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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 about scientific papers and results. ;)
Meaning e.g. you'll get the papers on how the rocket
was built, results of the scientific outcome of its use etc.
for free/cheap, not get a ride on it
Short-sightedly (as the Bush government is *g*), there is no gain in this.
u er r.htm
In the mid to long term, it could prove very helpful to aid in innovation (if there is more free knowledge spreading around that you can peek into and evolve even further).
It would be interesting if some more countries would come up with an approach that the French practice (or at least used to practise). Sometimes, if there is a good invention that could potentially benefit a lot of people, the government would actually buy it up and put it into the public domain. As happened with Daguerreotypes [the ancestor to modern photography]:
http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/dag
A government could potentially draw more scientists to work on issues based on this (as the scientists themselves have their main interest in getting an idea to work - and hopefully get paid for it; but they usually don't care about legalese around it, and they would certainly like to have a bigger free base of workings that they could freely extend on).
No, but the knowledge gained from it sure as hell should be. We are paying for medical research (in this case) by pouring billions of dollars from taxes into research projects. So we should get a nice report at the end of the day that shows what that research resulted in. This in not a move to get free drugs or rockets or whatever that Joe Schmoe can play with. It is a move to collect what we already payed for without being extorted twice. I believe the term is "double-dipping" and in most cases it's already illegal.
It's amazing that Congress, of all organizations, has caught on to the problems that have been going on for years. Most Academicians are required to publish something occasionally, even outside the sciences. Some journals will actually demand payment just to get an article published.
Since the issue at hand is that most scientific research is funded by the government, why should a Library (public or private) be paying back these publishers for something the taxpayers/government already paid for?
When I worked in a Library, I was a member of professional organizations that I'd never heard of simply so I could get the "individual" subscription rate (usually 1/4 of the "institutional" rate) then "donate" my copies to the same library I worked at.
In my opinion, the publishers have been getting away with a lot for a while and again, it's nice to see someone other than a lowly librarian noticing it.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
The high cost of access is also why I gave up my membership in IEEE. Of all the organizations, one would think IEEE would allow open access; but they don't. And want to charge an arm and a leg for everything. Screw them. I urge others to drop their IEEE membership too. Only when people start leaving them in droves will they change their policies.
This would effectively kill most printed journals (except for those heavily subsidized by advertising, which is a very small number).
Now, whether or not this is a good thing is another debate entirely.
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The Public Library of Science has been publishing two peer-reviewed biology journals on the net for over a year. They intend to be the model of open publishing. They charge the author $1500, which is comparable to submission charges in other journals. You get to read them for free. Many scientist write a few thousand in their grants for publication and conference travel.
This is so much of a gross oversimplification it is scary. The journals play an extremely role in science. Generally, they're not in it for the money, most of them are non-profits, and published by the scientists' own societies. There are high costs associated with the service they do to the scientific community, and they need to get that paid. If you undermine the peer review process, it is going to be a disaster for science, and it is not unlikely that you can manage to do that but undercutting their cash flow. Publishers have valid concerns, and it can only be solved together. If undermining the peer-review process is business, then business must be Considered Harmful.
That being said, I'm a supporter of open access, I licensed my thesis under the PLoS Open Access licence (even though it was very unclear in legal terms), and it is a topic would like to work on.
I think we can greatly enhance the peer review process, ensure open access to the scientific literature and cut the costs, if we just develop the technology to do it.
We can distribute papers by Bittorrent-like institutional proxies, distributing the costs of distribution and publishing to be shared among participants.
Peer review can be stated in a distributed way using RDF statements, and hashing the paper for integrity checks.
There are many other problems cited my societies, but I think they all have quite straightforward solutions.
The only real cost to remain will be finding and anonymizing reviewers. It is still a significant cost, but it will be much easier to live with. For example by selling dead trees... :-)
If only someone would hire me to do it.... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Let the receiver of the grant only patent the ideas granted from public research for 5 years.
As much as I support most of the Libertarian Party's positions on the vast majority of issues, I think there is a place for government funding of general scientific research. A case could be made that spending more money on scientific research and less on social welfare would benefit the poor much more.
The way I see it, if the government were to get rid of the social welfare programs and take maybe 10-20% of the budget and put it into "quality of life" research grants, the poor would have a higher quality of life. Think about it. Money going into:
1) enhanced crops means cheaper and safer food
2) genetic research means cheaper medicalcare
3) automotive research for hydrogen and electric-powered vehicles means cleaner air and water
All of which benefit society much more than tossing a wad of cash at the nearest "underpriveleged" person.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The employees of journals are paid by a private company. If the government wants to have the results of journals freely available, they can nationalize the company, or start their own journals. Requiring a company to provide its product for free is unsustainable (and possibly even unfair, no matter what you think of the scientific publishing system.
Something about IEEE just rubs me the wrong way, I always have had more respect for ACM.
... they self censored, if they were so sure it didnt apply to them they damn well shouldnt have put the ban in place. Shame on IEEE indeed.
They are too corporate/profiteering oriented indeed. But their cowtowing to export restrictions was especially damaging IMO. When it was all said and done the ban was lifted and they exclaimed that just as they have argued indeed the restrictions didnt apply to them. Well they should have put their money where their mouth was, they were never sued
As an academic who has published in commercial academic journals myself, I can only say that people probably don't realize how badly the commercial interests are impairing our ability to do research. These journals don't pay us to publish our articles, but then turn around and charge extremely high fees to our libraries--and upwards of $300 for an individual subscription (we're talking 4 Reader's Digest size journals here, folks).
Get this--Let's say a professor wants her class to read a paper she published in one of these journals and puts it in one of those "course packs" at Kinko's. The publishers can charge whatever fee they want for the privilege, and some of them charge enormous fees--you might as well just buy the book/journal.
Perhaps even funnier is when a professor wants to quote a sizable passage from her own work in another publication--say, a book. The commercial publisher will charge a massive fee for the privilege of reprinting a portion of YOUR OWN SCHOLARSHIP!
What's really ridiculous is another argument that ALWAYS comes up when I argue with the university presses about releasing journal content online for free. They say, "Well, if we do that, then people will stop subscribing to the paper version." I'm stunned to hear this excuse; I mean, "Yeah? And....?" To be fair, this all comes back to the professorial tenuring/hiring/promotion process. To get anywhere, you have to publish articles in recognized journals, and most of the committees refuse to accept online publications as valid scholarly activity. Yeah, I know, I'm embarrassed for us.