Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Why we must support CC-BY (e.g. RCUK policy). It’s good for us and good for the world « petermr's blog

"There is a not-very-healthy series of attacks on the RCUK’s policy of insisting on funded articles carrying CC-BY licences wherever possible. They emanate mainly from non-scientists and, unfortunately, it seems necessary for me to counter this. I will simplify the criticisms of RCUK policy to: [1] It is forcing scientists to publish elsewhere than their journal of choice. [2] It is a waste of money ('Green is cheaper'). These are perhaps oversimplifications but the whole situation is extremely messy (the publishers help to create lots of FUD, academics are arrogant, and libraries have not taken a coherent position). Any more complex argument is based on irreconcilable starting points. I concentrate on (2). I don’t believe (1) represents the RCUK’s position. And personally I am not in favour of journals. I think megajournals such as PLoS, or ArXiV (as overlaid by the mathematicians) are completely satisfactory for scientific *peer-review and communication*. The only remaining value of journals today is to add a perceived “value” to a scientist’s work. And most of the wasted expense of publication is because academics cannot be bothered to review other scientists – they rely on journal rankings, decided by an archaic metric and unaccountable commercial companies. To (2)..."