The European Commission, which spends over €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, and set up a publishing platform for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe.
According to a commission spokesperson, the two charities, which opted for a system in which papers are reviewed after publication, are 'models,' but that the commission is only considering the idea. Last week in Berlin, at a closed meeting of the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas suggested a 'decision' to create the platform had already been made, says Michael Mabe, CEO of the London-based International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). OSPP member Sabina Leonelli of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who tweeted from the meeting, confirms Mabe's assessment.
In 2016, European leaders adopted an ambitious plan to make all papers published in the union open access by 2020. But the new plan suggests the commission believes the publishing industry is moving too slowly.
The Gates Foundation announced on March 23 that it will launch its own platform, Gates Open Research, in the third quarter of 2017. It will be operated by F1000, a London-based company that also runs Wellcome Open Research, launched in November 2016. According to F1000 Managing Director Rebecca Lawrence, deals with other funders and institutes are "fairly close." Additionally, F1000 also operates its own platform, F1000Research.
The charities aim not just to make it easier to publish open access, but also to speed up the review process and make it completely transparent. Researchers upload manuscripts, which typically become public within a week and cannot be submitted elsewhere. Then, reviewers suggested by the authors make comments, which are signed and public as well, and the authors post revisions; once two reviewers have "approved" a paper, it gets indexed in PubMed and other databases.
Leonelli says OSPP has not debated the commission's idea but is about to make recommendations on another key obstacle to open access: the fact that jobs, grants, and promotions still tend to depend heavily on papers published in high-impact journals. In a move to address that problem, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced on Friday that it will allow researchers to include preprints and unpublished manuscripts in their grant applications.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
