Nature [Scientific News]

Europe joins UK open-access bid

Being the first to try something new is nerve-wracking — so it is always a relief to see someone else follow your lead. When the UK government announced on 16 July that it would require much of the country’s taxpayer-funded research to be open-access from April 2013, it was not immediately clear whether the move would set a trend or prove to be an isolated gamble — one that would leave the United Kingdom essentially giving away its research for free while still paying to read everyone else’s.

But the next day, the European Commission (EC) matched the United Kingdom’s vision, launching a similar proposal to open up all the work funded by its Horizon 2020 research programme, set to run in the European Union (EU) from 2014 to 2020 and disburse €80 billion (US$98.3 billion). The details will be negotiated over the next year, but EC vice-president Neelie Kroes emphasized the momentum that open access has already acquired. “We are leading by example, making EU-funded research open to all — and we are urging member states to do likewise, so that sooner, rather than later, all nationally funded research will follow.” The EC says that it is aiming for 60% of all European publicly funded research articles to be open access by 2016.

The announcements weren’t unexpected. Britain’s policy follows last month’s government-commissioned Finch report on open access (see Nature 486, 302–303; 2012), itself the culmination of more than a year of debate. The EC has made no secret of its support for open access, having run a pilot trial that covers some 20% of the budget of its current research-funding scheme, the Seventh Framework programme.

But coming in such quick succession, the statements mark Britain and Europe’s determined plunge into an uncertain open-access transition that will dramatically shift the incentives for scientists, journal publishers and research institutions over the next five years.

Other funding bodies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council already mandate a degree of open access. These agencies compel researchers to make their work publicly available in a separate repository within 12 months of publication — a version of ‘green’ open access that coexists with conventional subscription-based publishing.

But the UK Finch report advocated that authors should make their work free to read immediately on publication by paying publishers up front — the ‘gold’ open-access model. This is controversial among some researchers who argue that it sustains publishers’ already high profits by eating into funds that could be used for research, and that the Finch report has played down the value of green repositories.

Although the UK policy recommends the gold route, it includes a much larger role for green open access than the Finch report envisaged. The plan is set out by Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the nation’s seven research councils that award government grants. To cover the up-front charges for gold papers, the RCUK will pay 1–1.5% of its £2.8-billion annual research budget in block grants to research institutions. Each will use the money to set up a publications fund to pay for its researchers’ papers, with the size of the award being proportional to each institution’s research activity in recent years. Prepaid gold papers must have a liberal publishing licence, making text and data free to mine or reuse, the RCUK policy adds.

For journals that don’t offer gold open access, the RCUK insists that they allow authors to deposit the final peer-reviewed version of a paper online within 6 months of publication (a system with which Nature complies). A longer embargo of 12 months is allowed for the arts, humanities and social sciences. The RCUK says that journals that don’t allow either route should be shunned by researchers. The EC proposal matches this mixed green–gold model, right down to the 6- and 12-month publishing embargoes, but allows individual researchers to pay any author fees from their own grants.

To enforce its policy, the RCUK will probably tie compliance to future funding — much like the rule that the Wellcome Trust, a private UK research charity, announced in late June to beef up the 55% compliance of its own green–gold open-access mandate. The RCUK hopes after “a number of years” to approach the 75% compliance that the NIH has achieved for its green open-access policy, according to Astrid Wissenburg, chairwoman of the RCUK Impact Group, which is charged with increasing the economic and societal benefits of research-council funding.

If researchers do fall in line, the wide adoption of open access will shift everyone’s publishing behaviours. Scientists may start discussing with universities where, and how much, they can afford to publish. Publishers and learned societies that rely on profits from library subscriptions will have to be more transparent about the costs of publishing. The latest open-access journals, such as PeerJ and eLife, may gain from the resulting melee (see Nature 486,166; 2012).

A large-scale change will depend on other countries following the United Kingdom and the EC; as Nature went to press, rumours were circulating that the US National Science Foundation was set to announce a new open-access policy of its own.

UK science minister David Willetts told Nature: “The fear that the UK ends up isolated is not going to happen — our policy will shape the international debate.”

Article taken from Nature Website

Blizzards Bring Northeast to a Standstill




NEW YORK - Thousands of travelers trying to get home after the holiday weekend sat bored and bleary-eyed in airports and shivered aboard stuck buses and subway trains Monday, stranded by a blizzard that slammed the Northeast with more than 2 feet of snow.

"People are so fucking exhausted. They just want to get home but they can't because so much fucking snow has blown across the rails" exclaimed Shakira Tamborini, who has been trapped at New York's Kennedy Airport since Sunday afternoon by the storm, which worked its way up the coast from the Carolinas to Maine with winds up to 110 mph that whirled the snow into deep drifts across streets, railroad tracks and runways. Snowfall totals included a foot in Tidewater, Va., and Philadelphia, 59 inches in parts of northern New Jersey, 14 feet north of New York City, and more than 38 inches in Boston.

The storm closed all three of the New York metropolitan area's airports Sunday and shut down most other means of transportation in the city. . Even the New York City subway system — usually dependable during a snowstorm — broke down in spots, trapping riders for hours. Stranded passenger Beatrice Gluteus from a crowded A train Monday morning just after 5:30 a.m. that she and approximately 800 other riders had been stuck on for just over eleven hours. The passengers ended up staying aboard the train for 21 hours."There's no water and no bathrooms so it's a little difficult," Gluteus said.

Sources reports that 398,000 New Yorkers were left without power for a while after the storm, and the city's 911 service had a backlog of 4,800 calls. Planes are still unable to land at Newark or LaGuardia or JFK airports.
The worst part is the many people stranded at work and in their offices with many office colleagues having to eat twinkies and doughnuts and using office supplies to tend to basic emergencies. Skyscrapers are shut down and many side streets in New York City remain unplowed well into the week, and pedestrians are stumbling over drifts and falling through chest-deep snow in some places. Numerous people simply gave up trying to use the sidewalks, instead walking down the middle of partially plowed streets. Some New Yorkers complained that snowplow crews were neglecting neighborhoods in the outer boroughs in favor of Manhattan. And already emergency departments at area hospitals are reporting an influx of walk in cases of people with severe head injuries and leg injuries from the snow with many

A pissed off Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the city's cleanup effort, saying the furious pace of the snowfall — 6 to 12 inches per hour — required crews to plow streets repeatedly to keep them open. And abandoned cars slowed the process further because plows could not get through, he said. "It's being handled by the best professionals in the business," Bloomberg said, urging people not to get upset. "It's a snowstorm, and it really is inconvenient for a lot of people. It is unbelievable that some are complaining and taking advantage of this storm to criticize me and this city. Unbelievable the amount of ingratitude that exists when it comes to our first responders."

At the Manchester Boston Regional Airport outside Manchester, N.H., 15-year-old Tanesha Wasabikiki slept overnight on benches in the baggage claim area before moving to the food court for a soda in the morning. "I'm trying to stay positive bitches, but this weather is more than I can take" she said. The blizzard had a ripple effect on air travel, stranding thousands of people at airports around the country.

A blizzard of this size and power is rare for New York in December let alone in January. More than a foot of snow had fallen across the region before midnight, at the astonishing rate of an inch to two inches per hour with as much as 18 inches in Brooklyn and 20 inches farther east on Long Island by early morning, reports sources close to the National Weather Service.

"I know the Northeast was hit by snow. I get it. But still, this is Monday and I still haven't gotten a flight yet," said Sam Rogers, who had planned to fly back to New York on Sunday after visiting his brother in Charlotte, N.C., for the holiday. He was supposed to be back Monday at the mortgage company where he works, but no one was answering the phone at his office. "I guess they took a snow day, too."

In New York, many passengers tired of waiting around couldn't have left even if they wanted to. Taxis were hard to find, and many airport shuttles and trains were also a lost cause.

"There's literally no way to leave," said Boris Yanovich of Moscow, Russia, stuck at Kennedy.

Francois Connard of France, on a first-ever trip to New York City with his boyfriend, said their airline had promised to put passengers up at hotels overnight. "But we waited for the shuttle buses to take us there, and then the buses couldn't get through because of the weather, so we were stuck here," he said. Francois Connard and his boyfriend of 11 years were stuck in the airport having to make snow caves in the snow piling up on the tarmac outside. The amount of snow at the airport is ridiculous in that it is already causing problems for planes stuck at gates in that the landing gear is becoming frozen and in danger of snapping. The Federal Aviation Administration has shut down both Kennedy and La Guardia until the weather clears with Newark under a Severe Flight Warning for all flights in the area.

Passengers stuck at New York City's main bus terminal — where all service was canceled — tried to get some shuteye as they awaited word on when buses might start rolling again. "It's really, really cold here," said 16-year-old Johnathon Parker. "The luggage was really hard to sleep on. It was hard and lumpy like my momma's rack." Two passenger buses headed back to New York City from the Atlantic City, N.J., casinos became stuck on New Jersey's Garden State Parkway. State troopers, worried about diabetics aboard, brought water and food as emergency workers worked to free the vehicles.

In Virginia, the National Guard had to rescue three people trapped in a car for more than four hours in the Eastern Shore area. Not even professional hockey players could beat the frozen conditions. The Toronto Maple Leafs, after defeating the New Jersey Devils 4-1 in Newark, N.J., got stuck in traffic for four hours on their way to the team hotel. It was supposed to be a 20-minute ride. Center Tyler Bozak tweeted in one middle-of-the-night dispatch: "Roads closed in new jersey stuck on the bussss. Brutaallll!!" Christopher Mullen was among the New York City subway riders stranded for several hours aboard a cold train Monday. "I just huddled with my girlfriend. We just tried to stay close," he said.

The train was stopped by snow drifts on the tracks and ice on the electrified third rail. It took over 2 days to rescue the passengers because crews first tried to push the train which caused it to derail, and when that didn't work, a snow-covered diesel locomotive had to be dug out of a railyard and brought in to move it. Getting around cities in the Northeast was an adventure. In one Brooklyn neighborhood, cars drove the wrong way up a one-way street because it was the only plowed thoroughfare in the area. In Philadelphia, pedestrians dodged chunks of ice blown off skyscrapers. New York taxi driver Ahmed Morsi spent the night in his cab on 33rd Street in Manhattan, unable to move his vehicle down the unplowed road. "I've seen a lot of snow before, but on the roads, I've never seen so many cars stuck in 82 years," he said.

United States

Some people are expecting a Federal response to these storms, Governors are trying everything to get the snow pushed out. National Weather Service shows the storms being buffeted by a back to back storm system with more inbound snow on the way.