I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by the publishers.
Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
>most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestige of existing journals. Younger researchers will continue submitting to these journals since they care more about their careers than ideals. Any change in public perception would have to be driven top down by people already established in their fields.
I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. --- It's rightly owned by the publishers.
Are you American? I ask because this comment reflects a particularly American notion of property as an immutable, "God-given" right. In this thinking, governments exist to protect private property, not define it.
As someone else pointed out, the concept of intellectual property only exists in law that is inherently mutable. And whether the government can take away someone's property by redefining it as not property -- that's a question over which Americans once fought a bloody civil war.
> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication.
Of course they have the authority. Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law. Laws can be changed by governments.
> Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law.
That is actually one interesting discrepancy, I think there are some countries where you can not assign away the copyright to your work for someone else in a manner that you loose the copyright yourself. Anyone familiar with this or am I just remembering things incorrectly?
In such case how would Elsevier and the like react when someone decides to put their work published in such paper on their blog for free?
> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.
Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.
The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.
This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.
> When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.
Maybe it wasn't voluntary 25 years ago, but there are plenty of options today and most scientists still send most papers to for-profit publishers. You can argue about the culture and career pressures that influence those decisions, but the fact remains that there are alternatives that are still not commonly used. Other fields have managed to get around this (eg ArXivX in Physics) so it's on biologist/chemists to figure this out, too.
The journal choice is still not fully voluntary. Each field has certain flagship journals, and you are going to publish in them because they have large impact on the prospects for future career. The journals are flagships for historical reasons --- it takes time for a journal accumulate credibility and attract high-quality papers. If the flagships in your field happen to be owned by Elsevier, the you are going to be squeezed. Granted, the existence of arXiv and others alleviates the open access issue, but not the issue of crazy profit margins of the publishers.
The fact that it's tax payer funded is extremely relevant. It's not 100% their research. I pay for research whetherI want it or not - it should at least come with the string attached that I don't have to pay to read the results.
You should not forget that governments are above money and law. They could essentially change IP property laws. It is about academic freedom which EU citizens deserve to have. You raised some good points about the publishing of new articles, however currently the peer review is already done by public organizations. And I believe that presentation is not that difficult. In the end I think it will boil down to publishers retrieving subsidies.
I don't think many are talking about undoing copyright protection for past papers (it's not impossible, but harder to achieve and likely fraught with legal issues), so I think you are arguing against a strawman there.
For the future, submitting to OA(-friendly)-publications can be demanded or be part of the conditions for public funding.
Illegal or not, it resolves the issue for the majority of the demographic that needs regular access to publications but for some reason does not have this granted to them through their institution. I'm not sure how large this group is, and I've never needed to use SciHub, but I can't say I'm not wholly unsympathetic to their cause from an ethical standpoint.
Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).