Commentary: Open access matters for researchers

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-01-27

Summary:

"Should you, as a scientist, care about federally mandated free public access to journal articles and data? You should if you value the work of your scientific society. You should if you care about the sustainability and integrity of scholarly communication. Open access entered a new phase in the summer of 2014 with the release by the US Department of Energy of its public access plan in July and the opening of its PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) portal system in August (see Physics Today, October 2014, page 29). DOE is the first of 20 agencies that will issue new mandates pursuant to a 22 February 2013 memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy regarding increased public access to the results of federally funded scientific research. For work done and written up under DOE grants received on or after 1 October 2014, PAGES will include each paper’s metadata—title, authors, journal issue—and abstract and will link to a full-text PDF. That PDF will either be on the publisher’s website or on PAGES or at a grantee’s institution. The full text of the papers must be freely available 12 months from publication date. To a reader, free access to journal articles after 12 months sounds great. But as an author, you will have no say about anyone’s access to your paper, even if it is only partially based on grant data, or is one for which you already submitted the required grant report to the funding agency, or is a paper written on the author’s own time. And authors will have to make sure that the journal they want to publish with can and will support the DOE policy. Arguments that government-financed research be made available at no charge within a year are overly simplistic. Clearly, publishing a journal is not free. It requires hardware, software, management of the peer-review process, editorial work, maintenance of the database over decades, and printing the product. The real question is, Who pays? ‣ Authors, either personally or through their institution or the grants in question. ‣ Users, whether libraries, companies, or individuals. ‣ A third party, such as government (that is, taxpayers) or donors. If costs are not addressed, the continued existence of the system of scholarly communication on which science depends is at risk ..."

Link:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/68/1/10.1063/PT.3.2634

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.funders oa.mandates oa.green oa.gold oa.usa oa.doe oa.economics_of oa.universities oa.colleges oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.repositories oa.hei oa.policies oa.journals

Date tagged:

01/27/2015, 11:05

Date published:

01/27/2015, 06:05