Science journals to offer select authors open-access publishing for free - Science Magazine

AAAS, which publishes the Science family of journals, announced today it will offer its authors a free way to comply with a mandate issued by some funders that publications resulting from research they fund be immediately free to read.

For now, Science’s approach, known as green open access, will only apply to authors of papers funded by Coalition S, a group of mostly European funders and foundations behind an open-access mandate that takes effect this month. The funders say immediate access will accelerate scientific discovery by disseminating new findings faster.

Until now, these papers had been available immediately only to journal subscribers, although the paywalled Science journals do make all papers free 12 months after publication.

University librarians and others might drop subscriptions if they can access research articles for free, Moran acknowledged.

Depending on how AAAS’s revenues fare, it might even consider expanding the policy to allow other kinds of authors to publish open access in the same way, he said. .

In choosing the green route, the nonprofit AAAS (which also publishes ScienceInsider) deliberately chose not to expand its use of the so-called gold open-access business model, under which authors pay a fee to make a paper’s final, published version immediately free to read.

AAAS’s new policy is not a radical departure from its previous one, which allowed authors to immediately archive the near-final version, called the author-accepted manuscript, on personal websites and in institutional repositories when the final version was published.

But in a recent blog post, he and other officials at some other nonprofit societies, which otherwise support open access, voiced worries that details of Coalition S’s policy could actually slow the increase of open-access articles and have other negative consequences.

The policy includes a provision that could allow authors to immediately archive a paper’s final version, not only the near-final one.

That could undermine subscription revenues and give journals little incentive to help authors make more articles open access, they wrote. .

What is more, the near-final version, although usually very similar to the final one, typically lacks some useful parts that are contained in the final version, such as supplementary materials.

And posting the near-final versions can make it more difficult to ensure the integrity of the scientific record, the society officials wrote: Publishers typically add any corrections or retraction notices for a paper to its final version of record maintained on their websites.