I applaud the movement towards open science, to make publications freely available, but I can generally pay the associated publication fees. If publications free of paywalls become more important, will that work further enhance the benefits of working at wealthy universities? Should we fund open science differently?
Here are some thoughts on that in Nature by Tony Ross-Hellauer of the Open and Reproducible Research Group at Graz University of Technology and Know-Center in Austria.
Open science, done wrong, will compound inequities. Research-reform advocates must beware unintended consequences. by Tony Ross-Hellauer
"Open science is a vague mix of ideals. Overall, advocates aim to increase transparency, accountability, equity and collaboration in knowledge production by increasing access to research results, articles, methods and tools. This means that data and protocols should be freely shared in high-quality repositories and research articles should be available without subscriptions or reading fees.
"Making all that happen is expensive. Wealthy institutions and regions can afford this better than can poorer ones. At my university, in a high-income nation, I know I am privileged. In a collaboration to introduce open science at Ukrainian universities (including those displaced by conflict post-2014), I’ve been privy to difficult conversations about how to pay publication fees that are three times a professor’s monthly salary, and how to meet data-sharing requirements to be eligible for funding when institutional support is lacking.
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"A particularly pressing issue is open access (OA) publication fees, in which the benefit of free readership is being offset by new barriers to authorship. To support OA publishing, journals commonly charge authors, and charges are rising as the practice expands. My group and others have found that article-processing charges are creating a two-tier system, in which richer research teams publish more OA articles in the most prestigious journals. "
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