China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls

The animes got those themes from the real world. Pretty cool to see how the learning pattern can go full circle!

> EU aligning with China

Hmm...isn't this the other way around, China aligning with "European funders"? (EU is coordinating, individual organisations within countries are actually doing).

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. 1984 had it right

Is there any evidence that this is connected to other political issues?

I mean, the open-access movement is widely hailed as an important progressive step in improving the academic world, regardless of nationality. Hopefully it's just a matter of time before the US's own agencies join in similar demands, assuming that there isn't already such a plan.

I can imagine an anime plot where China/EU go back on their plan. But if they truly end up instituting this plan I'm not seeing any plausible plot line.

Are there really anime stories where a Barbara Streisand character roars at telepathic sourcerers who just stay silent and motionless for the rest of the episode?

I wonder if EU is also going to align with China w.r.t. the Social Credit Score. Want to to business with us? Just make sure every European uses WeChat so we can read everything they say online.

Why wouldn't China support it for other countries? THey'd benefit from the knowledge but would not pay for it. Meanwhile, I can imagine that they'd follow a more restrictive policy that would limit the viewing of Chinese research publications to Chines scientists. Edit: The latter statement is speculative, relative, and probably topic-dependent.

> on issues like this in the context of US-China war of words.

well, it does reduce the chinese cost of acquiring foreign IP, and so the decision seems pretty internally consistent

China is always in favor of making it easier to steal IP. I hope I live long enough to see them complaining that other nations don't respect their inventions.

Pretty similar to 1984 where Orwell split the world up into Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania

I've thought about this for years, and the fundamental problem I keep running up against is that you'd need to reinvent academic culture and incentives to have any hope of replacing the publication system with something better.

In my understanding, the most valuable service academic journals provide is peer review. If reviewers start accepting online submissions, people could simply send them links to their online articles hosted on their site or blog. Content would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA. If it passes peer review, the journal would simply link to it and also provide a PDF copy. Journals would become a directory of peer reviewed works.

It's an interesting question. At the start, it would be somewhat chaotic, also depending on how you define "existing publishers". Currently, many funders/universities determine who to give grants/tenure/etc by looking at the journals researchers have published in. They will still be able to do that for a while.

However, for academics, it wouldn't be entirely clear what to do. For example, if you choose to only disband paywalled journals, they will likely simple submit their works to open access journals, and over time some of those will emerge as the new "good ones".

Which is an interesting parallel, because that is sort of what Plan S tries to do. Except that it doesn't really have the power to "break up" paywalled journals, but only to deny them the ability to publish work they fund. As more and more funders join (like these Chinese funders appear likely to do), the closer this will get to "breaking up".

If you were able to disband all journals, but not preprint servers, then researchers would probably start publishing their work there, new servers would emerge for disciplines that don't have one yet, and some new system of determining "excellent" work will probably emerge. (Disclaimer: I'm working on one such system.)

If also preprint servers were disbanded... I don't know - nobody would be able to publish any more? Would you allow new publishers to be created?

I think we already have the answer in the field of computer science: ACM. I.e., a non-profit professional organization that runs conferences with peer-reviewed content (and some journals and magazines). A cheap membership (<$100) gives you access to all the content, which could even be free (money comes from conferences and donations).

Fundamentally what is needed is a process that produces peer-reviewed, immutable, discrete pieces of globally published work. Self-published blogs don't really achieve that well.

It's interesting to imagine the same thought experiment applied to other industries.

What if we did away with all car companies? How about all TV media companies? What if all physicians were no longer physicians tomorrow?

This is pretty much what the arXiv is, isn't it?

The fact that it is illegal makes it a problem to use for many people I know, especially in government. That in the TLD changes like every week.

> Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY.

https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Pla...

1) There already exist many platforms where one can freely view peer reviewed papers. The main problem is that only a small section of researchers submit their work there.

2) This, I think, is the crux. We should move away from using journal names as a proxy for quality (which, luckily, is an explicit goal of Plan S), and find an alternative. Altmetrics is an example of a company that attempts to establish one such alternative, I'm part of a project that attempts another.

3) This would be nice, but I don't think that's be necessary for making them open access? Given how conservative much of academia appears to be, I'm not sure if this would actually make a transition more likely.

4) Metadata for research is often already really good, also for Open Access research. Finding the actual article itself usually is the main challenge, but the only reason for that is because those articles can be behind a paywall. With them freely available, discovery is practically solved.

5) This too should be fixed if all research is published under an open license such as CC-By, which would allow everybody to mirror articles. (Like this project does: https://oalibrary.org/)

No, it doesn't. Making previously published work available would still be an open problem - although of course, the pressure to fix that is lower as long as Sci-Hub exists.

(Also, often subscriptions by university libraries to include the provision that they maintain access to already-published work, so together with inter-library loan, it's not that much of a problem.)

For Open Access articles, Unpaywall [1] (or at least its API) usually can find a direct link to the PDF (or HTML if available). For example, this is what I use in Flockademic [2] to be able to directly link to the articles themselves for researchers that have added the DOIs of the Open Access articles to their ORCID iDs.

Point being, if articles can be freely distributed, that paves the way for discovery services to provide better interfaces to the research.

[1] https://unpaywall.org

[2] https://flockademic.com

It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available.

The systems provided by publishers are, um, not. They're at the usual quality of bad corporate software, but more strikingly their anti-piracy changes have only served to make the gap worse. There are anti-crawler features which freeze access to entire universities when a hidden link is followed. There are view-in-app and download-disabled restrictions, often associated with no-searchable-text. (Which are especially idiotic, of course, because you can't actually restrict access to static content once you serve it. Using screenshots and OCR is irritating, but not hard to apply.) And in the worst cases, there's "available on request" via a library or some other human-interaction delivery mechanism. Which actually would limit bulk piracy, but only by crippling access altogether.

Every time I've tried to get a background in a topic or write about it, there's been a step where I check a dozen papers and discard 80% of them as being irrelevant for my purpose (or simply bad). Assuming that's common, it's hard to imagine how silos with custom access mechanisms can endure against a single, searchable repository at any price.