How this happens right now with NIH funding is yes, the government basically forces publishers to make things freely accessible - the paper is going in a public repository. Journals that publish lots of NIH funded stuff handle this for the author, while journals that don't tend to make it the author's problem.

And yes, if an author doesn't comply, it can be a problem for future funding.

>> Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals?

> How this happens right now with NIH funding is yes, the government basically forces publishers to make things freely accessible - the paper is going in a public repository.

I think you're either mistaken, or you didn't understand the difference between the two original questions. The NIH doesn't force the journals to do anything. The NIH makes it a requirement for researchers they fund to make all publications open access (after some time period), effectively prohibiting the authors from publishing in closed-access journals

And closed access journals have subsequently made accommodations to avoid death.

For biomedical research supported by the US NIH they require it to be posted to PubMed central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) within 6 months of publication. Since so many biomedical papers have at least some NIH funding the journals all went along with it.

I just went through this discussion in an EU funded project, and the consensus was that complying is up to the individual partners. In our case all academic partners decided to comply by posting preprints on their websites (contentwise identical to the accepted version), which is allowed by both ACM and IEEE.

I really dislike this approach. Finding the free version is harder and the links are much less likely to be permanent. I've found a huge amount of data, code and extra material is simply missing now. In 20 years are you confident someone will maintain the same url and content?

Can you afford the open access option with the journals you want to submit to?

I don't know, but speculating on what seems most reasonable, I wouldn't assume that publishers will have any burdens forced upon them apart from losing exclusive control. I'd guess that it means publishers simply don't get exclusive copyrights.

Who has the burden of publishing the free access could be the researchers themselves, or the universities, or the government, I think there are a lot of options besides the current private for-profit publishers.

I also wouldn't assume that much will change in practice immediately -- while the research and data might be available for free, some publishers do currently provide some value above and beyond access. Curation, editing, indexing, quality control, prestige, print versions, conferences, etc. - all things that free access doesn't necessarily come with.

I can't speak for the EU, but since my work last year was NIH-funded, we made it freely available via arXiv (http://arxiv.org/). This seems to be common practice.

I am curious: doesn't this negatively affect your evaluation score with your university? How do you deal with this?

The work was done in a professional capacity, so I can't answer your question. Both academia and industry are fraught with pretense, so I wouldn't be surprised if what you ask is true. I can only recommend that you do your best work; if it stands on its own, no amount of pretense will overshadow its value.

Other option: publisher grants a single right to author or author's institution (but no one else) to make a copy available.

with google scholar that's good enough, no? It already matches to pdfs on academic sites.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Definitely interested.

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

What if though, they actually get their money from private funding, like a ton of research projects do. You cast this of as a thing even weird to even consider, but this just implies you don't seem to have found yourself in academia ever (or if so, without any actual colleagues).

I certainly agree that no researcher would prefer a non-open journal vs an open journal, but if the former means a stand-still of their career and the latter means an advancement, then the latter is far more valuable for them.

>What if though, they actually get their money from private funding, like a ton of research projects do.

You'd be surprised how few those are. Even in the biggest private/public companies there are tons of research and tech subsidies, tax-cut deals and other schemes involved which end up in tons of government (our) cash. Those pay for lots of things, including part of their R&D.

I have never, in my entire life, avoided funding that would also make my work more accessible to a broader audience. I don't know any other academics who would do so either.

Responses like yours aren't an unrepresentative sample of academics - the ones who read HN and might have more interest in openness of information? A serious question.

Honestly, I'm not a particularly passionate advocate of open access publications, and am actively skeptical of open data requirements.

But if said open access occurs by mandate, and doesn't cost my lab money...why not?

Thanks for responding. Why be "actively skeptical of open data requirements"? From the outside, they seem to have very little downside and occasionally valuable benefits. As always, I suspect the outsider is blind to some important issues.

A couple reasons, in my case:

1. For the work I do, what "The data" is often somewhat ambiguous, and depending on how you define it, falls anywhere from "That's not mine to give" to "This is useless for what you actually want, but obeying the letter of the law".

2. It makes work with minority communities harder - they have a very, very poor history with "Consent to this, and researchers will do whatever they please with your information without consultation."

3. Sometimes privacy issues come up as well with medical data.

4. I think it gives us a false sense of security. "I re-ran their code with their data and got the same answer" is markedly inferior to "I attempted to replicate their study in a different population", but we often do the first and then pat ourselves on the back about it.

Sometimes you are using data that shouldn't be released e.g. for privacy reasons. See the recent controversy about research including data from a dating site.