Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict; Science, October 24, 2023

SCIENCE NEWS STAFF, Science; Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict

"Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas...

Eisen has previously been a frequent, feisty participant in debates about scientific publishing, doggedly supporting the development of free access to journal articles. In 2003, he co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS), whose journal PLOS ONE grew to become one of the largest open-access journals. Authors pay a fee so that their articles in PLOS journals are free to read when published. Eisen has criticized the paywalls still in place at many subscription journals as slowing the progress of science and the diffusion of useful findings. But critics of PLOS’s model have suggested author fees create an incentive for journals to maximize the number of papers published at the expense of adequate peer review and quality and can create barriers for authors with limited resources."

Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges; Nature, April 21, 2023

 Katharine Sanderson, Nature; Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges

"More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May. Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs. Andrew Davis, Elsevier’s vice-president of corporate communications, says that NeuroImage’s fee is less than that of the nearest comparable journal in its field, and that the publisher’s APCs are “set in line with our policy [of] providing above average quality for below average price”."

Massive open index of scholarly papers launches; Nature, January 24, 2022

 Dalmeet Singh Chawla , Nature; Massive open index of scholarly papers launches

"An ambitious free index of more than 200 million scientific documents that catalogues publication sources, author information and research topics, has been launched.

The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt, also aims to chart connections between these data points to create a comprehensive, interlinked database of the global research system, say its founders. The database, which launched on 3 January, is a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a free alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science that was discontinued at the end of 2021."

A Little-Known Statute Compels Medical Research Transparency. Compliance Is Pretty Shabby.; On The Media, April 21, 2021

On The Media; A Little-Known Statute Compels Medical Research Transparency. Compliance Is Pretty Shabby.

"Evidence-based medicine requires just that: evidence. Access to the collective pool of knowledge produced by clinical trials is what allows researchers to safely and effectively design future studies. It's what allows doctors to make the most informed decisions for their patients.

Since 2007, researchers have been required by law to publish the findings of any clinical trial with human subjects within a year of the trial's conclusion. Over a decade later, even the country's most well-renown research institutions sport poor reporting records. This week, Bob spoke with Charles Piller, an investigative journalist at Science Magazine who's been documenting this dismal state of affairs since 2015. He recently published an op-ed in the New York Times urging President Biden to make good on his 2016 "promise" to start withholding funds to force compliance."

Open Access, Open Source, and the Battle to Defeat COVID-19; JD Supra, April 22, 2020

PerkinsCoie, JD Supra; Open Access, Open Source, and the Battle to Defeat COVID-19

"No legal development over the past decades has had a greater impact on the free flow of information and technology than the rise of the open access and open source movements. We recently looked at how AI, machine learning, blockchain, 3D printing, and other disruptive technologies are being employed in response to the coronavirus pandemic; we now turn to how two disruptive legal innovations, open access and open source, are being used to fight COVID-19. Although the pandemic is far from over, there are already promising signs that open access and open source solutions are allowing large groups of scientists, healthcare professionals, software developers, and innovators across many countries to mobilize quickly and effectively to combat and, hopefully, mitigate the impact of the coronavirus."

Past coronavirus: an open-access future for academics; The Bowdoin Orient, April 3, 2020

Radu Stochita, The Bowdoin Orient; Past coronavirus: an open-access future for academics

"What Aaron Swartz left us is the courage to try and break the wall that exists between the public and the profit-driven industry of academic publishing. In his eyes, information was meant to be free and accessible. Progress was meant for the common good, in the benefit of everyone, not only for a selected few."

A Revolution in Science Publishing, or Business as Usual?; UNDARK, March 30, 2020

Michael Schulson, UNDARK; A Revolution in Science Publishing, or Business as Usual?

"Some advocates see corporate open-access as a pragmatic way of opening up research to the masses. But others see the new model as a corruption of the original vision — one that will continue to funnel billions of dollars into big publishing companies, marginalize scientists in lower income countries, and fail to fix deeper, systemic problems in scientific publishing.

As it stands, all trends point to an open-access future. The question now is what kind of open-access model it will be — and what that future may mean for the way new science gets evaluated, published, and shared. “We don’t know why we should accept that open access is a market,” said Dominique Babini, the open-access adviser to the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and a prominent critic of commercial open-access models. “If knowledge is a human right, why can’t we manage it as a commons, in collaborative ways managed by the academic community, not by for-profit initiatives?”"

Rumored executive order would change landscape of UC subscription partnerships; The Daily Californian, January 30, 2020

Alexandra Casey, The Daily Californian; Rumored executive order would change landscape of UC subscription partnerships

"Prominent Nobel laureate and chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs Rich Roberts has no online access to a paper he co-authored because his institution lacks a subscription to academic journal Nature Microbiology.

Roberts is one of 21 American Nobel laureates who submitted an open letter to President Donald Trump on Monday urging him to approve a rumored plan to make federally funded research free of cost and immediately accessible after publication. UC Berkeley’s Randy Schekman, who founded eLife — an open access scientific journal — led the Nobel laureates in their letter...

“This would effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free,” according to the letter from the publishers. “This risks reducing exports and negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration has negotiated with our trading partners.”

The letter added that the cost shift could place an “additional burden” on taxpayers and undermine both the marketplace and American innovation."

What if "Sesame Street" Were Open Access?; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), October 25, 2019

Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); What if "Sesame Street" Were Open Access?

"The news of iconic children’s television show “Sesame Street”’s new arrangement with the HBO MAX streaming service has sent ripples around the Internet. Starting this year, episodes of “Sesame Street” will debut on HBO and on the HBO MAX service, with new episodes being made available to PBS “at some point.” Parents Television Council’s Tim Winter recently told New York Times that “HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families” who can no longer afford to watch new “Sesame Street” episodes.

The move is particularly galling because the show is partially paid for with public funding. Let's imagine an alternative: what if “Sesame Street” were open access? What if the show’s funding had come with a requirement that it be made available to the public?"

Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right.; Forbes, April 1, 2019

Steven Salzberg, Forbes; Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right.

"What Haug doesn't mention here is that there is one reason (and only one, I would argue) that NEJM makes all of its articles freely available after some time has passed: the NIH requires it. This dates back to 2009, when Congress passed a law, after intense pressure from citizens who were demanding access to the research results that they'd paid for, requiring all NIH-funded results to be deposited in a free, public repository (now called PubMed Central) within 12 months of publication.

Scientific publishers fought furiously against this policy. I know, because I was there, and I talked to many people involved in the fight at the time. The open-access advocates (mostly patient groups) wanted articles to be made freely available immediately, and they worked out a compromise where the journals could have 6 months of exclusivity. At the last minute, the NIH Director at the time, Elias Zerhouni, extended this to 12 months, for reasons that remain shrouded in secrecy, but thankfully, the public (and science) won the main battle. For NEJM to turn around now and boast that they are releasing articles after an embargo period, without mentioning this requirement, is hypocritical, to say the least. Believe me, if the NIH requirement disappeared (and publishers are still lobbying to get rid of it!), NEJM would happily go back to keeping all access restricted to subscribers.

The battle is far from over. Open access advocates still want to see research released immediately, not after a 6-month or 12-month embargo, and that's precisely what the European Plan S will do."

The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism Editorial; March 4, 2019

The Guardian; The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism  

Editorial

"In California the state university system has been paying $11m (£8.3m) a year for access to Elsevier journals, but it has just announced that it won’t be renewing these subscriptions. In Britain and Europe the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.

Yet, somehow, the new system has not yet worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to $5,000, and apparently the work gets more expensive the more that publishers do it. A report last year from Professor Adam Tickell pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” has been steadily rising at a rate above inflation ever since the UK’s open access policy was adopted in 2012. In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power."
 

UC open access fight exposes publishing rip-off: Charging exorbitant fees for journal articles isn’t in the best interests of scientific research, Mercury News, March 6, 2019

MERCURY NEWS & EAST BAY TIMES EDITORIAL BOARDS; Editorial: UC open access fight exposes publishing rip-off

Charging exorbitant fees for journal articles isn’t in the best interests of scientific research

"The scholarly research publishing industry is a rip-off that hinders scientific advances and piles unnecessary costs onto taxpayers who already fund much of the academic work.

It’s ridiculous that, in this age of the internet, researchers are paying huge fees for access to academic papers and for publication of their own work. That made sense in the days when scholarly works were printed in bound volumes. Today, academic work, especially public- and foundation-funded research, should be open for all. It shouldn’t cost $35 to $40 for each article, effectively freezing out those without the means to pay...

The University of California’s mission statement reads: “The distinctive mission of the university is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.”

UC’s commitment to open access helps fulfill that goal and advances scientific enterprise for the benefit of all."

University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access; Science, February 28, 2019

Alex Fox, Jeffrey Brainard, Science; University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access

"The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, headquartered in Amsterdam. Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.

The stand by UC, which followed 8 months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open-access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10% of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first U.S. institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at U.S. universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers."

Do You Have Concerns about Plan S? Then You Must be an Irresponsible, Privileged, Conspiratorial Hypocrite; The Scholarly Kitchen, November 26, 2018

Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen; Do You Have Concerns about Plan S? Then You Must be an Irresponsible, Privileged, Conspiratorial Hypocrite

"Ultimately, though, what is most concerning about Plan S is not the behavior of those hell-bent on defending it by any means necessary. That’s just par for the course. More important is the way in which researchers themselves — the people whose work and whose freedom to choose will be directly affected by its implementation — seem to have been excluded from the process of formulating it. This shouldn’t be surprising, I guess, given the disdain in which authors and researchers are apparently held by Plan S’s creators. After all, as Science Europe’s Robert-Jan Smits puts it: “Why do we need Plan S? Because researchers are irresponsible.”

There you have it. The freedom to choose how to publish isn’t for everyone; it’s only for those who are “responsible” — which is to say, those who agree with Plan S."

Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free; The Guardian, September 13, 2018

George Monbiot, The Guardian; Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free

"Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry."

Open Access at the Movies; Inside Higher Ed, September 10, 2018

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed; Open Access at the Movies

"[Jason] Schmitt's film raises some important questions -- how is it possible that big for-profit publishers, such as Elsevier, have fatter profit margins than some of the biggest corporations in the world? Why can't everyone read all publicly funded research for free?

Discussion of these questions in the film is undoubtedly one-sided. Of around 70 people featured in the film, just a handful work for for-profit publishers like Springer-Nature or the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- and they don't get much screen time. There is also no representative from Elsevier, despite the publisher being the focus of much criticism in the film. This was not for lack of trying, said Schmitt. “I offered Elsevier a five-minute section of the film that they could have full creative control over,” he said. “They turned me down.”

Schmitt said he made Paywall not for academics and scholars but for the general public. He wants people to understand how scholarly publishing works, and why they should care that they can’t access research paid for with their tax dollars."

[Documentary] Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, 2018

[Documentary] Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

"Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.  

Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access.   

If you are interested in screening this film at your university, please fill out our contact form."

California Bill Is a Win for Access to Scientific Research; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), August 30, 2018

Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); California Bill Is a Win for Access to Scientific Research

"In Passing A.B. 2192, California Leads the Country in Open Access

The California legislature just scored a huge win in the fight for open access to scientific research.

Now it’s up to Governor Jerry Brown to sign it. Under A.B. 2192—which passed both houses unanimously—all peer-reviewed, scientific research funded by the state of California would be made available to the public no later than one year after publication. There’s a similar law on the books in California right now, but it only applies to research funded by the Department of Public Health, and it’s set to expire in 2020. A.B. 2192 would extend it indefinitely and expand it to cover research funded by any state agency...

Finally, it’s time for Congress to pass a federal open access bill. Despite having strong support in both parties, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR, S. 1701, H.R. 3427) has been stuck in Congressional gridlock for five years. Take a moment to celebrate the passage of A.B. 2192 by writing your members of Congress and urging them to pass FASTR."

Who Gets to Read the Research We Pay For?; Slate, August 21, 2018

Aaron Mak, Slate; Who Gets to Read the Research We Pay For?: Scientific journals’ lock on new studies has ignited tension for years. When it comes to access for people with rare diseases, it becomes an ethical issue too.

"This does not sit well with academics and other members of the research community, who often publicly complain about the company’s profit margins, its allegedly restrictive copyrights, and the fact that much of the research it sells access to is taxpayer-funded. This public outrage seems to have gotten under the skin of William Gunn, Elsevier’s director of scholarly communications. When one user argued that people in rare-disease families “shouldn’t have to jump through additional hoops to access information,” Gunn responded, “Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y’all keep wishing for that, I’ll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.”

This is just one reckless tweet in the heat of a Twitter spat (though it’s worth bearing Gunn’s job title in mind), and, sure, he later apologized. But the issue of rare-disease families trying to avoid the high fees associated with accessing research on potential treatments goes beyond this Twitter spat: It’s a real problem that has not been adequately fixed by the company."

Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal ; Guardian, May 29, 2018

Neil Lawrence, Guardian;

Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal  

"Many in our research community see the Nature brand as a poor proxy for academic quality. We resist the intrusion of for-profit publishing into our field. As a result, at the time of writing, more than 3,000 researchers, including many leading names in the field from both industry and academia, have signed a statement refusing to submit, review or edit for this new journal. We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine-learning research. We believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine-learning community would be a retrograde step."