Impact of Open Data Movement on Data Management and Publishing — Labguru Blog

" ... Momentum has picked up in recent years. Today, all seven of Britain’s research councils require that the results of work they fund are open-access in some way. By 2016 all public money given to universities in Britain will have the same open-access requirement. On the other side of the pond, in 2013 the White House required that federal agencies spending more than $100M a year on research must publish results where they can be read for free. While proponents of the movement argue that open access benefits science, there have been some unintended consequences. In many open-access models, the cost of publishing shifted to the generator of the research - a burden on the already meager funds allocated to researchers. Others argue that it negatively affects the quality of published research by incentivizing publishers to push through more articles in order to generate higher revenues (as opposed to the current scenario where quality drives subscriptions and thus rejecting a submission does not hurt the bottom line). Nature published an informative article on the pros and cons of the open data movement and concluded that any successful emerging model must be economically sound ..."