Article here; an excerpt:
11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today [for "open access" (OA) publishing]. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.
The move means grantees from these 11 funders—which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics—will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model....
The plan is ambivalent about "green OA," in which researchers or institutions post a copy of their paper in an institutional repository, instead of publishing in an OA journal; it only says the importance of such repositories is "acknowledged." That's an "elementary mistake," Suber says, because green OA has its own advantages; also called self-archiving, it is cheap and easy to scale up, and by allowing researchers to make their work freely available while publishing in a "conventional, venerable" journal, green OA helps young scientists who need the cachet of publishing in top journals, Suber says.
As philosopher Michael Weisberg (Penn), who flagged this for me, wrote: "This has large-scale consequences—not fully understood yet—for humanities and less-well-funded areas of science (because of open access publishing fees). A lot depends on how they deal with the 'green option'." Philosopher Sabina Leonelli (Exter) has begun a thread discussing some of the issues and ramification on Twitter.
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