Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."

Not so easy

[smoondog (85133)]

As a search scientist, I am a huge fan of open access and I have published and promoted its use in the past. However, there are more issues than just making it law. For example, PLOS Biology charges $2750 US for a single paper [plos.org]. Right now, a budget of $2-3k per year for publication is a reasonable cost, if that were to rise to $2-3k per paper, it could get very expensive, at tax payer cost and at the expense of research activity. How are we going to bring down the cost of open access, perhpas the feds should get into publishing? I am personally a fan of looking at other, perhaps less expensive options, such as creating open data repositories that are publicly funded or focusing on community driven knowledgebases that are in the public domain. Lots of papers aren't very interesting, requiring those authors to pay open access costs is a recipe for useless expense.

Re:Not so easy

[backwardMechanic (959818)]

Yes, but what are the costs? You write the paper for free, and deliver it in electronic form half-way ready for publication, draw the figures, etc. It's reviewed by your peers for free. It can now be published purely in electronic form (not free, but cheap). Journal publishing houses might as well be printing money - the model needs shaking up.

Re:Not so easy

[ahaile (147873)]

You've obviously never served on a journal board or seen one's budget. Most journals barely break even. The reviewers might be "free" volunteers, but the cost of that is that you're 5th or 6th or 37th on their list of priorities, so you need a lot of paid staff hours to get them to stick to a non-glacial timeframe. And every author believes that their papers are ready for publication until you show them that half their citations are wrong or missing, that the chart they whipped up in Excel forgot to include the critical data, etc etc etc. Scientists are good at being scientists, as they should be, but they're not always good at being writers. If your overriding goal is to publish the best science, you can't just kick out the papers with these kinds of errors. You need paid people to do that kind of grunt work, and that costs money.

Re:Not so easy

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Honestly, I've given up on this debate around here (and for the record I fully support these open access policies). I used to work at a nonprofit scientific journal (small 3 person office, 15 AEs, ~45 review board members). Our print run was a little over 20,000. Our operating budget was a bit less than 1M a year. We barely broke even each year, and any extra that was made was funneled back into the next year's operating budget. We were all making average salaries and could easily have been making more in the for-profit world. Slashdotters are all convinced that they know how to run a publication for absolutely nothing. Save your breath. They simply don't want to understand that regularly producing a quality journal has costs, time, and effort associated with it.

This needs support

[digitalderbs (718388)]

Publishers make cash from advertisers, from readers (subscription costs) and even the authors (charges for publications, color figures). As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public -- I further believe that all academic publications should be free, but that's a different topic. NIH and NSF (National Science Foundation) research is really the property of the people that pay for it -- the public -- and authors have been somewhat powerless to change this broken system. We're required to adhere to the policies of high-impact journals as well as sign over copyrights in many cases.

I hope this is the beginning of new open policy for academic reports. At the very least it belongs to the US public (or whichever gov't funds the research), and at best, it belongs to the public in general. With digital costs being a fraction of printed costs, there's really no reason this shouldn't happen.

uh, economics?

[Quadraginta (902985)]

I'm really sympathetic to this idea. Personally, it'd be great. When I was on a university faculty, I never thought twice about access to papers. If the journal had an online version, it was pretty much guaranteed that the university had a subscription and (thanks the magic of IP mapped subscription) I could just access the stuff from my office computer.

Now, in private industry, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. If I don't want to trudge down to the God-damned library to read papers, which is very expensiv

Sorry, not a terrible great idea..

[damneinstien (939730)]

I have modpoints, but I just had to post here.

Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious. This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit, do layout, maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks. It makes sense then that there should be a way for journals to recoup their expenses. I don't think forcing top authors to publish in lesser known journals is the way.

A better solution, I feel, would be to ensure that the (NIH grant winning) authors pay an up-front cost to ensure open-access for their articles. Most of the big name publishing groups I'm familiar with (i.e. Science, Nature, Elsevier, etc.) allow this. The cost is usually not prohibitive (~1000 USD) and would be a better solution for ensuring that the science paid for by government agencies is open to everyone.

Re:Sorry, not a terrible great idea..

[neapolitan (1100101)]

I'm a researching physician -- You did not take your own points to the logical conclusion:

A great deal (almost all) research has an NIH component of funding. Thus, if the bill goes through, *all journals will open their access* rather than have the scientists publish in lesser known journals, which will instantly become prestigious. The only articles that a 'closed' journal could publish would be those from industry or private/semiprivate funding sources (e.g. HHMI).

This is an indirect way of forcing open access to journals, which is a *great* thing.

Many journals have already opened up archive access. For instance, the New England Journal of Medicine http://nejm.org/ [nejm.org] has its archive with free access, and also releases "important" or widely read articles for free immediately.

For the average scientist (including me) at a large institution, this has no effect. All of the hospital / university computers are whitelisted for almost all major journals by IP given the hospital / institution subscription. This will still occur, as I need journal access for articles when they come out, but this open archive access will benefit those not tied to major universities or private doctors out in the community.

Of note, it is an unspoken agreement in science that researchers at major institutions help others. Rarely we will receive an email from a doctor / researcher in Bumbletown, Argentina asking "Can you send me article from 1997 in X journal, they want $399 USD for an archive copy," I have a patient with this reported disease, etc.

They get a .pdf attachment in reply.

Re:bullshit

[m2943 (1140797)]

You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?

I said "$50k per journal". And, no, of course there is no way that Nature could get by with $50k/per journal; that's because Nature spends a lot of money on things unrelated to the core function of a scientific journal: they are spending money on increasing their ranking and citation index, they are spending money on making things better for authors (at least the ones that are accepted), they finance a big staff of journalists, etc.

But those are really abuses of scientific publishing. Not only is it unnecessary for Nature's function as a scientific journal to do any of the other, expensive stuff, it artificially distorts the importance and reputation of the journal.

The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.

Or, alternatively, the journals will simply have to focus on the essentials: reviewing and distributing, essentials that can be provided at minimal cost. If behemoths like Nature can't be financed that way, all the better. Nature is a fun and interesting journal, but people should pay for the "fun and interesting" part separately from the peer reviewed journal paper part.

I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more

So am I. If you need a "big staff" for publishing 10 articles a year, you are doing something wrong and deserve to go out of business.

Yearly?

[JoshJ (1009085)]

What the hell is the point of making it require yearly renewal? If it's a good law, it should be permanent; if it's a bad law it shouldn't be passed at all. In this case, making it require yearly renewal means universities and such can't depend on the journals remaining open.

I'm sure that my company will fight this

[raddan (519638)]

I work for a publishing company that shall remain unnamed, but has a rather large stake in scientific publishing. Several years ago, our company president commented, in reference to state legislation that was being pushed to control the cost of college textbooks, that "campaign contributions just don't have the effect they used to anymore" and that the state PIRGs were just a bunch of fearmongers. While it it true that the cost of textbooks has gone up, because our customers are demanding more and more elaborate kinds of books, it is also true that our profit margins have remained the same: very large. His comment simply disgusted me. You can't go from talking about how "sudoku books are pure profit" to bemoaning the fact that people don't want to pay $200 for their intro psych book. Obviously, I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I think this is a bad company to work for (quite the contrary), however this kind of shortsightedness is exactly what is wrong with the world. I expect them to fight this legislation with equal vigor.

"Open access" means "author pays"

[ahaile (147873)]

I was on the board of a small scientific journal deciding whether to go open access. We decided not to for two main reasons. First, though, you need to realize that peer reviewed journals are expensive, especially the "nichey" ones like us. The peer reviewers themselves are volunteers, but precisely because they're volunteers, you need a lot of paid staff hours to make sure everybody's got what they need and is getting it turned over in a reasonable timeframe. Most small journals barely break even. So why didn't we go open access?

1) "Open access" sounds great, but you have to realize that "open access" means "author pays." Someone has to cover the journal expenses. Right now, it's largely the library budgets of research universities that fund journals, as they take out expensive institutional subscriptions. (Individual subscriptions generally lose money, by comparison.) Once a journal goes open access, the libraries drop their subscriptions and journal revenue plummets. To make up that money, journals have to raise the publication fees they charge authors dramatically. So "open access" just moves the barrier from access to publication. We have interests in attracting more international authors, and when we told these authors, particularly those from developing countries, what it would cost to publish in an open access journal, they said there was no way.

2) There's a perception that open access is cheap, because a lot of journals are only charging around $1000 or so to make a single article open access. But the fact is that those journals are radically underpricing open access. They can do that because right now, only a few of the articles in each issue are open access, so the research libraries aren't dropping their institutional subscriptions just yet. So at the moment, that $1k is just gravy for the journal. But if you actually price out what it costs to publish a journal article, it's 3-10 times what they're charging. So once the scientific publishing world really shifts to open access, those journals are either going to sink or have to boost drastically their open access fees.

Great

[arrrrg (902404)]

Maybe this will cause more journals to go the way of Machine Learning, which IMO would be awesome.

From wiki [wikipedia.org]: The [Journal of Machine Learning Research] was founded as an open-access alternative to the journal Machine Learning. In 2001, forty editors of Machine Learning resigned in order to support JMLR, saying that in the era of the internet, it was detrimental for researchers to continue publishing their papers in expensive journals with pay-access archives. Instead, they wrote, they supported the model of JMLR, in which authors retained copyright over their papers and archives were freely available on the internet.

Re:clever wording

[mrbluze (1034940)]

Oh, they'll give you free access to all the papers you want. But nobody said anything about charging for the ink.

All of the journals I read are published online as well as in print form. Some (such as the BMJ) already open up their papers after a period, but enforcing this to happen within 1 year of publication is _fantastic_ news, because, even if I am 12 months behind my boss who paid for his articles, I am still 4 or 5 years ahead of my juniors who have only just finished reading their textbook.

Re:clever wording

[tsa (15680)]

Full costs for publishing are around $10k, and journals generally do only marginally better than break even.


I don't believe that. Everything that you have to do to have a paper published costs YOU money. You have to pay for the research, and to get the paper published you have to pay a fee of around 80 USD per page. To get your paper published you usually have to give up the copyright, and to read your own paper you have to pay for the journal subscription, which usually is an insane amount of money. On the other hand, the publisher is happy to not pay you anything for peer reviewing other papers (which costs at least an afternoon if you want to do it right), or do other work for them. Only if your are employed directly by the publisher you will get paid. So scientific publishers have much less costs than magazines and newspapers (they don't have to pay their authors), and they get much much more money from subscriptions. I think they earn quite a lot of money.

Journal grants

[Per Abrahamsen (1397)]

> In fact these journals provide for a significant source of grants for projects which are not qualified for federal
> funding.

I have never in my ten years working with scientists heard of anyone getting a grant from a journal.

Can you provide any numbers that suggest this should be a significant source for anything?

(Even if it was, with a few exceptions scientific journals are read almost exclusively by scientist, usually paid for by the basis research money for the institution. Thus, it would just move research money from one pocket to another, with a lot of overhead loss in the process).

Re:Journal grants

[OrangeTide (124937)]

> I have never in my ten years working with scientists heard of anyone getting a grant from a journal.

Now it is true that publishing in the right journals can get you grants from people who read those journals. But that isn't what the GP said. It is misinformation to think these journals are handing out grants, the idea does not make sense on multiple levels.

Re:horrible idea

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I don't think the parent was talking about putting privately-funded research into the public domain; the issue is research funded with public monies, by the NIH.

I agree with him, that research paid for by the public ought to belong to the public; you shouldn't be able to get the government to pay for your research and then use it to get a patent that lets you deprive others of the fruits of that research for a few decades.

Nobody is saying that a company can't pay for research itself and reap the benefits of it.

Re:horrible idea

[Hatta (162192)]

Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*?

College professors and because they love it.

Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,

Really? Bettering the health of the general population isn't any incentive at all?

pharma patents were removed, much of medical research would halt and never progress beyond where it is now.

Nope. It wouldn't change the demand for new drugs at all, just the process by which they are developed. Instead of handing over large chunks of public money to pharma companies which they then leverage into large chunks of private money, we could put both public and private money into public research. And in doing so we could better prioritize research. You know, fund the things that actually help people instead of what's just going to turn a quick buck.

Re:horrible idea

[Hatta (162192)]

Ultimately, the money should come from grants. Pay the researchers reasonable salaries, don't waste money on marketing and we should be in a better position to fund research than we are now. The money the pharmaceutical industry spends on research comes from the public anyway, either in the form of grants or selling the drugs to the public. Why not cut out the middle man? I really don't care if research isn't profitable because it's best done by non-profit institutions anyway.

drug patents don't work out economically

[m2943 (1140797)]

what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,

Drug patents are an even better candidate for throwing out because the drug patent system isn't working.

Right now, a big part of drug development is already publicly funded. Furthermore, the government pays a huge amount of money for those patented drugs. If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug.

And that's assuming that the drugs that are being developed are actually useful. In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Drugs that provide symptomatic relief for common, non-fatal illnesses are profitable. They become even more profitable if they are simply minor variations on well-known drugs (i.e., provide little additional benefit). Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances, or that go for risky and small patient populations are not profitable, but those are the drugs that we actually need.

Funded by NIH - paid for by the people

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

The context here is for NIH-funded papers about NIH-funded developmnents.

If the people have already paid for the development (through NIH funding) then who should benefit from the patent?

The whole ethics of patenting is a seperate subject, but in general, I'd think that if public money funded the development then the fruits should be put in the public domain.

Re:

[daeg (828071)]

So before we had these huge pharmaceutical companies and drug patents, we didn't have any medical research, right?

Re:

[Secrity (742221)]

I am so happy for you that you and people like you in your ivory towers have access to ALL the major journals. Not all of us have that sort of access to those articles, even though our tax money paid for the research that allowed them to be written.

Re:Is access really that restricted now?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak (773371)]

Most university researchers probably don't have a problem.

I'm a university researcher and I have a problem.

About 70% percent of the papers I go looking for are under lock and key, with the key being upwards $30 per paper. This is just for an electronic, windows only, pdf file, which I download from an automated site. Precisely why papers cost this much is beyond me, as most are poorly written and not very useful. You're essentially playing lucky dip, looking for that paper that will be of use to you. The difference is that you're paying $30 a pop.

Strictly speaking, I had a problem. I have in fact simply given up on restricted content, and if my university doesn't have a subscription to a journal, and I see a "give us money" splash page, I just regard the paper as "lost" or "unavailable" and move on. It's not really much of an impediment to research, though there are drawbacks. The drawbacks are however significantly less that blowing $300 in one day on mostly useless pdf files.

Basically, if I can't get my hands on your paper, I'm not citing it, and frankly that's your problem, not mine. If people insist on publishing in restricted journals, they'll have to accept the consequences. In this digital age, online pay per view content may as well not exist.