Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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