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

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.

in Sweden and/or Europe

[myom]

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.

Re:Get over it

[flossie]

I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of making these journals cheaper, but unless the government wants to fund the peer review process that papers go through before they are published, and the publication costs of the journals, this may well backfire.

The government already funds the peer review process - grants to research institutions pay for the journal subscriptions, which in turn pay for the journals to put the papers through review. Bear in mind however, that the most significant part of the review process is having other researchers review the paper and they already do it for free (while being paid by research grants which often come from the government).

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.

Don Knuth's public letter...

[Goonie]

I was going to post a rant about the evils of journal publishers...but I don't need to. Don Knuth has posted a letter he wrote to the coeditors of an algorithms journal about the gouging commercial journal publishers engage in. Ultimately, the board resigned en masse and have started a new journal using the ACM press, which is unfortunately not open content but is at least available at a more reasonable price.

Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.

And Good Riddance...

[agilen]

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.