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Congress Pushing Open Access for Government-Funded Research
Posted by
michael
on Fri Aug 06, 2004 07:50 AM
from the don't-pay-twice dept.
from the don't-pay-twice dept.
jefu writes "According to this article from UPI Congress may be moving toward mandating 'Open Access' to the public for scientific papers. This move is prompted by the high prices scientific journals often charge for subscriptions and for reprints -- even when the papers were funded by government grants. The publishers and societies are opposed to the idea as it seems likely to cut into their financial base. This is an interesting move by politicians who usually find laws that make things more expensive for consumers all too attractive."
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Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as "killing the financial base" of the scientific publication market goes: Yes, it might just do that. I don't believe that anyone guaranteed that publication market any kind of revenue stream, let alone a good one. They've had it made recently, being able to raise prices to astronomical levels. Now those prices might have to fall. It's called business, people. Get over it.
Re:Get over it (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Get over it (Score:2, Interesting)
Meaning e.g. you'll get the papers on how the rocket
was built, results of the scientific outcome of its use etc.
for free/cheap, not get a ride on it
Re:Get over it (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like they are not saying that the public should have free access to the drugs made via this research, but the INFORMATION gathered via it.
Re:Get over it (Score:3, Insightful)
If the government can build a rocket that can be copied at virtually zero cost, using virtually no additional resoures and with no danger to the public from lunatics (literally!) crashing into each other and no adverse environmental consequences, then yes. Free access to text and diagrams over the internet is not really the same as free access to a specialist and dangerous piece of hardware.
Re:Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
A better analogy would be that NASA funds a study to Mercury, when the data comes back the researchers publish all the data in Nature (yes, I know I am being very simplistic...but this is an analogy on
Parent
Re:Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want to prevent other countries from benefitting from scientific research? Let me guess, you aren't an academic or researcher yourself.
Other countries already have the benefit of the information. Research that is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals is generally available to anyone that can afford the subscription.
If your concern is just that US research will be available for free but that other countries will continue to publish in journals that require subscriptions, I think that your fears are unfounded. If the majority of US research is published in open-access journals, those journals will quickly become pre-eminent and you will find that most of the world follows.
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Re:Get over it (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's more like saying that because software can be copied at near zero cost, government-funded software (which has been cleared for release to the general public) must be freely available. Something with which I think many people would agree.
To extend your metaphor: the way that the journals see it is that they've taken your method and written a program. Now you want the program for free, because you
Re:Get over it (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course not (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not. Let me fill in the between-the-lines bit:
The government uses public money to fund scientific research and paper on some topic. The results are then made immediately available -- but only to those able to pay out the nose for a subscription to a periodical. The key point is "immediately available." That means that the research was not on a classified topic. In that case, the public shoul
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
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Re:Of course not (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Get over it (Score:3, Insightful)
If you'd said, "So, if the government does research on rocketry, that research should be freely accessable to citizens." it would make sense. And since the Gov't actually DID make a bit of it's rocketry research public domain...
I hate people who confuse ideas/research with manufactured goods. Sure they're related, but Jesus Christ!
Re:Get over it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get over it (Score:2)
Giving the people a ride on the rocket is "free beer", giving them the knowledge about rocketry is "free speech"...
Re:Get over it (Score:2)
Re:Get over it (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of making these journals cheaper, but unless the government wants to fund the peer review process that papers go through before they are published, and the publication costs of the journals, this may well backfire.
Re:Get over it (Score:5, Informative)
The government already funds the peer review process - grants to research institutions pay for the journal subscriptions, which in turn pay for the journals to put the papers through review. Bear in mind however, that the most significant part of the review process is having other researchers review the paper and they already do it for free (while being paid by research grants which often come from the government).
Parent
Re:Get over it (Score:2)
To me that seems like a major cop-out. I mean, if these things are usually only available in professional journals, one can assume a well-informed readership. If the information is classified or a security risk, fine, but otherwise anyone who actually WANTS that information is probably going to be a decent judge of its value.
I think the government is doing the right thi
Re:Get over it (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/A r ti cles/johnson.html
Project Euclid is a just one initiative to make math and statistics journals affordable.
http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Home
Finally, Universities themselves can stand up against rising subscription fees. Cornell did, and told Elsevier to piss off.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031117-1.s ht ml
It's not black and white! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is so much of a gross oversimplification it is scary. The journals play an extremely role in science. Generally, they're not in it for the money, most of them are non-profits, and published by the scientists' own societies. There are high costs associated with the service they do to the scientific community, and they need to get that paid. If you undermine the peer review process, it is going to be a disaster for science, and it is not unlikely that you c
Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
Public Doesn't Care (Score:5, Insightful)
...only the scientific community does.
The problem is that some journal subscriptions are getting so highly-priced that even institutions cannot afford to carry a full complement of the published literature. (Have you noticed the trend where there is an "institutional" price and a "personal" price for subscriptions? The first might be US$1000/year and the second might be US$600/year.)
This is certainly a problem for me. A month or two ago I was looking for a journal article from the mid-1970's (no online PDF that I could print out) and my institutional library did not have a hardcopy or microfilm. I had to make a formal request, that was time-consuming for me and the librarians involved in obtaining a copy of the article from a different library that had that particular journal.
It's scientists like me (and my work) that is impeded by the high subscription prices for scientific journals.
[Having served as a reviewer, gratis, I can tell you that the subscription money is not going directly into the peer-review process that helps to keep the journal quality high.]
At some point the inertia in the paper-driven scientific archival journals will start giving way to more online offerings where the search capabilities are superior anyway.
Re:Public Doesn't Care (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Public Doesn't Care (Score:3, Insightful)
If these private journals paid for work, that'd be different but far from it
I appreciate your suggestion; it's a good one. But it does requires both courage and principle to stand up for what is right.
Why?
Because people evaluating my job performance, deciding tenure, giving raise, etc. give greater credence to articles published in the Journal of the Society of Highly-Selective Elitists than to articles published anywhere that begins with http://www .
Yet another convenient, artificial, potentially mi
Charging for access to public property? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Charging for access to public property? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not one dime of taxpayer money should be paid for research that won't bennifit or won't be available to the public.
I refuse to believe... (Score:2)
There is probably a catch as there is always...
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if they pull it off, but the history tells different...
Sorry I refuse to trust any government.
in Sweden and/or Europe (Score:5, Informative)
For example: large energy companies and a few governmental departments and a university are members of an organisation that deals with future energy solutions. They all fund the organisation and projects with an amount depending on the company's size and type. The involved participators try to get projects started that would provide them with valuable information. Usually interesting projects get approved, and the different organisations recommend (usually their own) people that are suitable to execute the studies.
The results are then spread primarily to the members of the organisation, and since the documents are primarily for internal usage, it can be hard or impossible to get hold of copies legitimately. Even in the universities the existing copies are used conservatively, so few copies spread to the public.
After some time the results are published usign the Universities printing presses and made available more widely.
This might not apply to all similar organisations in Europe or even Sweden, but these are my experiences of how it works over here. Many European Union projects also work like this, but I don't know if it is general.
Who will edit/peer review? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who will edit/peer review? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. But the peer review process is *free*. No one pays my professor to peer review a ton of articles every month. But he does. And nonetheless my university *pays* for the subscription to the journals he serves as a peer reviewer.
Peer review is at the core of scientific quality. But I think it won't be harmed by open access to scientific papers/journals. I think governments would spend much less by paying peer reviewers and servers to store papers in electronic formats, than financing a thousand redundant subscriptions to journals for every academic institution.
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Now if only (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I had lobbyists to get the government to pay for my education and then allow me to reap the benefits without giving anything back. But alas, I am not a pharmacuitcal.
Maybe the difference between the journals and the pharmacuticals is that the journalists don't have good lobbyists.
Journal Publishers = Profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the issue at hand is that most scientific research is funded by the government, why should a Library (public or private) be paying back these publishers for something the taxpayers/government already paid for?
When I worked in a Library, I was a member of professional organizations that I'd never heard of simply so I could get the "individual" subscription rate (usually 1/4 of the "institutional" rate) then "donate" my copies to the same library I worked at.
In my opinion, the publishers have been getting away with a lot for a while and again, it's nice to see someone other than a lowly librarian noticing it.
About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Goodbye, (Most) Printed Journals (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, whether or not this is a good thing is another debate entirely.
And Good Riddance... (Score:5, Informative)
1) Someboday (Government in this case) gives a grant to a faculty member for some research
2) Faculty member does the research, writes a paper, then wants to get it published in a prestigious journal.
3) Journal gets the paper, asks other professors in the field to peer review it to make sure its "good research". This is done entirely for free by those peer reviewers.
4) Publisher now owns the copyright, *PRINTS THE STUFF UP AND BINDS IT* (yes, no more work really than the sleaziest $1.99 magazine), and charges thousands of dollars per subscription.
5)University must pay for subscription, which they often can't afford, if even the author wants to read his own paper. Yeah, im sure he has a copy, but his collegues aren't even allowed to read it if the institution doesn't subscribe to that journal.
The publishers make all the money here, and really don't do much work at all. Plus, for whatever reason, most big publishers are Dutch, so they are making huge amounts of money off of US government-funded research.
What makes it even more broken is really the tenure system in American universities. Its basically a matter of keeping your job if you are an associate professor trying to get tenure. If you can't give a nice list of the journals that you have been published in, you are not going to get tenure.
Really, the tenure system is the root of the problem. However, by requiring free access, the government can go a long way in breaking this cycle, as the focus for giving tenure may move more towards quality of work and away from quality of journals that you get published in.
Parent
Law of unintended consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
So -- will some areas soon have journals less likely to accept gov't funded papers as a result of this proposal? If so, will gov't funding become less desirable?
Perhaps Congress should use it's Library [loc.gov] as a "mirror" of gov't funded research journal articles instead of engaging in price control?
Re:Law of unintended consequences? (Score:3, Informative)
With all due respect to other fields, biomedicine is the 800 pound gorilla of scientific publishing, especially here in the US. Most of the funding, research, journals, and profits are in biomedicine. And the vast majority of the funding comes from the NIH, with the vast majority of publications coming from NIH-funded labs. Any journal that decides
Why So Expensive? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess academia is to blame for these high prices, since they farm journal-publishing out to commercial publishers. The fact that the vast majority of journal consumers don't pay out-of-pocket to read these journals (libraries and institutions pay) means that journals can charge the exorbitant prices they do, and libraries have to comply.
Overall, cost is a non-issue in most of academia (I guess the undergrads pay for this indirectly to support the library
Many already available (Score:3, Informative)
Public Library of Science open journals (Score:4, Interesting)
Don Knuth's public letter... (Score:5, Informative)
Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.
And the followup bill should.... (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I support most of the Libertarian Party's positions on the vast majority of issues, I think there is a place for government funding of general scientific research. A case could be made that spending more money on scientific research and less on social welfare would benefit the poor much more.
The way I see it, if the government were to get rid of the social welfare programs and take maybe 10-20% of the budget and put it into "quality of life" research grants, the poor would have a higher quality of life. Think about it. Money going into:
1) enhanced crops means cheaper and safer food
2) genetic research means cheaper medicalcare
3) automotive research for hydrogen and electric-powered vehicles means cleaner air and water
All of which benefit society much more than tossing a wad of cash at the nearest "underpriveleged" person.
Open Access for Closed Minds (Score:4, Interesting)
As an academic who has published in commercial academic journals myself, I can only say that people probably don't realize how badly the commercial interests are impairing our ability to do research. These journals don't pay us to publish our articles, but then turn around and charge extremely high fees to our libraries--and upwards of $300 for an individual subscription (we're talking 4 Reader's Digest size journals here, folks).
Get this--Let's say a professor wants her class to read a paper she published in one of these journals and puts it in one of those "course packs" at Kinko's. The publishers can charge whatever fee they want for the privilege, and some of them charge enormous fees--you might as well just buy the book/journal.
Perhaps even funnier is when a professor wants to quote a sizable passage from her own work in another publication--say, a book. The commercial publisher will charge a massive fee for the privilege of reprinting a portion of YOUR OWN SCHOLARSHIP!
What's really ridiculous is another argument that ALWAYS comes up when I argue with the university presses about releasing journal content online for free. They say, "Well, if we do that, then people will stop subscribing to the paper version." I'm stunned to hear this excuse; I mean, "Yeah? And....?" To be fair, this all comes back to the professorial tenuring/hiring/promotion process. To get anywhere, you have to publish articles in recognized journals, and most of the committees refuse to accept online publications as valid scholarly activity. Yeah, I know, I'm embarrassed for us.
Long overdue (Score:4, Insightful)
High prices hinder the scientific process (Score:4, Informative)
For those that don't know, here is the process of scientific publication:
If the paper is accepted, the author pays the journal to offset publication costs.
Libraries pay the journal to subscribe
The journals get all this work, which costs them nothing. They publish print editions, and charge for them. It is reasonable that they're paid to print stuff. But some of them are out of control.
Societies, e.g., American Institute of Physics, charge a few hundred $ a year. Top journals in most fields are society journals. Private publishers charge thousands, as high as ~$20,000, per year for subscriptions. Some are top-tier journals, but most are not. Worse, the private publishers like to bundle the journal subscriptions. So if you want the good ones (at less-astronomical prices), you have to but the crap ones, too.
And, worst of all, all journals are now online, but they have become far more expensive. Online is a good thing: speeds research, no paper cost. But, publishers charge a yearly subscription for online access, so you end up buying the same thing over and over again. Even if you own the thing in hard copy already!!!
Want more info? Check out this guy's web site [ehess.fr]. Or google "boycott Elsevier" for tons more.
Could just reduce impact of US gov. research (Score:3, Informative)
So let's assume US government-funded researchers are told they may not publish in journals which wish to retain copyright over their articles (that's pretty much all journals currently worth publishing in), and instead must either publish in obscure low-impact journals or release their findings on the internet sans independent peer review. This will not be good for their citation rates, nor for their employment prospects outside of US government agencies - researchers tend to be rated on the impact of their published work, both in terms of the impact factor of the journals it is published in and the frequency with which other researchers cite their work. This will probably only work if the government is prepared to commit significant financial support to the establishment of new, high-quality open journals. Good journals are expensive to produce - just ask all the scientific societies who spun their publications out to private enterprise in the first place..
I guess the question is, are the NSF and NIH big enough to drag the big journals to a more open publishing model, or will the likes of Nature (which currently rejects 90% of papers submitted to it) just shrug their shoulders and get along with whatever the remaining 90% of the international scientific community can scrape together and send their way?
This is all a bit of a red herring anyway - as others have noted it's the patents, stupid. Why get upset at a private publishing house wringing a measly few hundred dollars out of a government-funded research paper, when private pharmaceutical companies routinely make millions from government-funded NIH patents?
Re:The question is why... (Score:2, Interesting)
In the mid to long term, it could prove very helpful to aid in innovation (if there is more free knowledge spreading around that you can peek into and evolve even further).
It would be interesting if some more countries would come up with an approach that the French practice (or at least used to practise). Sometimes, if there is a good invention that could potentially benefit a lot of people, the government would actually buy it up a
Re:The question is why... (Score:5, Informative)
The benefit to a researcher with this research is often in browsing it - most of the useful papers I found while looking for papers on another topic. And browsing implies easy access to a wide range of materials.
Would it be beneficial for the government to allow the dissemination of information? If not, why would they fund it and allow public access to it in the first place? Certainly it would help our business and the development of our technology. Innovation is supposed to be the engine of growth for our whole economy, isn't it?
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Re:The question is why... (Score:3, Insightful)