Ricerca e riviste: the times they are a changin' - A piccole Dosi - Blog - Repubblica.it

From Google Translate: "A pint-sized revolution in access of biomedical research data is occurring before our eyes. The Economist noticed it and has just published a lengthy article ( http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21719438-about-change-findings-medical-research-are-disseminated-too ) regarding open access and ends with this scathing sentence:

'Having survived for three and a half centuries of scientific papers will no doubt continue to exist for a long time yet. With a little luck will return to being servants of science rather than' directors of the circus. Fierce criticism of the excessive power of some publications, those calls in the following Premier-league, the most prestigious with high impact factor, peer reviewed stringent (Nature, New England Journal of Medicine-or PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Are magazines that can make a fortune and prestige of the researchers but, these criticisms, take too long for the publication of the work (including revisions and corrections to spend months and even a year), do not allow the free exchange of research data, they have high subscription fees.

The big change was announced two years ago by the Gates Foundation: the research that will fund from now on will have to be, since January 2017, now published in the open access platforms for the usability of all data to other researchers. The Foundation will pay the costs provided by the online scientific journals of this type (open access) for publication (between 1000 and 3000 US dollars). But there's more: the dawn of last February 14, 2017 the Foundation announced a $ 100 thousand according to Science and 4 newspapers of the 'group American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, Immunology Science and Science Robotics; AAAS also publishes Science Advances, an open access) newspaper, newspapers which provide an annual subscription fee. The agreement may be renewed in 2018. This refers to a note Science that 'the agreement will cover only a handful of items. The five newspapers published around 2015 only 12 articles by researchers funded by the Gates Foundation. But the deal could stimulate a larger number of publishing requests'. It is the click here: the Gates Foundation, with its economic impact billionaire, can really change all the rules of the system of scientific journals. The web has already done, in part, with open access journals. But not enough. This week, exactly on March 23, another announcement of Gates Foundation: Gates Open Research, the open platform for research funded by Gates, available from autumn next. 'An open access model enabled the immediate publication. And thus open to complaints from anyone, followed by an open invitation to peer review.' Similar but not the same as the model followed in the last 4 years by F1000Research platforms (the stock of scientific articles online but with peer-review created by Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, the other charity which funds the bio-medical research in the world) and Open from the Wellcome Research (always Wellcome Trust). Not only that: there is also the founder of Facebook and his wife with their foundation Zuckerberg and Chan-BioHub that, not even a month ago, has chosen a policy, announcing a grant of $ 50 million to researchers under the condition of immediately publish research with free data access. The key word in all this movement, the one that makes the difference compared to the publication of peer reviewed Espert chosen in the field, is "pre-print", a kind of publishing on the web open to criticism and judgments also anonymous, a mechanism that does not It prevents the publication later in magazines but allows a comparison and a check to 360 degrees on the data and the researcher to still put first the "flag" came out of that discovery or research. At least that was the case for physicists since 1991 with the 'warehouse or store open' who goes by the name of arXiv, supported by Cornell University Library, Simons Foundation and 200 members, mostly university students, who pay a subscription form. The Economist explains it well, but fails to give an answer to the fact that in physics this mechanism is working but for bio-medicine, despite similar attempts, and a far greater number of searches is not working yet. Much larger economic interests and power circles might be, perhaps, an explanation. But, as he sang fine sixties of the last century the Nobel Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A Changin'."