* Posts by Semper Bersabee

2 publicly visible posts • joined 30 May 2016

EU wants open science publication by 2020

Semper Bersabee

Already happening...

"If tax payers fund research then they should be able to view that without paying again."

Actually that is happening in the UK anyway - researchers have to publish open access in order to be assessed for public funding under the next REF assessment (Research Excellence Framework). The Research Councils are also moving from encouraging open access to mandating it as part of their funding conditions (some like the medical research council are more advanced than the arts or social sciences). And it is already a condition of EU Horizon 2020 funding and many medical charities (Wellcome, CRUK etc).

The challenge is replicating the peer reviewed quality assurance of journals and funding the skills and infrastructure to properly curate and store. Under the current system the UK alone produces about 150k articles every year and the world wide total is somewhere around 3 million articles a year (and growing at around 3-5% pa) and all articles are not equal...

Semper Bersabee

Re: on the results of publicly funded research

In the UK at least, universities are not publicly owned/operated - they are independent charities. Similarly for most (but not all) research institutions. There are very few publicly owned research institutions left, most were closed or sold off during the 80s/90s.

They are dependent however on public funding for most of their research. Industrial research is a relatively small component. The only exception maybe some areas of medical research where the huge medical research charities (Wellcome, Cancer Research, etc) outspend the gov contribution, although normally (hopefully) in complementary rather than competitive ways.