Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free (sciencemag.org)

Article summary

A major UK science funder will require grantees to make their papers immediately free, a move seen as a positive development towards open access. This change aims to make publicly funded research more accessible. The cost of publishing in open access journals can be high, with some journals charging thousands of dollars per paper. Public repositories like arXiv and bioRxiv offer a free alternative.

Main themes

• open access
• academic publishing
• research funding
• public repositories
• peer review
• decentralized rating systems
• commercial publishers
• research accessibility

What commenters say

• Requiring open access to publicly funded research is a good thing as it promotes transparency and accessibility.
• The current publishing model is expensive and denies access to research for many people, particularly in lower-income countries.
• Some researchers believe that open access repositories like arXiv are becoming the new standard for academic publishing, with community review and feedback replacing traditional peer review.
• Others argue that traditional peer review is still essential for ensuring the quality and validity of research, and that open access repositories can be prone to misinformation and disinformation.
• Crowd-sourced review and rating systems may not be reliable for evaluating the quality of research.
• Decentralized rating and sorting systems could be developed to help identify high-quality research in open access repositories.
• Commercial publishers' business models are seen as outdated and exploitative, with high fees for access to research that has already been publicly funded.
• Open access repositories like arXiv have moderation processes in place to filter out low-quality or misleading submissions, but these processes have limitations and do not replace traditional peer review.