- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the world’s strongest policy in support of open research and open data. If strictly enforced, it would prevent Gates-funded researchers from publishing in well-known journals such as Nature and Science.
I've been personally thinking about only publishing in open access journals from now on. It's becoming a more viable option.
I really hope the trend will continue. Looking at my boss now and previous ones, they are all obsessed with publishing high. They always ask "What experiments can I do to publish in Nature?" And the answers are always such things as "hot topic", "crazy novelty", "we need mice, loads of mice". I sat in a few boards to chose news profs. fot my previous university. No one in the board cared about the number or quality of the publications. Only about the amount of high impact publications. They also didn't care about whether the new prof. had any experience with teaching etc. I hated that, and still do. Force these fuckers to publish in open access journals. Science should be available to anyone... Now for the DFG (the "German NIH") I really hope that they do that too!
That's the problem. The audience is focused on nature and science publications... Our journal club only has high impact publications because "we want to get to that standard" but there are so many good plosone publications etc. Do you know how much a university pays for access to all nature journals for example? Would be interesting to know. My uni has access to some nature journals, but funnily, not to Nat. Communications where we have published ourselves (!!!) So I end up using libgen or /r/scholar