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Science/ AAAS
By Jeffrey Brainard
AAAS, which publishes the Science family of journals, today announced that it will offer its authors a free way to comply with a mandate issued by certain funders that the publications resulting from the research they fund be immediately free to read. Under the new open access policy, authors can file near-final, peer-reviewed versions of articles accepted by paywalled Science titles in publicly accessible online repositories.
For the moment, ScienceThis approach, known as green open access, will only apply to authors of papers funded by Coalition S, a group of predominantly European funders and foundations behind an open access mandate that takes effect this month. Funders say immediate access will accelerate scientific discovery by disseminating new findings more quickly. Up to 31% of research articles in the flagship journal Science and four others Science the headlines cited Coalition S funding, said Bill Moran, publisher of the journals. Until now, these articles were only immediately available to journal subscribers, although the paywall Science journals make all articles free 12 months after publication.
Articles made public under the new policy will carry an open access license, and the authors will retain copyright, another of the S Coalition terms.
The AAAS said it will pilot the new policy for 1 year, allowing it to judge whether the policy hurts income. University librarians and others could drop their subscriptions if they can access the research articles for free, Moran acknowledged. But he said some librarians told him they appreciate Science enough to keep them subscribing to help keep it going. Depending on how AAAS revenue evolves, it might even consider expanding the policy to allow other types of authors to publish open access in the same way, he said.
By choosing the green way, the non-profit association AAAS (which also publishes ScienceInsider) has deliberately chosen not to expand its use of the so-called Golden Open Access business model, where authors pay a royalty to make the final published version of an article immediately free to read. A sixth AAAS journal, Scientific advances, charges a fee of $ 4,500 per article for posting articles under the gold template.
Had AAAS chosen to convert its flagship product Science Under the Gold Model, the likely publication costs would have been prohibitive for many authors, especially those in poorer countries or working in disciplines with meager funding, Moran said. The costs would have been “in the same direction, if not higher” than the higher amount of € 9,900 per article that the Nature family of journals proposed from this month for the publication in open access d’or, under of his response to the Coalition Mandate S. Moran said Science should set high fees to cover staff costs involved. Further, he noted, as Nature, Science does not charge publication fees for articles that do not contain original research, such as news, comments, and reviews. (ScienceThe News Department is editorially independent.)
The new AAAS policy does not depart radically from the previous one, which allowed authors to immediately archive the near-final version, called the Author Accepted Manuscript, on personal websites and institutional repositories when final version has been released. The new policy expands this to allow authors to post to nonprofit subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central of the US National Institutes of Health.
The AAAS is not the first nonprofit scientific society to publish journals to adopt such a policy. The Massachusetts Medical Society announced a similar approach in October 2020 to The New England Journal of Medicine, covering authors funded by Coalition S members. Other publishers with similar policies include the American Geophysical Union, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Microbiology Society, and the Royal Society.
The Royal Society started a version of the policy several years ago, and “we’re seeing high levels of subscription renewals every year (typically> 95%),” wrote Stuart Taylor, its publishing director, in an email. But in a recent blog post, he and other officials at some other nonprofits, which otherwise support open access, expressed concern that details of the S Coalition’s policy may be in danger. slows the increase in open access articles and has other negative consequences. The policy includes a provision that could allow authors to immediately archive the final version of an article, not just the near-final. This could hurt subscription revenues and provide little incentive for journals to help authors make more articles open access, they wrote.
Additionally, the near-final version, while generally very similar to the final version, usually lacks some useful parts that the final version contains, such as additional materials. And the publication of near-final versions can make it more difficult to ensure the integrity of the scientific record, company officials wrote: Editors typically add any corrections or notices of retraction of an article to its final version of the retained record. on their websites. But some authors cannot replace the articles they archive with such updated versions.
“Green has never been an ideal way to open access [OA]The authors of the blog said. “It depends entirely on precisely the model that the OA movement was trying to reverse, namely subscriptions. … Green was the workaround, not the desired endpoint. “
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