The vast majority of published scientific discoveries, and most of the authoritative new research, are now hidden behind paywalls. We are charging fees and prices are rising faster than inflation.annual membership with Nature cost $199, chemistry From $79/year lancet Charge $227. And these are just a few of the hundreds of journals in which new research is published.

This money goes to publishers, not the academics who actually write the scientific papers. Some top-tier journals give researchers the option to make their articles free to read, but they do this by inverting the fee structure, putting the burden on authors. .

Nature, For example, we charge non-institutional authors approximately $9,500 to display their papers without a paywall. Given that funded research is already far from the interests of the researchers themselves, this is a significant hurdle that disproportionately hits young researchers and researchers in low-income countries.

But in an effort to remove the paywall and make science more accessible to everyone, the White House last month made all taxpayer-funded research, including the data used in the research, free by the end of 2020. Announced new guidelines requiring disclosure. 2025.

Biden’s plan is one of the biggest wins ever for the “open science” movement. In practice, it often refers to the immediate publication of papers describing new scientific discoveries without a paywall. It also includes publicly sharing the complete dataset and code used for analysis.

The movement towards transparency and open access science began with activity in the 1990s and reached the White House in 2013 during the Obama administration, which was influential in US politics as early as 2007. In 2016, he said, “Taxpayers fund cancer research at $5 billion annually, but once publicized, almost all of that taxpayer-funded research is behind the walls.” I’m asleep on the floor,” he said.

There is a candid debate about making publicly funded research available. Taxpayers are already paying to fund research, so why should they also pay journals to see results? It is hoped that this will enable scientists and entrepreneurs to build new discoveries more quickly and give the public a better picture of the state of scientific knowledge.

However, despite decades of advocacy for “open science,” the idea has not been widely accepted, and there is not even a consistent definition of what it means.

The promotion of open science and its opposition did not start in the United States. Past international efforts may hint at how new guidelines may unfold.

In 2018, Robert-Jan Smits, then Senior Advisor on Open Access and Innovation at the European Center for Political Strategy, used growing support in Europe to launch a movement to open up access to science. rice field. He recruited many influential funders and demanded that grantees publish their research. Although this was a radical departure from the previous European standards for paywall-based scholarly publishing.

In a recently published free downloadable book, Shock plan SSmits, and co-author Rachael Pells argue that while science will be more successful as an international collaboration, scientists in poorer countries are now being shut out by high access fees. For society to fully reap the benefits of new discoveries, the results must be available to everyone, not just researchers.

Open access papers show small, if inconsistent, increases in citations from other scientists, but compared to paid research, this greatly understates the real impact. Rating: springer nature It turns out that 40% of visitors to open access sites are not academics and only have a personal or professional interest in a topic.

Under Plan S, which came into effect in 12 European countries in 2021, scientists receiving grants from relevant funders will make their research results open access as a condition of that funding. You can submit to free public repositories such as Zenodo or arXiv, or pay for traditional journals. Universities often negotiated direct deals with publishers to fund these fees, but some funders instituted their own programs to fund submission fees for the research they funded. Did.

Biden’s new plan has similar requirements, but they apply to the vast number of researchers and universities funded by the US federal government. The federal government covers approximately 400 different organizations and agencies. The transition is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

Unlocking research that is largely funded by taxpayer money may seem like a no-brainer. Platforms that pay to publish but are free to read will make more research available to the public, while They can create barriers for researchers and exacerbate existing inequalities in academia. Scientific publishing is a for-profit industry and will continue to be a highly lucrative industry for publishers. Passing the fee on to the author does not change this.

Many newly established open access journals have dropped fees entirely, but still need to cover operating costs, even if they are not looking to make a profit. They rely on advertising revenue, personal donations or charitable grants, corporate sponsorships, and even crowdfunding.

However, open access platforms often lack the prestige of well-known top journals such as: NatureEarly-career scientists and scientists at less affluent universities in low-income countries often rely on volatile short-term grants to conduct their research. Their careers depend on putting out an impressive publication record, which is already an uphill battle.

Established journals are reluctant to commit to open access because submission fees can discourage potential researchers from submitting their work. Also, if journals do not charge submission or reader subscription fees, they will be forced to rely on other sources of income, which may be unsustainable in the long term.

There are other ways the open science movement may fail to live up to its proponents’ optimistic claims. So far, the movement has focused on publicly funded science. Corporate R&D and privately funded research are not mandated. Supporting commercial innovation and entrepreneurship is one of the Biden administration’s explicit goals, but some groups believe that the “commercialization” of science actually reduces transparency and We are concerned that financial conflicts of interest in funded research will lead to biased research.

Projects such as Plan S have increased the influence of the open science movement, but it’s difficult to gauge just how much of that influence is currently growing. A coalition of their funders has supported 200,000 new studies in 2020, making him 12% of the most cited journal articles.

White House guidelines give a big boost to adoption — the U.S. government funded between 195,000 and 263,000 studies in 2020 — but to shift the world of scientific publishing to a new, more accessible paradigm Not enough. If science is really meant to serve the public interest, making it available should be in the public interest.

A version of this story first appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!