The European Commission, which controls one of the world’s largest science budgets, has backed calls for free access to publicly funded research in a move that could force a major change in the business model for publishers such as Reed Elsevier.

“Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and they need seamless access to raw data,” said Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for digital agenda.

The EC saidon Tuesday that open access will be a “general principle” applied to grants awarded through the €80bn Horizon 2020 programme for research and innovation.

From 2014 all articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020 will have to be accessible and the goal is for 60% of European publicly funded research to be available by 2016.

source: The Guardian

Nice, but will the data be free for open access?

“Such repositories are important because they contain all the experimental data that was collected during the experiment as well as its results.

It is the raw data that is as important if not more so to other researchers as the results themselves in order to make full use of the information to help their own research. It is unclear at this stage whether publishers will allow access to the raw data or impose a charge for access to this information.

“The Government, despite having made a bad choice, still has an opportunity through the detailed implementation of the new structure to ensure that researchers and taxpayers do not lose out completely,” Mr Friend told BBC News.”

http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk/index.php/current-issues is a bit more substantive.

Welcome and happy hunting here in Climate Science land!

Let’s go back to first principles. Every freshman in a Science 101 lab class learns that a Methods section must include everything needed to replicate the work described. In computational and statistical research, one cannot replicate work with a different data set or different computation or analytic tools. It is literally impossible.

Therefore, no such work passes muster for college freshmen, much less professional scientists. IN order to get on with it and keep the publication gravy train running, everyone in the fields go along with this practice, but it does not hold up under scrutiny.

When data sets were held in lab notebooks, this could be excused on pragmatic grounds. This is obviously no longer true. In order to replicate your work, I need your data and your code. Both should be archived and available without asking. Just shining the light of day on such work would do wonders for the relevant fields, if not for the careers of the inmates.