[p4bl0]

I don't understand why this comment is downvoted. What a3_nm says is very important. There are multiple forms of open access, and the EU is being lobbied by publishers to push for their idea of open access, sometimes called "gold open access", in which the authors pay to publish.

This is a really bad model as it makes money part of an equation which should only be governed by scientific concerns: should this paper be published or not?

Now, researchers is poor countries may be able to access existing research but they won't be able to publish their findings…

And even thought it kind of solve the problem of mass access to scientific publications, it doesn't deal with the fact that a lot of public money is going in the pockets of private academic publishers for no good reasons. With this model, research is still paid for at least 3 times (for doing it, reviewing it, and now publishing it instead of accessing it) by universities and research institutions, while publishers are making an awful lot money for hosting PDFs. This money which could be used to do more research, as only a tiny part of it would be necessary to support the necessary arXiv-like infrastructure.

[pjc50]

> an equation which should only be governed by scientific concerns: should this paper be published or not?

"Will this paper increase my impact factor or not?" It now becomes literally necessary to spend money to increase the metric used to determine if you get any money.

[IanCal]

> Now, researchers is poor countries may be able to access existing research but they won't be able to publish their findings…

Well they definitely can publish, but they will have to pay a decent amount to publish in a big journal. Grants will include money for this purpose.

edit - I'm not sure why this was downvoted. There are free places you can publish work, and grants that require open access include money for publishing costs, certainly the grants my wife has worked on included open access publishing money.

[p4bl0]

>> researchers is poor countries

> they definitely can publish, but they will have to pay a decent amount to publish in a big journal

Yeah, okay.

This is exactly what I'm saying this system is wrong. The decision to publish a given paper in a big, notorious journal should only be based on the scientific qualities and contribution of the paper. Not on the money (grants or not) that their authors have.

And by the way, grants, and generally speaking project-based funding, are not a good way to distribute money for research. It is okay to fund big experiment requiring a lot of money on project-based grants, but it is totally poisonous to need grants for daily operations (paying people's salaries and publishing being typical daily operations). Research can't work long term if even the basic necessities for a lab to just exist depends on grant money attributed with respect to current trends and other random factors.