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The key is that they are starting with the funding agencies themselves...
The Golden Rule: He who has the Gold makes the Rules.
The thing is that the funding agencies have every incentive to want the research they fund to be Open Access. If nobody reads the research article, then the funding agency has effectively wasted the money it spent on the research itself. Just like the tree in the forest, the research that nobody reads might as well not have been published in the first place. And the research that was effectively not published might as well have not been performed. And in an increasingly large number of fields, an article that can not be easily accessed with no out-of-pocket cost to the researcher is effectively not there... you might as well write the article in Arameic.
The cost of purchasing open access for an article is only a few thousand dollars which is chump-change compared to the cost of the research itself... even small grants in the biomedical sciences, like R21s, are on the order of $50k. So funding an Open Access paper is on the order of 5%-10% of even modest research funding levels, and larger laboratory and institutional grants are orders of magnitude larger. Not funding open access publishing of research that is supportedon that level is like buying a new car and then scrapping it when it runs out of gas for the first time rather than being willing to pay to fill the tank.
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[–] Lucretius 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
The key is that they are starting with the funding agencies themselves...
The thing is that the funding agencies have every incentive to want the research they fund to be Open Access. If nobody reads the research article, then the funding agency has effectively wasted the money it spent on the research itself. Just like the tree in the forest, the research that nobody reads might as well not have been published in the first place. And the research that was effectively not published might as well have not been performed. And in an increasingly large number of fields, an article that can not be easily accessed with no out-of-pocket cost to the researcher is effectively not there... you might as well write the article in Arameic.
The cost of purchasing open access for an article is only a few thousand dollars which is chump-change compared to the cost of the research itself... even small grants in the biomedical sciences, like R21s, are on the order of $50k. So funding an Open Access paper is on the order of 5%-10% of even modest research funding levels, and larger laboratory and institutional grants are orders of magnitude larger. Not funding open access publishing of research that is supportedon that level is like buying a new car and then scrapping it when it runs out of gas for the first time rather than being willing to pay to fill the tank.