (like link rot in references )
-will the repositories be SEO optimized so people will find them
Can someone explain to me like I'm five, what this "publishing" actually means now in an age where any researcher can upload a PDF containing their research onto the internet for free?
Papers should be immutable, blogs bit rot, and anonymous peer review is important.
The million dollar question is why don't researchers publish on journals that don't charge outrageous open-access fees. Here the main problemis that carreer advancement is predicated on publishing in prestigious venues. Such venues take advantage of that by jacking their price. Fixing this will require cooperation from governments, which have leverage on both sides of the equation: they can help fund alternative paper repositories, and they are ultimately responsible for the rating criteria of what venues are prestigious and how research grants get awarded.
Internet Noodles of Babel! Let's have every corporation do this too! We can solve every problem that matters by working together like this, the rest is just corpo-gaming.
Absolutely! I think the concept of proprietary knowledge for profit was actually a huge mistake, and that humanity can advance much faster and more effectively through open collaboration. This applies to patents too (and arguably copyright).
There is no advancement without profit. Advances are a product of market competition. When no company can profit from investing in R&D, there will be no R&D.
Amazing that your comment consisted of three sentences, each of which is incorrect. I could say more, but the simplest refutation of what you are saying is that open source exists. It is advancement without profit, it is advances without market competition, and it is an investment people make without expecting profitable returns.
It’s not that those things aren’t important in a functional economy, but that your absolute thinking cannot explain open source, and thus your theory is incomplete to explain human activity.
It depends how long you’re willing to wait for those advances in open source.
For a fair comparison of “advancement” in open source you have to discuss free open source applications where a commercial version of a similar app exists.
Photoshop vs Gimp, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Microsoft office vs libre etc etc. objectively speaking the commercial version is going to be better across the board.
Open source variants are getting closer these days like Blender and Godot but you’re on a different scale of waiting for those advances to catch up vs the commercial for profit versions.
Some life saving pharmaceuticals, automobiles tech, general consumer communications and entertainment tech, all come from capitalists trying to be the first to market to profit. The sheer amount of technological leaps our generation alone has seen was all pretty much for profit. You wouldn’t observe the same rate if it was all purely driven by governments.
Exactly, but government is doing its best to boost R&D, what matters more is private funding for R&D. Big companies like Reliance, TATA and Adani should setup research labs in universities and colleges.
This would be amazing to see in the US. Unfortunately I feel like lobbying is too powerful with the death grip publishers have. If you were to do a popular vote, it would be nearly unanimous I expect.
If you read the article it mentions that US implemented an OA mandate in 2022.
> The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
[1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of...