Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers 213
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."
clever wording (Score:2)
Oh, they'll give you free access to all the papers you want. But nobody said anything about charging for the ink.
Re:clever wording (Score:5, Insightful)
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I love the idea that this might happen...
My only concern is that publicly available scientific material might cause the cerebrally challenged (as frequents the Bush Whitehouse), to be more inclined to censor scientific material paid for by public funds before they even get to be displayed. They've made it perfectly clear that when the truth is either incovenient, or embarassing to their religious affiliations, or whichever corporate interest that owns them this week, they haven't the slightest discomfort i
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The amount of research that goes into an average biology paper, including salaries, is probably on the order of $250k. Full costs for publishing are around $10k, and journals generally do only marginally better than break even.
Open access papers don't have anything to do with funding research--they are just a way for information to be widely disseminated.
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Journal grants (Score:4, Interesting)
> 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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:clever wording (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Whaa? You might get paid to publish a Harry Potter novel, but not a scientific article. In fact, it isn't uncommon for authors to have to pay to have their work published (e.g., there are many journals for which the authors must pay to publish if their paper exceeds a certain number of pages).
If anything, pushing toward a free publication model would only serve to help researchers who have limited funding because that would be less $ spent on accessing the research of others. (Though this expense tends
Within a year (Score:2)
Having access to papers is one step, but surely any fruits of this research should also be placed in the public domain.
Re:horrible idea (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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American public funds it, but placing it into public domain — as GGP poster wants — would make it automatically freely available to the rest of the world too.
Making stuff is easy these days — designing, researching, developing it is hard. I would like us to be able to pick and choose, what we give away, and what we keep.
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I also want to point out that your statement that research is harder than implementation may be true for the biotech or medical industries, but isn't true for the computer industry.
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How is this as an alternate approach to this whole mess.
Make copyright-lengths reasonable and you will more likely than not avoid much of these problems. Secondly, I do believe the government has the right and the duty to mandate where, when and how publicly funded research money is used for not just the research, but the final publication. This money comes from the people, and we through our legislators should dictate how it is put to use.
Keep in mind that many of the issues we now face are new ones
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If you work for the public for less than you'd work for substantially less than you'd work for a corporation, then either you're very generous or you're a fool. But it's not the NIH's fault if you underbid yourself.
The point of funding basic research with public money is because it's generally not profitable. If there's profit to be made as the result of it, maybe you should be looking
Re:horrible idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Really? Bettering the health of the general population isn't any incentive at all?
Do you have any idea what you are talking about, or are you just talking out of your ass? The average cost of a new pharmaceutical in the US is roughly $1.2 billion, and this is something that an individual or corporation is just going to do out of the goodness of their hearts when other corporations can immediately go out and sell the same pills without having the overhead that is R&D? I find that hard to believe.
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.
It wouldn't change the demand, but it would pretty much ensure that no credible lab woul
Re:horrible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Financing private drug research (Score:2)
Most of the world have public health care, which means that the development of the new drugs are going to be paid by the tax payers through the government anyway. Instead of the g
drug patents don't work out economically (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Not that I support big drug companies or anything, but how are you coming up with that? Logic dictates that governments would be less efficient in producing drugs (like they seem to be with everything else). Further, you are then forced to rely on the current government in power to decide on what avenues (drug development wise) to pursue. If that was the case, you would never get things like the "morning after pill" or anything else that has any controversy behind it.
In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need.
Really? Well, the market seems to t
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The current system wastes total wealth by:
I'd venture the guess that this quite outweighs government inefficiency.
Also, as has already been said in the comments multiple times but can't be reiterated enough, the government already pays anyway through research grants and healthcare.
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Those are not the drugs *you* perceive that we need. One of the scary things about centralized control of drug development is that somebody like you is going to constantly be saying "We're going to stop developing drugs for these wasteful, vain, pompous people (who need things I don't) because they don't NEED them. They're a drain on our society rabblerabblerabble!"
Quickly following that
Funded by NIH - paid for by the people (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Here's a possibility:
Establish a trust fund, whose purpose is paying OUR income tax. Individuals and couples ONLY; no business or corporate entities need apply. Any monies gained from any publicly-paid patents goes to this account, and right back to pay our taxes FOR us. Any "extra" assets {if any} can be used toward a universal health care system, Pell grants, or even to shore up Social Security.
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So... scientists already give up substantial rights to their work to publish papers. This has led to less financial incentive to become a scientist, but has created intense competition
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It wouldn't cry a tear if the "drug" companies were divested. They spend way to much money on marketing instead of research. Their marketing does very little for the health of the patient, and in cases like Vioxx is even detremental by taking patients away from better suited medications.
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"2000 science-hours! We have already reached half that!"
"Good, then we will be assured of our grant next month!"
The point is...the free market is best (not perfect, but best) at directing funds to the 'best' research.
If research were centrally funded, how would one decide which to fund? How would one pick a decider?
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Not so easy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not so easy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not so easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not so easy (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Here is a completely free journal [washington.edu] that is among the most reputable in its field. I guess it doesn't exist.
Elsevier made a profit of 850 million USD off academic publishing last year, a more than 25% profit margin.
plenty of others too (Score:2)
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If all the costs are moved to the publication side, then the finished result can be read
not just know how to: actually do so (Score:2)
Exhibit A [washington.edu]
Exhibit B [mit.edu]
Exhibit C [www.ine.pt]
etc.
In fact, you can just take a look at this directory [doaj.org] and scan for the entries that say "Publ
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And $1M/year is not all that much to raise from a group of research institutions, even without providing a tangibly different benefit to those that pay versus those that don't. Divide it among the institutions that regularly publish in your journal, and have them mark
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The evil overlord part of my brain is saying that this is a job for all those English majors. Let's see the universities start requiring the English department to start proofreading and "editing" all the papers th
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The agency I work for has... it has a scientific report series that solicits peer-reviews among experts (not just agency insiders), performs editorial tasks, and then publishes online. Quite cost-effective, I'm told (I haven't seen the bill except for paper reprint printing costs). Problem is, it's just not "big name" so despite having similar quality in scientific content to any mid-range journal out there, and being freely available online, it's still not co
PLOS Biology (Score:2)
Preprints (Score:2, Interesting)
Too many papers (Score:2)
It is probably more extreme here than elsewhere, because we make models that integrate many different disciplines, but I suggest that the trend is universal. There are simply too many papers published in too many journals for you to even skim, so you rely on search.
Open Access journals obviously score high this way, as we are not dependent on our in
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depends on the field (Score:2)
In many areas of computer sc
This needs support (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez [nih.gov]
I do think the scientific community would get behind an NIH initiative to publish papers through the NIH. The NIH employs tens of thousands of people, and thousands of IT people.
More importantly, tons of profitable websites exist that disseminate information that costs a l
Sorry, not a terrible great idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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They get a
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I am a scientist and I very strongly support this requirement. I (and most other computer scientists) already put our papers online for free, but that's not true in some peripheral research fields that interest me. It's stupid for taxpayer funded research not to be available to everyone.
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fixed that for you.
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Gee, I dunno... Maybe they could get a grant?! If we're willing to spend billions on research don't you think we can find a couple million to help get the results of that research to people who need it? The money the publishers make is coming from the
bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
Well, and this legislation fixes that by forcing prestigious journals to either become open access or go out of business.
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,
Peer review, editing, and peer review management are handled by unpaid volunteers.
do layout
Even i
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Re:bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
hmmm; (Score:2)
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Not quite (Score:2)
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Because reasonable governments don't go around interfering in free markets willy-nilly. The argument for open access scientific journals apparently is compelling to Congress. The argument for network neutrality apparently is not compelling to Congress yet.
One can argue about whether Congress is right or wrong, but they get to make the call on this; that's what we elect them for.
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The journals are "free to do as they wish". But so is the government--it's just another participant in the free market. Since the government is paying for this research, the government has a right not to do business with these journals unless the journals publish in a way that the gove
Yes! A step closer to the Age of Info (Score:2, Troll)
Speaking as one who has had occasion to do research, there is a choice of ways to find research, but they're all mediocre at best. It's so easy for them all to be a lot better.
Libraries suck. To be fair, many of the reasons why they suck are beyond their control. They've still got the old card catalogs, which aren't too bad considering the obvious limitations. Nowadays they tend to have a few computers with various quirky proprietary search programs and data that are of course not available over the I
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"Well Heeled" Publishers Can Kiss My Taxpaying Ass (Score:2)
Funding their other endeavors on the profits is great, but in that case they're gonna have to sell Congress on the width and breadth of what are in fact publicly financed activities. How nice are their offices? How muc
Re:"Well Heeled" Publishers Can Kiss My Taxpaying (Score:2)
Oh, and many of them don't have offices. Its just a collection of people who do the work mostly by email and snail mail, and then send the proofs to a publishing company to print and mail. They have about as much in common with DoD contractors as Saddam did with WMD.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain (Score:2)
In academic publishing, as with publishing in general, there's been a lot of consolidation. As a result, what we'
Is access really that restricted now? (Score:2)
They don't get everything, but they get a pretty large chunk of what's out there. I've rarely had problems finding stuff I need.
I suspect most companies doing research can afford access to these as well. While not cheap, by any means, it's certainly within the reach of most moderate sized companies.
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Re:Is access really that restricted now? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yearly? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sure that my company will fight this (Score:4, Interesting)
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That used to be true. It isn't any more. Major journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis are also major textbook companies. It's part of the wave of consolidation over the last couple of decades in the publishing world as a whole, and these days there's a lot of money in journal publi
"Open access" means "author pays" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"Open access" means "NIH pays" (Score:2)
misses the real problem (Score:2)
Slashdot is... (Score:3, Interesting)
A peer reviewed journal for geeks. What we need is to take the same approach to the peer reviewed scientific journals. Currently, they leech off the authors, and turn around and charge exorbitant fees to the readers to boot!
Example: Just today, I needed some information on a relatively esoteric mathematical topic: maximal count linear feedback shift registers. I'm interested in relatively fast ways of finding dense polynomials, without doing the brute force try and see approach. However, most of the articles returned by Google were either to simple - they just discussed the general theory - or they were pay to view. Not only is the abstract uninformative, I have to pay in advance to read, which means that even if I should fork over the exorbitant fee, I might still end up with an article which reveals little more than Wikipedia. To folks like me, who do need this knowledge for professional work, even the peer-reviewed articles are worthless to me if I have to pay for them in advance, without a preview. I can't help but wonder how someone supposedly well-versed in math can't figure out the economics of publishing: that if they pay to have their article published, and the publisher charges readers a fee, that their article isn't likely to be read by anyone of consequence. Because I do professional work in this field, such an article would be of great interest to me; however, those who go the pay-to-publish route literally work themselves into obscurity.
Honestly, I don't understand why the prestigious research institutions don't offer their grant-funded research for free. Rather than publish in a little-read, expensive, journal, they could publish on the net and let advertising pay their editorial costs. Instead of hiring experts, articles could be rated by experts across the world, using digital signatures to verify the authenticity of not just the author, but the moderator as well. Readers could choose articles for reading based on their endorsements by recognized authorities in the field, rather than the selections of a few ivory-tower types.
Some might say that top research journals must be pay-to-publish in order to retain editors who are experts in their field. However, this argument doesn't really hold that much weight in light of the Alan Sokal Affair [nyu.edu] in which a peer-reviewed journal published rubbish that was easily recognizable as rubbish to even the most casual reader.
Interestingly, names like Schneier, Daemen, etc... are well known because their work is widely available, without a fee. I can't help but wonder if paying to publish in one of these peer-reviewed journals actually does anyone any good - because they are generally ignored by both industry and the public at large.
Great! but will happen anyway .. here's why (Score:2, Insightful)
Open = !free in publishing (Score:2)
Great (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Brighter side: most authors have the right to publish anything pre-final (which is usually just the same sans format particulars) on their own respective websites, for free. So once more, Google is your friend.
Researchers powerless (Score:3, Informative)
It's not really their choice. The people who can make tenure decisions are deans, but deans tend beancounters who only look at the historical prestige of a journal.
been there, done that.
Tell me where this chain of logic is broken. (Score:2)
1. NIH requires articles be published in journals that are free after a year.
2. Since NIH funds a TON of stuff, basically ALL journals must go free after a year.
3. Very small institutions and groups drop their subscriptions to journals because hey, they get the articles free now.
4. Those journals have to raise subscription prices to make up for the lost customers (because despite the summary's tone, I get the f
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At the moment Publishers get a good deal. The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK). The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps
Who is it (Score:2)
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the free software way (Score:2)
Researchers have a job, and their job is to research things. That's how they earn their living.
Free software developers usually have jobs as well, many times as programmers. That's how they earn their living, but when they get home they start hacking free software projects and contribute to the free software communities.
I see no reason why a researcher couldn't do the same if they wanted: Keep their day jobs and when they get home start doing some research for free, network with other like-minded indi
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