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Congress Pushing Open Access for Government-Funded Research
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."
This is brilliant, if the US does it then maybe the UK and EU will follow ...
Biomedcentral is the formost open publisher in the natural sciences. Take a look at the site - how easy it is to start your own journal for example... an example of how it should/could be.
UK Laptops
A somewhat similar situation exists in Sweden, but instead of research institutes charging for prints and reprints and/or memberships we have a situation where the organisations that are participating in research projects and studies not only finance them, but also take part with personnel and other resources.
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.
Here is a nice link to a thoughtful discussion of soem of these issues.
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http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/A
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.
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).
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Many papers can already be accessed, at least in astronomy, for free online, e.g. NASA's ADS or the arxiv.org system.
Batman: "Slake your thirst. You'll have worse than a parched sensation when we're through with you!"
According to the article, the free electronic copy doesn't need to be made public until six months after publication. So, the publisher gets their initial fee as normal, and John Q. Public doesn't have to pay $30 to read the article three years after it's published. The publisher still gets to make money, and we still get to read the research WE funded.
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
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?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Note that only F is not funded by the government, and only F gets paid for this work. Because Journal titles live mostly on reputation, holding a crucial journal in a field is for publisher F a gold-mine, as they can charge whatever they want. The authors will keep on writing for free, the editor will keep on working for free, the referees will keep on working for free, the libraries will still be paying F for actually putting it in print. There are some isolated cases where the complete editorial board of a journal got rid of the middle-man F, but generally this does not happen.
PLoS does not remove the reviewing process from the equation - in fact quite the opposite. PLoS realizes that if they are to be treated seriously as a journal and have any hope of scientists submitting to them, they must have a highly regarded review process. PLoS my be critized on many things, but this isn't one of them.
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. Or google "boycott Elsevier" for tons more.
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?
To follow up on what you wrote above, the entire administration of the journal is nearly free. The only place money goes is the salary of one secretary for the journal's managing editor and mailing costs for those journals that actually still mail out hardcopies to reviewers. The journal editor rarely gets any money from the journal, and the referees never do as far as I can tell. In principle, the only legitimate reason for high subscription prices is small circulation.
Looking at actual subscription prices, journals published by research societies (like the American Mathematical Society, Documenta Mathematica), university consortia (Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Annals of Math), etc. (Mathematical Research Letters), are much cheaper than those published by commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer (Inventiones Mathematicae). The journals seem to be run the same way, so traditional publishers must be skimming profits.
You can find data and the prices of math journal subscriptions at Rob Kirby at UC Berkeley and Ulf Rehmann at Bielefeld and John Baez at UC Riverside
Journal publishers are one of the biggest contributors to the exhorbitant cost of higher education. For those unfamiliar with how it works...
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.
For this exact reason I'm shocked (and gratified) that Congress is actually taking up this issue. Particularly in the current climate, I figured there's no way they would do the right thing and force publishers to give up their fat profit margins. It would be like giving Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices.There already is such a thing, called PubMed Central. It's a public, electronic repository for journal articles. However, only a handful of journals permit their content to be so archived, because they fear the loss of profits. Since the journals own the copyrights on their articles, you can't just "mirror" them - you need an act of Congress to force them into certain licensing terms.
Abstracts are rarely enough to go on, in my experience. Often the interesting part is tangential to the main thrust of the paper. Data presented in a paper to support one conclusion can have implications the author wasn't concerned with. And some papers are better than others. For all these reasons, just having access to abstracts is rarely enough to judge whether the paper is going to be useful to me.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I work at a national lab and am a physicist. As I have way too much stuff to do, I always look at articles in journals we have access to online first. If we don't have online access because it's too expensive, I have to drive across site to a library to dig it out (which is getting harder as libraries here are cutting back on paper journals), and I am doing this less and less. My colleagues are the same way.
What does this mean? The people publishing in these expensive journals are getting very few reads and citations, as people are having problems getting access, while articles in cheap journals get great access. The American Institute of Physics journals (PRL, PRB, RSI, RMP, etc.) are very reasonable, and EVERY library has access. So guess which journals people actually try to publish in now: the expensive journal no one reads or the cheap one everyone reads.
So, the cheap (society) journals are getting the great papers (with the exception of a few expensive journals such as Science and Nature), while the private journals get the rejects. Everyone in research knows you can ALWAYS find a private publisher to take your paper. The society journals are much harder, as they are not for-profit, and get plenty of submissions anyway.
People used to publish a lot in Physica and Nuclear Instruments and Methods, but NOT NOW! They are very expensive!
Anyway, I am not too worried myself, as the expensive private journals have already signed their death warrants, at least for physics.
In the city I live there is a big university library. A few years ago, the paper journals were stored in the shelves. You could go there and read. Now, many subscriptions are only for the electronic version of the journal, and to access them you have to be a member of the university (student, faculty or staff). And the old paper issues are being put on storage. As a result, whole collections of scientific journals are being put out of reach from the general public. Well, I pay federal, state and local taxes -- I am supporting this university. How come I can not have access to its library collection of journals? I thought that universities have a responsibility towards the public. So, yes, this is a clear example where the private benefit of the editorial companies has to yield to the common good of the community.
I have been an author, reviewer and associate editor at one time or another for scientific journals. None of these three are renumerated activities. While I object to the high price of the journals, I do have a little more appreciation for the economics. It is true that the original articles are written and the review process is carried out without expense to the journal. However, the publisher does pay the cost of administering this process and also (in most cases) the cost of editing, setting the article for publication, printing and marketing. While I believe that substantial profit is still involved, it is true that there is considerable expense as well. This expense, coupled with the very small circulation of these journals is one of the reasons for the apparently high substription price. One just cannot think of archival journals with small circulations and no advertising income in the same terms as mass market magazines. It is also the case that some professional societies derive significant income from their publications. Having said this, I would still donate my time to review and edit for an open electronic journal. But such a journal would still have expenses, and it is unclear how they would be met.