Open access by decree: a success of Plan S?

“Science family of journals announces change to open-access policy”: the title of this Nature news article may sound boring, but the news are not:

Science is allowing authors to distribute their articles under Creative Commons license, free of charge, without embargo.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, of course, there are caveats. First, this is the author’s accepted version, not the published version. (OK, minor point.) Second, this is a trial policy, which may or may not be made permanent. And third, this only applies to authors who are mandated to do so by their Coalition S funders.

Who, you may ask, are these happy authors? I will defer to Wikipedia for reminders about Plan S and Coalition S, and move to the next question: how did Coalition S achieve this? Last summer, Coalition S announced a Rights Retention Strategy that mandates fundees to distribute their work under CC license, without embargo, no matter what the publisher makes them sign. In their own words,

This public licence and/or agreed prior obligations take legal precedence over any later Licence to Publish or Copyright Transfer Agreement that the publisher may ask the author to sign.

This type of “open access by decree” may sound like little more than an exercise in blame-shifting. To an author who is caught between a funder and a journal’s incompatible demands, it should not matter who blacklists the other: the author cannot publish in that journal. However, Plan S got bad press among some researchers for appearing to blacklist journals. Now it is the journals who will have to blacklist funders, and to reject submitted articles for technicalities.

The success of the maneuver depends on publishers’ reactions. Coalition S is too big to ignore, so publishers have to take a stand. Nature journals have recently announced their adoption of Gold open access options, for a charge of the order of 9.500 euros per article. This was denounced as outrageously expensive. Björn Brembs even took it as a refutation of the widespread idea that the author-pays model would lead to lower costs.

However, Coalition S-funded authors can now choose between publishing in Science for free, or in Nature for 9.500 euros. It does seem that Science is competing on price! Not so fast: Nature’s high price is partly an illusion, as it comes in the context of transformative agreements, which are supposed to transition Springer Nature’s journals to open access. The idea is that academic institutions’ journal subscriptions would also cover open access publishing of their researcher’s articles. For an author who is covered by a transformative agreement, publishing open access in Nature is effectively free, which may be why Science had to offer the same for free, just to stay competitive.

At this stage, it is not clear which authors will face which choices of open access options and pricing. It is therefore a bit early for seeing the effects of the Rights Retention Strategy. At least, we now have the admission by an important publisher that open access is not an extra service that should bring them extra revenue.

With open peer review, open is just the beginning

Abstract

Open peer review does not just mean publishing existing reviewer reports, but should also lead to writing reports primarily for the public. We make a specific proposal for structured reviewer reports, based on the three criteria validity, interest and clarity.
This post is partly based on a joint proposal with Anton Akhmerov for improving the structure of reviewer reports at SciPost. Feedback from Jean-Sébastien Caux on that proposal is gratefully acknowledged.

 

Benefits of open peer review: the obvious and the less obvious

In the traditional model of academic peer review, reviewers’ reports on the submitted article are kept confidential, and this is a big source of inefficiency and waste. If the article is published, the readers can neither assess how rigorous the process was, nor benefit directly from the reviewers’ insights. If it is rejected, the work has to start all over again at another journal.

Open peer review, defined here as making the reports public, could help journals remedy the penury of reviewers: if applied to rejected articles, by avoiding duplicating effort, and if coupled with naming reviewers, by giving them better incentives to do the work. However, the consequences of open peer review may be more far-reaching. Published reports can indeed be used for evaluating the article’s interest and quality. In aggregate, they could be used for evaluating journals and researchers. For these purposes, they would certainly be better than citation counts.

Learning scientific writing from great writers

For scientists, writing well (or well enough) is a critical skill, as written texts are essential for communicating research. Of course, not every scientist should be able to write well, as some may rely on collaborators. In a lecture on "Writing physics", David Mermin emphasizes the importance of language and writing through a famous example:

It is also said that even Landau's profound technical papers were actually written by Lifshitz. Many physicists look down on Lifshitz: Landau did the physics, Lifshitz wrote it up. I don't believe that for a minute. If Evgenii Lifshitz really wrote the amazing papers of Landau, he was doing physics of the highest order. Landau was not so much a coauthor, as a natural phenomenon — an important component of the remarkable coherence of the physical world that Lifshitz wrote about so powerfully in the papers of Landau.

Write that printing money creates wealth, get published in Nature

In the debate about the carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies, Nature has recently published a one-page correspondence titled “Cryptocurrency mining is neither wasteful nor uneconomic”. This counter-intuitive claim provoked me to read the text in search of a non-trivial idea. To my shock and horror, the only basis for the claim is the trivial wordplay of using the same term “wealth” for both money and goods and services.

Germany won't pay for Nature's "scientific porn", and other messages from Couperin's open science days

Earlier this week, there was a mini-workshop in Paris called Couperin’s open science days 2018. (Original title in French: Journées sciences ouverte 2018.) I followed most of it via webcast, and I will now summarize some of the salient points. The videos are available online, but most of them are in French.

The German way: Horst Hippler and Ralf Schimmer

 

The most important messages came from Germany: the country whose academic institutions have thought seriously about scientific publishing, and have organized themselves so as to drive the needed reforms. The most salient manifestation so far has been the standoff with Elsevier, and it was nice to have further details on the strategy.