FLICKR, DUNCAN HULLOpen access advocates, led by Imperial College London PhD student Jon Tennant, are drafting an open letter to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of Science, outlining concerns over newly announced details for the organization’s forthcoming open-access journal Science Advances. Tennant and a bevvy of cosignatories argue that publishing in Science Advances places “unnecessary restrictions on reuse,” and that the journal does not meet the standards of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. (Full disclosure: I am a signatory on the draft open letter, and worked for the open-access publisher BioMed Central from 2012 to 2014.)
Like most open-access journals, Science Advances will be supported by article processing charges. But unlike other publications, the journal plans to charge an additional fee ($1,500) for processing articles longer than 10 pages. “In an online-only format, page length is an arbitrary unit that results from the article being read in PDF format,” Tennant et al. argued in their draft letter, which is being edited today on a collaborative Google Doc.
The authors also take issue with the new journal publishing papers, by default, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC-BY-NC) license, making researchers funded by organizations such as the Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust unable to submit their work. The open access advocates argue that non-commercial restrictions offer little benefit to ...
