The Solénoid Muon Compact (CMS) detector in CERN, which announced a plan to encourage open scientific policies in publication.Credit: Valentin Flauraud / AFP via Getty
CERN leaders, the physics laboratory on European particles in Geneva, Switzerland, will present financial incentives for university publishers to adopt open science Policies within the framework of the collective agreement of the organization with 11 journals of particle physics.
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The current program sees these journals openly publish work in the field and at no cost for the authors, in exchange for bulk payments. As part of the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers who adopt policies such as the use of the public examination or open by peers and liaison of research to data sets, and less to Those who don’t.
Some openness specialists say that politics could change the situation to encourage transparent science. Others warn that he could create a precedent for publishers to increase their costs in exchange for becoming more open.
“Particle physics is large, international, very complex, very dynamic. Opening is the only really effective way to practice science in discipline, ”explains Kamran Naim, responsible for science open to CERN.
Access to access funds
This decision comes from the success of the CERN to encourage journals that publish its work to do it more openly, through a program entitled The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (Scoap3).
Scoap3 Launched in 2014 and its members include 3,000 libraries, research donors and research organizations around the world, all of which contribute to a common fund in CERN. This is used to pay annual or quarterly lump sum sums to magazines, in amounts depending on the number of articles they publish. The initiative has so far defended the publication of more than 70,000 free access articles. It has an annual budget of around 10 million euros (US $ 10.4 million).
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In the next phase of the program, known as the open science mechanism, CERN will mark publishers on the way they adopt open science practices, according to a system of points developed by consortium. Publishers will be able to earn points to, among other things, make their content accessible to disabled people, by linking research to relevant software and disclose data on the diversity of authors.
Those who have a high score will receive payments up to 15% higher than the agreed origin, while those who score badly could obtain up to 10% less, explains Naim, who is director of SCOAP operations3. The system is not designed to be punitive, but to help encourage publishers, he adds. “This is where our community places its values, and we want to put our money where our mouths are.”
Naim says that scoap3The budget will increase by 9% over the next three years to cover the cost of changes. It expects the process of rating of the seven publishers currently involved in the agreement to be finished in early April. These include the giants of the Elsevier and Springer Nature industry, who publishes Natureas well as publishers of the small company such as the American Physical Society (NatureThe press team is an editorial independent of its publisher).