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."

Comments

Get over it

[Lord Grey]

From the article:

Representatives of scientific societies and publishers, some of whom attended [a meeting held by the National Institutes of Health's director], told UPI they were concerned articles would be placed on PubMed before they were properly peer-reviewed. Even if the final versions were posted, there would the possibility of confusion, they said.

More urgent, however, the societies are worried that free publication would kill their financial base.

If the U.S. government sponsors a paper that is funded with public money, the public should have access to the paper. That seems to be a no-brainer. Congress' move to make this happen is the Right Thing.

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.

Re:Get over it

[JDevers]

You have to understand there is a difference between what you are proposing and what we are discussing. All the information they are talking about making public for free is ALREADY PUBLIC, just not free. DoD grant research isn't often published, they pay extra to the researchers to basically cover the loss of credit. Trust me, I am working on a USDA grant right now and we don't have NEARLY the funding of a DoD grant, of course we will get public credit for the research as well. Now, some DoD research is made public (a lot actually) but definitely not all of it. They aren't proposing to make THAT research public.

A better analogy would be that NASA funds a study to Mercury, when the data comes back the researchers publish all the data in Nature (yes, I know I am being very simplistic...but this is an analogy on /. after all), and nowhere else has any of the information. NASA doesn't post any pretty pictures, no updates at all...if you want to find out what your money paid for and the government has OKed you to see, you have to pay again for the Nature publication. Incidentally, at $10 per copy of the journal, if everyone in the country was interested in the research would cost the country 3 BILLION DOLLARS, probably more than the research itself, just to access the results. Think about that for a second.

Re:Get over it

[flossie]

How does one prevent other nations from benefitting from this information? Passport sign-in security? Don't make me laugh.

Why would you want to prevent other countries from benefitting from scientific research? Let me guess, you aren't an academic or researcher yourself.

Other countries already have the benefit of the information. Research that is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals is generally available to anyone that can afford the subscription.

If your concern is just that US research will be available for free but that other countries will continue to publish in journals that require subscriptions, I think that your fears are unfounded. If the majority of US research is published in open-access journals, those journals will quickly become pre-eminent and you will find that most of the world follows.

Public Doesn't Care

[4of12]

...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.

Charging for access to public property?

[192939495969798999]

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?

Now if only

[foidulus]

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.

Law of unintended consequences?

[stomv]

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?

Why So Expensive?

[tabdelgawad]

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.

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 :)), 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.

Re:Of course not

[JDevers]

You think the goverment keeps track of everyone subscribing to Nature, Science, Cell et all? There is no auditing at the journals either, you pay your money and you get the journal. The overwhelming majority of the research published in a journal is only interesting to about 0.000001% of the population of the Earth (and I'm being generous). The people studying that particular area NEED access to that research though, it is absolutely essential to keep up with the field. Whether that scientist is being 100% honest and works at an NIH lab in Bethesda or is 100% crooked and works in Tehran (sorry to our Iranian audience, Middle Eastern people are obviously this guys boogy man) he is allowed unfettered access to this information. Remember after 9/11 when people were talking about closing publication on certain biological research such as anthrax? The community decided that for the most part, the benefit to man of publishing that publically was more important than the slim chance that it would be used for ill will.

Long overdue

[paiute]

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.