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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.
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
...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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.