Why Johnny Can't Speak: a Cost of Paywalled Research 189
theodp writes "That there's no easy way for her to get timely, affordable access to taxpayer-funded research that could help her patients leaves speech-language pathologist Cortney Grove, well, speechless. 'Cortney's frustration,' writes the EFF's Adi Kamdar, 'is not uncommon. Much of the research that guides health-related progress is funded by taxpayer dollars through government grants, and yet those who need this information most-practitioners and their patients-cannot afford to access it.' She says, 'In my field we are charged with using scientific evidence to make clinical decisions. Unfortunately, the most pertinent evidence is locked up in the world of academic publishing and I cannot access it without paying upwards of $40 an article. My current research project is not centered around one article, but rather a body of work on a given topic. Accessing all the articles I would like to read will cost me nearly a thousand dollars. So, the sad state of affairs is that I may have to wait 7-10 years for someone to read the information, integrate it with their clinical opinions (biases, agendas, and financial motivations) and publish it in a format I can buy on Amazon. By then, how will my clinical knowledge and skills have changed? How will my clients be served in the meantime? What would I do with the first-hand information that I will not be able to do with the processed, commercialized product that emerges from it in a decade?'"
I believe the intent... (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the intent... is that all healthcare practitioners do not have private practices, but are instead employed by large healthcare conglomerates like Connecticut Life, United Healthcare, etc., and that those conglomerates have online access to the journals from their networks.
As long as you do not hang out your own shingle, and remain a wage-slave to a large corporation, you will have no problem accessing the necessary publications.
Having worked for a Springer journal, (Score:5, Informative)
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
Re:Simple (Score:0, Informative)
Sorry, the government has no obligation to you, just like any other common thief. After they steal from you, they are free to do whatever they want with it.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
you mean like adam schwarz? that didn't end well.
Re:If you don't like the game, change the rules (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't.
What is the incentive for me to do this if I am an academic who is trying to get tenure or move to a better position at another university or compete for grants? The major ammunition in the CV of anyone trying to do these things is publications in big name journals.
Re:Ever hear of the university library? (Score:5, Informative)
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Lots of universities simply can't afford all the journals they ought to have.
Re:If you don't like the game, change the rules (Score:0, Informative)
Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Academia is a popularity contest. Prestige is the only thing that matters. The only thing. Actual research is a wholly unintended side effect of academia. Only naive fools even attempt real research and inevitably fail. Savvy academics spend entire careers writing literature reviews, in other words republishing others' words. Truly dedicated academics literally resort to literal cocksucking to get ahead.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
You know about PubMed, right? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed [nih.gov]
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless.
What???
The Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states: SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. The Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The Policy requires that these final peer-reviewed manuscripts be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.
NIH/ NSF sponsored research published since 2008 is available on Pubmed for free 12 months after it is first published. Most of the rest you can rent from DeepDyve.com for about a buck an article.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
i'm pretty sure that ms. parks didn't cause a spontaneous movement. rather, the movement was ready to go, and they chose rosa to make an iconic stand.
Re:Ever hear of the university library? (Score:3, Informative)
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Oh, but who has time to go there, find a place to park and then run around the stacks...?
Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for your career instead of always whining about how things should be made better just for you. The journals charge money because they incur substantial expenses for providing an important service.
I went through that bullshit of trying to get access to university libraries.
First of all (at least in New York City), university libraries aren't open to the public. They charge their own students a $2,000 library fee so they don't let outsiders in for free.
Second, even when I did pull strings to get special accommodations to use a library on a guest basis, it was basically a day's work to look things up in the stacks when everybody else is getting them in 5 minutes online (as I do now with access to some academic databases).
Sometimes you have to find out what's going on in reality before you give sermons accusing people of "whining" when they're raising legitimate questions about what's being done with their tax money.
Your misinformation about journals is addressed here by somebody else.
Re:Libraries (Score:5, Informative)
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States, /Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
I've been through that in New York City. Most of the medical school libraries in Manhattan don't allow public access. One of them offered to let me use their library for about $2,000 a year. It's a real problem.
If you actually tried to do it, rather than just looking at their web site, I think you'd find it was difficult to impossible. Unless you happened to find a small friendly library that had everything you needed.
Re: Simple (Score:2, Informative)
There is a lot of research outside of the NIH. Not everything gets published in PubMed.
Surprisingly the US isn't the only country in the world, and surprisingly the NIH doesn't fund the entire global research. Even more surprising is that other countries not only exist but do their own research. Shocking I know.
Re:Could US Attorney Carmen Ortiz Help Her? (Score:4, Informative)
Under MIT's Open Campus Policy, the library he was at, and all other places on campus are open to the public.
So the argument of trespass is suspect at best.