Europe announces that all scientific papers should be free by 2020

[Forgettable]

This sounds amazing, truly. Knowledge should be freely accessible to anyone who seeks it out.

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I know Europeans always want free stuff.. but whats the incentive to publish them in the first place then?

The betterment of humanity? The joy of discovery? The feeling that you make a difference in the world?

[Aggrophobic]

This is great!

[Allybeboba]

Which country in the EU?

[Slant]

And this is actually very shortsighted remark.

If scientific papers become more available they may contribute to new inventions and discoveries which in the end may produce something useful to ordinary people.

This is the point. This change wouldn't mean scientific papers are "more available". It means they're "freely available". In reality, this means that they are for free, but nobody will tell you about them and they get buried deep in some university's webpage without a chance of normal people ever being aware of them.

People underestimate the value of publishers big time in this thread.

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The betterment of humanity? The joy of discovery? The feeling that you make a difference in the world?

You're mistaking the real world with Star Trek.

[Deleted]

In my current situation this would be really useful since I'm building up my graduate level research proposal while not being associated with an institute that would grant me free access to quite a few scientific papers that I would like to read.

Would be even better if this was global instead of just EU but that will not happen anytime soon unfortunately...

[PC2]

why should publicly funded research papers be freely available to private enterprise?

That's the whole point. Public research helps the private sector make better products/services who then pay taxes which feeds back into public research.

[WskyDK]

As a concept, this is amazing.
In reality, it's going to be a cluster to get working and maintain current levels of research.

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Undoubtedly! What a good move, EU, there's nothing more frustrating that spending hours searching for the study or paper you're interested in only to get the abstract and then a gigantic pay wall.

Honestly, when I finish my undergrad in December, I'm going to sign up for random community college classes just to have access to their digital libraries (things like EBSCO host and such).

[PC2]

Tax avoidance is rife in private enterprise, best charge at source for publicly funded research papers.

Okay but individual Europeans still pay taxes, so you could make an argument that they should get it for free since it is their tax money paying for the research. Also individuals working for a corporation would still have rights, which means they cant be denied access based on employment.

[Garnier Fructis]

This seems like a largely symbolic gesture.

Because let's be real here, millions of people will now have access to a wealth of information they don't understand and don't care enough to read.

[Deletedaccount1]

And this is actually very shortsighted remark.

If scientific papers become more available they may contribute to new inventions and discoveries which in the end may produce something useful to ordinary people.

Yeah but scientists usually get papers for free anyway through the institution they work for. At least in the US.

[Dendrek]

It goes to continue the good that they are - Hell the online repositories need money too you know that ?

How much do they need to get paid? Hundreds per article? Thousands per subscription? They should get paid, but what they are currently getting paid is likely nothing more than a premium for being a well-known and highly rated journal. But those subscriptions literally block public access to the content. Science is way too important to be only available to the elite who can afford it.

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This seems like a largely symbolic gesture.

Because let's be real here, millions of people will now have access to a wealth of information they don't understand and don't care enough to read.

Most people not understanding it (or caring) doesn't mean it shouldn't be available though. I realize that's not what you're saying. But symbolic or not, this kind of information is too important to not be freely accessible. (Anti-science IS freely available and floods the internet and our everyday lives; when all we have access to is the stupid shit that science deniers spout, it's only inevitable that more people will become science deniers.)

[Garnier Fructis]

Most people not understanding it (or caring) doesn't mean it shouldn't be available though. I realize that's not what you're saying. But symbolic or not, this kind of information is too important to not be freely accessible. (Anti-science IS freely available and floods the internet and our everyday lives; when all we have access to is the stupid shit that science deniers spout, it's only inevitable that more people will become science deniers.)

To play devil's advocate, people who don't understand what they're reading are more than likely to come away with misinterpretations that reduce their understanding, and the anti-science types will now have an near endless supply of material to misinterpret (out of malice or simple ignorance) and spread their misinterpretations thereof.

Denier misinformation is free and readily available. But so is a lot of legitimate information at pretty much all levels up to graduate study. People don't need research level material to up their understanding of a particular science. What they do need is already available and free. People are simply too hasty, they want to know the high level stuff without a good understanding of the basics, and that's why we already have an endless stream of people who have utterly failed to understand relativity but think they've disproved every physicist of the last century.

[Deleted]

Good guy EU. Meanwhile Donald Trump would have The US to keep all their scientific research to themselves to be competitive in the world... I really don't get how anyone could support this guy.

[Authary]

Yeah but scientists usually get papers for free anyway through the institution they work for. At least in the US.

It's not free for the institution and sometimes they pay only for major repositories, meaning you sometimes have unavailable papers. The cost isn't negligible and that money could be better spent elsewhere. In France, for example, public research is very poorly funded.

That, and I dislike having people making money with MY work.

[Deleted]

Interesting I guess but useless for the vast majority of people.

Their loss. If the vast majority of people don't care about scientifically validated ways of doing anything (dieting, working out, being a healthy individual, managing change in organisations, pricing your product, etc etc etc etc), then joke is on them for being at a disadvantage and believing in broscience, hearsay or simply being dead wrong.

[Slant]

Yeah but scientists usually get papers for free anyway through the institution they work for. At least in the US.

Not just the US, this is common for most academic institutions and companies utilising these research papers.

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It's not free for the institution and sometimes they pay only for major repositories, meaning you sometimes have unavailable papers. The cost isn't negligible and that money could be better spent elsewhere. In France, for example, public research is very poorly funded.

That, and I dislike having people making money with MY work.

Um, you're always allowed to publish stuff yourself. Just as an exercise, do the editing, layout and walk into a printer's office and ask him how much it would cost you to print, oh say, 2000 copies. And then sell them.

You'll notice a couple of things first, while you're editing and doing layout, you're not doing research. Then you'll find out that printing a book in half decent quality will cost you about 16 Euros per copy. That's 32k Euros upfront without having a copy sold. You'll then continue to find out that people on the street just won't randomly buy your book, you'll have to make your book known. Trust me, your personal Twitter account won't attract many sellers unless you're named George RR Martin or Rowling. So you'll spend weeks and months trying to list it everywhere you can and if you sell a book at 20 Euros (which is dead cheap for scientific research) an hour, you still only got 4 Euros per hour for your effort. Let's ramp that up and say you somehow manage to sell it for 100 bucks a piece, that's still only 80 Euros and hour. IF you manage to sell a book an hour. Which probably won't happen, since you're doing all the marketing and sale management yourself and as a scientist, you probably suck at these mundane things...

Not to talk about claims. Oh, you'll love those. See, everytime the mail service fucks up and your book is damaged or lost (which happens surprisingly often, trust me), they'll have the audacity to return the book and ask for a replacement. That's 100 bucks out of your profit going to shits. And so on and so forth...

I really think this thread totally underestimates the role publishers have and the reason why they're asking for payment. It's like people think writing the paper is all that's needed, please keep on sending the money in now, thank you very much.

Edit: As a personal anecdote, I once had to acquire a scientific paper directly from the author for a company. Never again. First, nobody had a clue how to reach her. It took the publisher of the (sold out) bachelor piece weeks to contact her, it took her weeks to send us an email. In which, I kid you not, she asked me (the buyer) "What price should I take?" That's the level of experience authors have about these things... I as the buyer had to look up the market prices for bachelor pieces and quote her an average price that seemed fair, because I didn't want to rip her off (being the nice guy that I am), but I could easily have told her "Oh we'll just give you a tenner and you can have a nice lunch with it, how about that?" and she would've taken it. Not the 30 bucks that her piece was actually worth.

Publishers are on the side of the authors, removing them from the equation is a dumb idea. And we're discussing all of this without the publishers actually a) taking notice of this commissions recommendation and starting to b) oppose it. Trust me, this will never pass.

[Authary]

Um, you're always allowed to publish stuff yourself. Just as an exercise, do the editing, layout and walk into a printer's office and ask him how much it would cost you to print, oh say, 2000 copies. And then sell them.

You'll notice a couple of things first, while you're editing and doing layout, you're not doing research. Then you'll find out that printing a book in half decent quality will cost you about 16 Euros per copy. That's 32k Euros upfront without having a copy sold. You'll then continue to find out that people on the street just won't randomly buy your book, you'll have to make your book known. Trust me, your personal Twitter account won't attract many sellers unless you're named George RR Martin or Rowling. So you'll spend weeks and months trying to list it everywhere you can and if you sell a book at 20 Euros (which is dead cheap for scientific research) an hour, you still only got 4 Euros per hour for your effort. Let's ramp that up and say you somehow manage to sell it for 100 bucks a piece, that's still only 80 Euros and hour. IF you manage to sell a book an hour. Which probably won't happen, since you're doing all the marketing and sale management yourself and as a scientist, you probably suck at these mundane things...

Not to talk about claims. Oh, you'll love those. See, everytime the mail service fucks up and your book is damaged or lost (which happens surprisingly often, trust me), they'll have the audacity to return the book and ask for a replacement. That's 100 bucks out of your profit going to shits. And so on and so forth...

I really think this thread totally underestimates the role publishers have and the reason why they're asking for payment. It's like people think writing the paper is all that's needed, please keep on sending the money in now, thank you very much.

I'm perfectly able to comprehend the difficulty of publishing stuff in actual books but the kind of "publishing" the EU and I are talking about is limited to merely putting PDFs online.

Servers cost aside, do you think building a website and putting links to PDFs on it is THAT hard ? I'm the one writing my papers. They are (supposed to be) reviewed by peers for free. The hardest part of the publisher's work is formatting my paper to their arbitrary standards and including their fancy logos. I don't even want that : my work, my style.

I'm a computer scientist, I don't make money with my papers. I don't even think they're printed. I'm literally offering them to publishers so THEY can make money. I agree that paper books should be paid for as a separate service (for libraries and such) but the online part no.

[Slant]

I'm perfectly able to comprehend the difficulty of publishing stuff in actual books but the kind of "publishing" the EU and I are talking about is limited to merely putting PDFs online.

Servers cost aside, do you think building a website and putting links to PDFs on it is THAT hard ? I'm the one writing my papers. They are (supposed to be) reviewed by peers for free. The hardest part of the publisher's work is formatting my paper to their arbitrary standards and including their fancy logos. I don't even want that : my work, my style.

I'm a computer scientist, I don't make money with my papers. I don't even think they're printed. I'm literally offering them to publishers so THEY can make money. I agree that paper books should be paid for as a separate service (for libraries and such) but the online part no.

You have to understand that the current form of online publishing via PDF or other formats is a byproduct of the regular print publishing product. None of the big publishers are using PDF only for their journals. There's a reason for this. For once, libraries, institutes and companies - that is, the main consumer base for this branch - don't even want PDFs. They want a paper version they can bind and put in their archive at the end of the year. We're not in the age of 100% paperless libraries, yet. For now, the industry is scrambling to digitalise old content. This will keep the industry busy for decades to come, considering the vast amount of content that is published every day.

So, no. It's not just servers. It's also the back office, editorial, marketing, IT support, customer service... there's a shitton of people that need to get paid to properly supervise the whole publishing process, with or without printers/sales dpts.

Building a website and putting links to PDFs isn't hard. What's hard is getting everyone to find what they're looking for on that website. Try asking Google how much their search algorythms are worth to them. They'll quote you a number that you could actually, literally, buy Apple Inc. with, I bet you that. So no, it's not that easy. Especially not if you're publishing a paper about the effect of friction reducing substances on the teeth of cogwheels of a certain shape. Yes, those are the papers I'm talking about. Super obscure bullshit that only a dozen car transmission engineer per year may be interested in.

And no, it's not your work, your style. Your work is the scientific part. After that, you're the one that's begging Journals to publish your paper so your peer scientists can review it. Because without that publication, your peers don't know about your paper, don't give a shit about your paper and most likely don't even know you exist.

If you're the type that publishes stuff for free, like the open source community, good on you. I commend that attitude. However, you are probably not making as much money as you could. And if you're working like the open source community, you're scrambling where to get money from most of the time. But heck, perhaps you're the lucky bastard that gets fed money just for being awesome at work and does all kinds of genius sciency stuff in his spare time just for the fun of it. I think you may be. But I'm equally sure that outside the IT community, this open source attitude is very, very, VERY scarce and people won't lift a finger professionally without demanding compensation for it. And engineers especially do not seem to buy into the open source idea at all. And those are the types that write papers that cost three digit sums of money.

[Deleted]

I don't buy it.

It sounds like some rentseekers might lose some money while the masses benefit despite some shockingly patronizing posts claiming otherwise.