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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."
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.
I don't like the idea of interested taxpayers having to pay once to fund the research and once more to read the results. To the whiners in the publishing community: boo-friggin'-hoo.
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
...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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If a paper is 100% funded by public grant, it should be 100% free to access. However, being only partially funded by a grant makes it harder to figure out what to do. Many art museums have admission fees, but still receive public funding. They need the money to stay open, though, because the funding isn't 100% of what they need. Also, a digest of articles isn't the same thing as going and picking up the latest patent digest -- it's like paying someone to show you their top 10 favorite patents, instead of pouring through the zillions logged in each digest. How do you charge for and distribute something with partial public funding? Who gets paid? Are they allowed to earn a profit?
stuff |
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 should have free access to the results. They've already paid for the privilege.
The results of government funding on classified topics should remain classified, within reason.
Currently, one can trust the published papers in "reputable journals" - they've gone through the peer review process. Removing this from the equation will turn scientific papers into "the blog of xxx, yyy and zzz". The signal/noise ratio will go through the floor...
they would allow people to get cheap access to drugs such as Norvir whose research was funded with public money. Now the manufacturer(who owns a patent paid for by the US government) just raised the cost from about $1.71 a day to over $8. There are countless other examples of this to.
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.
One possible ramification of this idea is that journals will be less apt to accept papers related to gov't sponsored research. In some industries this would be impossible; other industries, however, do have a healthy amount of non gov't sponsored research.
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 as a "mirror" of gov't funded research journal articles instead of engaging in price control?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
My guess is academic journals are extremely cheap to produce. The content is provided for free by academics and the review process is conducted for free by other academics. On top of that, they get advertising revenue with an extremely well-understood reader base.
:)), although I'm guessing this has more to do with the recent discussions about dislosures of negative results for clinical trials than with the economics of publishing.
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
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
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.
It seems to me that these two are unrelated. The journals are certainly free to charge whatever they want, and given that the circulation of these journals is tiny it's understandable that they aren't going to be cheap. Since digital archiving is a bit questionable libraries of course want paper.
The funding by govenment grants is all fine and good, but last I looked that funding went to the researchers, not the journals.
Ultimately if we have a mandate that distribution of these articles is going to be free, the current journals are going to be put out of business by this madate. If this happens there will be side effects one of which is that the funding agencies like the NIH are going to have to pick up the burden of disseminating these articles.
Now the question is: do you want an increasingly politicized government agency deciding which articles are worthy of publication (remember that many scientists are already complaining that the Bush administration is surpressing scientific results that don't fit it's political agenda - Lysenko anyone?), or do you want the scientific community through it's professional societies deciding what gets published?
jkrise, you keep responding to these posts saying things to the effect that the government's agenda is to avoid helping other nations as much as possible. While this may be its agenda under the current administration, the Right Thing (and I think most hackers would agree with me) is the freedom of information to _everyone_. Not just the "chosen people" or "OUR" nation, but everyone.
Your kind of "hide it from the people who might hurt us" is contrary to much of what makes the software industry tick.
This is in response to several of your posts on this thread.
This is still the United States of America, and battered as the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people may be, it still exists. Don't assume that just because the government does many things to restrict the knowledge of individuals (and the freedom to make well-informed decisions is perhaps the most basic freedom, without which all the other freedoms don't mean much) that all politicians, everywhere, all the time, want to keep everybody ignorant. Knowledge, not money or guns, is the true might of the nation.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Scientific societies are a scam. They do absolutely nothing for their members, who have to pay to get the official journal, pay to have their papers printed in the journal, and pay to attend the annual meeting. Oh, and pay the annual dues. The sooner these artificial entities lose their grip on information the better.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Excuse me, but are you saying that scientists should work for free? I don't think so! I need to pay my rent too. And I have a right to have a life outside of science.
I am a 34 year-old with a Ph.D. physics, who has ended up floating from one post-doc to another due to the lack of permanent academic and government positions in my field. As a result of the way the universities and laboratories that I have worked for have classified my position (student or fellow) I have have been exempt from social security tax. You might think this is a good thing, but really this has been done so the universities and labs do not have to pay the employer's share of the tax. Because post-docs are typically classified as temporary student employees or fellows, they can also get away with declaring you ineligible for other benefits such as health insurance or other retirement plans. I can barely mangage my living expenses on my miniscule salary. As a result, I have virtually no money set aside for retirement, buying a house or kids' college funds. I have NOT mis-managed my money and have no outstanding debts.
All of my college friends who took industry jobs after getting a B.S. degree make about twice as much as I do, plus they receive full benefits. Although their degrees are also in physics, their jobs are mostly engineering positions so they do not publish scientific research.Scientists in the U.S. working in academia or in labs, who publish the bulk of papers in my field, are mainly post-docs or other people working on temporary contracts for relatively low pay compared to industry positions.
To publish a paper in some scientific journals, I already have to pay the bulk of the publication costs myself, mainly through research grants.
However, the fees that I am charged do not cover all of the costs involved. In addition, while some of the staff at these journals are salaried employees, a lot of volunteer work goes into publishing these papers because the scientific societies just cannot afford to pay everyone for their time. When I peer-review a paper for a journal, I am not paid for my time.
In some cases, the editors of the journals are also not paid for their time. And believe me,
being the editor of a scientific journal is a very time-consuming job.
If all publications resulting from government funded research were made freely accesible to the public, it would also put a lot of scientists out of work, in addition to destroying the scientific societies. The money to pay for printing costs and maintaining web servers and files for electronic journals, not to mention the journal index search engines, has to come from somewhere. If the journals do not get this money from subscriptions, it will have to come from someplace else - probably a raise in publication costs to the scientists. As the money to pay for publication comes from government grants, I will need to increase the amount of money I request from the government in order to compensate. This will place a bigger burden on the taxpayers, who will complain to Congress, who will in turn cut funding to these programs and cause many scientists who are already underpaid to take pay cuts or lose their jobs. And people wonder why no one wants to pursue careers in science anymore. As Rodney Dangerfield would say, "We don't get no respect."
How many lay people really read these technical journals anyway? If they did, would they understand them? I doubt it. The scientists who really need the information can always get it - either they have personal journal subscriptions, their institution has a subscription, or they can ask colleagues for a reprint or pdf file. Some journals may have strict copyright policies, but the ones I submit to generally will let the authors retain the copyright and distribute reprints.
While I would love to see my work distributed to a broader audience, I really think this free journal access is a bad idea. The consequences could be more far-reaching than people realize. There is just no such thing as a free lunch.