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NIH Proposes to Open Tax-Funded Research
Johnny Mnemonic writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the NIH "has proposed a major policy change that would require all scientists who receive funding from the agency to make the results of their research available to the public for free." Scientific magazines are screaming, fearing that their subscriptions would diminish--but the common sense nature of the proposal is hard to refute. Why should Americans who funded the research with their tax dollars have to pay again to read the research? Particularly since the web makes pubishing said information inexpensive."
...NIH seems to be the National Institutes of Health.
Join the Free Software Foundation
hopefully this will help filter out bogus research by opening it up to more eyes.
Shouldn't this be presented to the UN?
I mean, why should only America share their findings? Shouldn't all nations, no matter how small their medical research budget, share whatever they can?
You know it's a good idea when companies start screaming, "But that would put us out of business!"
they should also make all of the code they write available as open source.
It's a widely known fact that the EU prefers sponsoring research projects if the results are open. I've participated in a EU project, and I'm applying for another one, with a group of partner, and the latest sets of documents from the EU all mention openness, and even open source.
Sounds good. Open is Better (tm)
I wonder if anything neat will come of this, now that everyone can use data collected from others research.
U.S. taxpayers pay $700m for Taxol wonder cancer drug; Bristol-Myers reaps $1700m profit
Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of freely available scientific work that is funded via federal dollars. However, there wtill needs to be a peer review system. That is what you pay for when you subscribe to scientific journals. If you could impliment a peer review panel in any given field as part of Federal as a requitrement for funding then this just might work.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Chances are, probably not. The people who *do* read the research now are the ones who know enough about the field to be able to read the research critically. The people who don't probably won't be able to identify bogus research.
You can give a fake e-mail address when you register. They give you access to the article as soon as you submit the form, and don't check whether you're actually able to receive mail at the address you give.
Find free books.
companies like cambridge publishers do free subscription magazines, which the readers are HAPPY to receive for free on the basis that a) it contains stuff they might be interested in b) if they fill in the survey correctly they might be advertised at with stuff that they WANT to buy.
... my question is, therefore, to these "scientific magazines", so what??
it's an audited process, so there is a stacking big paper trail [in CPL] with a stacking big database where nothing can get thrown away for something like well over six years.
so change your business model to one similar to that of cambridge publishers. contact the auditors for "free subscription" magazines, make your mag free, get an audited status, end of problem.
I published a paper in the Journal of Chemical education last December, but I also posted in on our own website for anyone to download...
people pay taxesa and some of that money is used to give out grants that benefit the planet. Screw the publications. If they can't act reasonably and responsibly, then they deserve to go out of business. Until I see proof that providing their research freely makes it impossible for them to run a business, I'm gonna say it's bullshit. There's still a roll for peer review and gathering research to present a overview of the best research.
no one would be willing to pay for a subscription to Sports Illustrated if they can get the scores for free off the Internet.
There's more to these health journals than just the reports themselves, which provide commentary and editorial content above and beyond reports.
people claim that in order to post the research then it should be reviewed
ok I agree
what I dont agree with is that the reviewers in most case for publications get paid pitance or are completely out of their depth
what the NIH needs to do is set up a publishing system that ANYONE can use and submit their work
you get mod points and a team of very fancy reviewers who NIH appoints and have unlimted mod points
those publications e.g. NATURE who charge me to view somone elses work are dead
NIH should be looking out for the people who pay tax's
(I dont pay tax in the US anymore I pay uk tax's and frankly complain about it...)
regards
John Jones
"I told you!"
There will always be a need for scientific journals. They don't just exist to publish and sell physical copies of scientific papers. Obviously it's true that the same papers can be distributed over the internet as PDFs much cheaper. The more important purpose of journals is to lend credibility to the papers that they publish. Papers published in journals have to go through a critical peer review process. Simply looking at the which journal a paper was published in (ie. how prestigious the journal is) can give a scientist a rough idea of the quality of the work.
Off topic but I appreciate the work you do keeping The Assayer going. It is a very good source of free reference books to learn from. I hope you continue maintaining it for a long while.
Wouldn't using tax dollars for public good just socialism?
And isn't socialism evil?
Now, this does run strictly to our wonderful new lasseiz-faire/globalized/neoliberal economy, which has as one of its main principles, "if there is a way through which any corporation may make money, then that is a Good Thing."
Of course, what we have here is just another example of "public financing, private profit."
eat shiat and bark at the moon
If you actually read the article, rather than just the summary for this post, it's fairly reasonable. It requires NIH-funded research to be released 6mos after publication. That is, the journals get exclusive publication rights for 6 months, after which it's released to the public. So it does address the peer review issue (which was my initial concern).
Note that this allows for freer access to the publications, not the raw data.
There is an alternative - author pays (see PLOS). There are downsides to this too. If you don't have grant money you don't publish. It is less of a problem in biology, but mathematics and theoretical physics will suffer.
Publishing on the web is not a good alternative. With paper journals and a university library you can find articles from 100 years ago or more. Strangely enough these old articles are useful sometimes :)
The problem came about because Springer decided make scientific journal publishing a more profitable business at the same time that libraries decided to cut costs by limiting paper journal subscriptions. IMHO, let's not make radical changes while we are in a state of flux.
This is the most sensible thing I've ever heard from the NIH!
That doesn't mean they haven't said things just as sensible in the past, of course, just that I've never noticed, if so. The stinky things people / organizations do tend to stick out more.
If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.
Moreover, any government spending at all should be made with a specific plan for making it best benefit the commonwealth. If the Federal government (remember, that is Microsoft's largest customer, by far) threw half as much money into Free software as they have into the one-way-only stuff, things like OpenOffice might have already passed Microsoft Office, etc.
On the other hand, they might not (the world is uncertain, and Microsoft employs smart people who honestly want to make their software worth its price), but the fact is the same here as it is when the government funds research with secret results: that money does *not* directly benefit the commonwealth, and should therefore fail the test of whether it deserves money collected by force from citizens of that commonwealth.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm amazed we Americans have allowed this form of double-taxation on our research to occur.
I really don't know why our tax-funded resesarch hasn't been open to the public in the first place. Why should I pay taxes (input) on something for which I cannot personally use the results (output) without paying again (input)?
Fuck the scientific publishing companies. Welcome to the free market of ideas; adapt or die.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Ok, as someone who has received funding from NIH and who has also worked with various journals, I think that encouraging the wider dissemination of research is very good. I also think that there are publishers that are dangerously close to owning most of the publication outlets for many fields (Elsevier for one...) and that libraries are feeling the pinch. This is a bad thing.
I will also note that Journals, whether owned by commercial companies or produced by scientific societies perform many services that cost money and legitimately should be renumerated. Scientific research does not stop at data collection but the results must be vetted by your peers (i.e., peer review). An editor for a journal must select some number of reviewers, distribute the papers to the reviewers, read the returned reviews, make a publish/reject but resubmit/reject decision, then, if accepted, hand it off to the copy editors, etc. Many of us act as reviewers for free but editors, editorial assistants, copy editors, graphic designers, etc all work for pay and the scientific process benefits from their efforts. Moreover, archiving and preserving electronic access essentially forever will cost someone some money. The devil in the details is that we need to make sure that there is room for some revenue to support these things.
My two cents.
What's all the fuss about?
I'm not sure whether you're a moronic troll or a trollish moron.
And getting everyone to set up their own peer review panels would be both inefficient and open to corruption. But there must be some solution. Maybe the funding agency could provide their own peer review panel, which differs from a normal periodical only in that the articles are available for free on the web.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I treat orphan diseases so often, I feel like Father Flanagan, MD. Do a lit search and find a reference that might help cure a child with a rare disease. Find that I can't read the thing because its only published in some obscure journal and they won't release the copyright without charging me a significant amount of money (especially considering that the article may not do anything at all for my patient, and that there may be 5-10 of these articles.) Much better to see these studies in the public domain. The journals charge obscene amounts for subscriptions, which is why their circulation is falling and libraries are shifting to more on line materials.
I guess the geek in me got the better of me. When I read the story title, I thought it meant that NIH was going to mandate that scientists receiving funding from them use open source software. And of course, it would make sense as it would mean more money spent on actual research. Now if only ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Wow, what a load of male bovine excreta. Peer reviewers aren't paid. In my field (physics), journals typically require the author of the paper to submit it in LaTeX format, using a set of LaTeX macros that are defined by the journal. The journal does absolutely zero work in cleaning up the paper and getting it ready to go in the journal.
What seems a little ambiguous here is what would actually happen to the papers. AFAICT from the article, they're just talking about forcing recipients of NIH money to give their papers to NIH for free-as-in-beer distribution. But then what happens to the papers? In physics, we have arxiv.org, which is a free electronic depository for preprints and reprints, many of which have not yet been peer reviewed or published in a peer-reviewed journal. Is NIH planning to set up the equivalent of arxiv.org themselves? It seems like they're completely ignoring the recent efforts to start up free, electronic scientific journals.
I would like to see something like this:
Find free books.
I don't think your average person is going to put down their Glamour/Cosmo/Time/Maxim/Newsweek so they can read about immunoglobin class switch recombination for $30. If your family member is sick with cancer in the hospital, you will not be beside table interpreting the western blots from the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The current, scientifically educated, audience of the NIH funded publications have enough trouble understanding the research. What makes them think the general non-science public will.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
Can anyone post a link to the actual proposal and/or public comment directions on the NIH website? I looked all over and can't find it. I get the feeling it's still filed in the pre-embargo press release section.
Over the sumer I worked under a NIH sponsored grant (the BRIN/INBRE program). All of the research projects presented where public. Granted it was all university research and not private companies. Either way, I wrote some spine modeling software and to my knowledge I am required to release it open source (As I would anyways, though I would go GPL over PD personally.) About the only thing I can think of is that there where added requirements to the initial NIH grant by the BRIN/INBRE or BSU groups.
If your intrested, the pdf of the power I presented (warning, almost 3 megs) can be found here.
Let people publish to it with the proviso that they peer review another 5 papers before they can publish again.
Free peer review (well, it is done for pittance anyway) and they don't have to buy journals so really they are saving money anyway, and papers get rated which solves one of the arguments against this system.
If they are too lazy to peer review, then make them pay $20 to submit their paper to aid in the running of the system, although it should be run as JustAnotherServer at universities anyway.
The situation so far has been that we fund the studies and the corporations made money on controlling that information from those studies.
LETTING the corporations do that is called Laissez faire.
I think Laissez faire is a bad thing, as it is public funding to obtain private profits.
Get it now?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I was trying to electronically access some reasearch journals the other day.
My access to those journals should be covered, but because of an authentication problem, the proxy server was not handling the connection.
Without the proxy server the journals wanted something like $30 just to read a single research paper.
In particle physics (and some other mathematical physics), we already put preprints of all our papers on the web (for free) at the arXiv and have done for years.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
The main two reason that this is a bad idea is that the peer review process necessary to get into high prestige helps filter out the poor papers, and they concentrate the good ones in one resource. If every paper written was published in one website it would be like patents - too many to look at. Who honestly sits down and reads patent applications, and they're freely available?
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
You wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
"Socialism is a good idea, but not if you want a growing, vibrant economy."
>>>>>>>>.
yeah! And when the slavers were running slaves to the South and the plantation owners were making a fortune growing cotton, THAT was a "growing, vibrant economy," too. Problem was the slave lifestyle, well, it kinda sucked, dude. You might wanna go meditate on the idea that a "growing, vibrant economy" aint what we want. We want a high quality of life, instead.
You also wrote:
>>>>
"Capitalism assures that those who are best able to use resources to produce more will end up controlling them."
>>>>
Naw, I don't think so.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
If this is the beginning of the end for the traditional publication system (hopefully in *all* fields -- computer science has a large chunk of papers freely available, but not all fields, and not all are so lucky) I will be overjoyed. Free access to research data is *huge*.
Now, the possible spectre is if research journals can't make money by charging $200 to view a research paper, we might lose the existing mechanism supporting peer review. However, I'd much rather build a new one (The cost is in distribution and trust management, ne? We *love* designing new systems to manage these on the Internet! P2P + PGP + some idiot-proof front ends, and we're talking.)
This also means that cutting-edge knowlede spreads more quickly, and is available to people "outside the field" -- i.e. those that don't buy in to the expensive journals that mark you as being "in the field".
I am overjoyed. I'm not sure who initiated this policy shift, but they deserve major kudos.
May we never see th
On the surface, this idea makes sense (you paid for it, so you should have access to it). But two important words are left out of the post: not journals but PEER REVIEWED journals. If you look on the web for 5 seconds, you can find all kinds of pseudo-science BS (e.g. http://www.alexchiu.com/, perhaps a bit of an extreme example, but it makes the point), because there is no one checking that the researcher is not full of BS him/her-self. Peer review serves as an important guide to both scientists and the public in general and subverting it would be, simply put, insane. Anyway, this a mute point. Most journals offer much of their content for free online, albeit with a few restrictions. This is just another example of bureaucracy lagging behind the rest of us and unnecessarily interfering with the status quo.
That depends entirely on the business and what's done to get rid of it. I don't like this without assurances that it won't be abused but I can imagine things getting worse rather than better. Measures that reduce freedom are always bad, even if the public is thrown some free beer in the process.
Once again, government is increasing it's power to fix a mess that excessive government power created to begin with. It would make much more sense for government to reduce copyright to reasonable terms, like 14 years, than it does for them to mandate how you publish results. The problem is copyright and this fix, while nice, does not undo what run away government imposition created in the first place.
One obvious problem is that everything published yesterday will still be locked up for 100 years or so. Text books won't be able to quote it. Authors themselves will have to create new layouts and words to avoid infringing or, worse, irritating the keeper of 100 years of work in your field. Wouldn't it be better to simply free older works?
Powerful publications are government creatures. Government mandated publication and publication guidelines are sure to create a new crop of abusive publishers. Surely, the new publishers will be able to demand that practitioners do all the work: review, edit, write and then pay for all of it. The only difference will be that the public will be able to read it. That's good, but what terms will that reading be under? Will the public be able to share the information freely or will it be in some kind of nasty DRM format?
How fitting the article is on a registration required site.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
i did nothing of the sort!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
I have no idea why the mag's are whining. If anything, this is going to help them. Why? Simple.
First, when people do come across some interesting scientific research, chances are they still won't know what the heck it all means. (Unless they are a person in that field) This is the magazines chance to make a bundle, as they can step in and explain everything.
Second, people are lazy. Chances are that, once again, unless they are in the specific field of research, they won't know, or even care about other discoveries. This again is great news for the magazines, because they collect all the research that has been done and then send it out for people to read, allowing people who wouldn't have otherwise known, or even cared about it, to see it.
I really fail to see the problem with making government funded research open-source. I would say, that if anything, this will help magazines because people will be more interested in it, and there will be more developments since any old Joe can use previous research as a base for his/her own research.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
If a journal wants to own all the publication rights for a piece of taxpayer-funded research, allow them to do that if they agree to refund the taxpayers for whatever amount the government spent on the research.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
---If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.---
Sure. Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all. When our taxes pay for a coup of a foreign government, are we all entitled to a piece of that country? And we should all be entitled to all sorts of services from Haliburton as well.
NIH Proposes Free Access For Public to Research Data
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 6, 2004; Page A21
The National Institutes of Health has proposed a major policy change that would require all scientists who receive funding from the agency to make the results of their research available to the public for free.
The proposal, posted on the agency's Web site late Friday and subject to a 60-day public comment period, would mark a significant departure from current practice, in which the scientific journals that publish those results retain control over that information. Subscriptions to those journals can run into the thousands of dollars. Nonsubscribers wishing to get individual articles must typically pay about $30 each -- fees that can quickly add up for someone trying to learn about a newly diagnosed disease in the family.
Although patient advocacy groups and other organizations have been lobbying hard for the proposed shift, the scientific publishing industry and related interests are crying foul. The move could drive some journals out of business, they say, and bankrupt some scientific societies that are dependent on journal profits to fulfill their research and education missions.
Whatever the outcome, both sides agree change is inevitable, given society's rising expectations of easy access to information from the Internet and the enormous interest in health -- a topic that NIH officials say accounts for about 40 percent of all Internet queries.
"The status quo is not an option," NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni said last week at a meeting on the agency's Bethesda campus.
Pressure to make publicly financed research results more available to the public has been building for years but gained new momentum this summer with report language by the House Appropriations Committee.
"The committee is very concerned that there is insufficient public access to reports and data resulting from NIH-funded research," it read. "This situation . . . is contrary to the best interests of the U.S. taxpayers who paid for this research."
The report called upon NIH to devise a system that would ensure that NIH-funded research results be "freely and continuously available no later than six months after publication."
Although the language was nonbinding -- especially given the lack of similar pressure from the Senate -- it gave the NIH the political backing the agency needed to craft a system it had been leaning toward for more than a year. It brought a quick and panicked response from scientific publishers. If contents of their publications are to be made available for free, they argued, people will stop subscribing. And without journals, who would do the expensive work of selecting, peer-reviewing and editing research results into the clean and scientifically reliable products upon which scientists and the public have come to rely?
"The House has held no hearings and has established no evidentiary record," wrote Patricia S. Schroeder, a former Democratic House member from Colorado and now president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. Her recent letter was directed to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who heads the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NIH. "Publishers feel steamrolled."
Other critics raised concerns about costs to citizens. "If the NIH has to increase the size of its grants or make other major expenditures to implement a new, open-access system, taxpayers will end up paying more money for less research," said Roberta E. Arnold of the Radiological Society of North America, which supports its scientific activities in part from its journal profits.
Supporters see things differently. "There's lots of free junk and advertisements for snake oil on the Internet, but people can't get the good research unless they pay for it. That does not seem right," said Richard J. Roberts, a research director at New England Biolabs in Beverly, Mass., and one of 25 Nobel laureates w
get it now?
I disagree that publishing on the web is cheap because for a hi quality journal you have to have editors, graphic designers, basically full time staff. Someone has to pay for it! If we don't have any centralized source we might not be able to get good peer reiview anymore. The other option is that the individuals would be charged to publish their papers which would likely reduce the overall number of publications, which is not always a bad thing, but we could loose important science this way. Besides, you can get these journals for free -- just go visit your library.
Hmm. How about logging in the Tongass? The industry received $36Meg of taxpayer support and posted profits of $2Meg last year.
Or, what about the no-bid contracts for Cheney's corporation, Halliburton?
These "businesses" are many orders of magnitude greater wastes of money than are any science publishers. The AAAS and Nature routinely publish government-financed research and they are the top of the heap. Hell, I think it would be nearly impossible to find any published research that didn't have taxpayer support - even in the JIR!
This isn't a good idea.
The whole point of research being done in journals is that before the general public goes and kills themselves with it, a graduate student gets to try.
With journal based research everyone who needs the information has it already. Journals are cheap (by business and grant standards), and usually individuals buy their own specific research journals + libraries and departments have most or all of them. Research isn't really suitable for public consumption, that sort of raw unfiltered and unchecked information is what you see on al jazeera.
Besides that, how do you know when someone publishes something new (and legitimate)? Journals provide a venue for it all in one place, and journals don't disappear the same way webpages do. Lots of people can and do provide their research on the web as it is, but with something like medicine you don't want someone posting 'promising' research on some new chemical, have a bunch of people go and make it in their houses and find out it say doesn't break down properly and will contaminate water supplies or god knows what else.
Research is just that, research. It isn't meant for public consumption, because its often wrong, useless, dangerous or outright fraudulent. There are lots of people who try and convince people about their crackpot theories, journals (while they have lots of room for improvement in the online world) keep most of that away from the 'end user' of research, who doesn't want to find out this new supposed miracle cure for cancer is really just arsenic with some ricin.
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but taxpayers also fund medical libraries. Where I am, at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, anyone can come in off the street and read expensive medical journals to their heart's content, free. Most major cities have similar facilities.
(This aside, I still think free (meaning internet) access to taxpayer-sponsored research is a good thing, provided that the peer-review institutions can be retained somehow.)
---This, however, doesn't add so much value---
Editors do a lot more than just hands on editing of papers. They spend a lot of time soliciting articles for their journal, requesting review articles, news articles and book reviews, determine the direction of the journal (and keep it moving that way), solicit and edit art, answer author queries, get and grant reprint permission for figure re-use and just generally deal with the day to day crap necessary to keep a journal running. Most journals have several editors on staff full time. Do you really think you're going to find volunteers to do a full time job for no pay? How many scientists have a spare 8-12 hours a day to devote to these things?
---Copy editors for academic journals do nothing - authors do the proofreading.---
Not true at all. I've read brilliant submissions that were indecipherable due to the poor English skills of the authors, and I've read absolute crap that was beautifully written. Again, you're asking scientists to devote valuable research time to picking up English skill, and writing and rewriting their papers. Don't forget layout, and correcting of figures for publication (I'm amazed at how many scientists still don't understand the concept of RGB vs CMYK).
Sometimes you have to pay so you don't have to spend all day doing crap. I'm worried that in this rush to make everything open, most scientists don't realize what they're going to have to take on for themselves if the journals go away.
Furthermore, the first journals to die are those run by the scientific societies. Which means all of those societies will die as well. Meanwhile, the behemoths like Elsevier will persevere on and pick up all those little journals' niches until they rule the world all by themselves.
as a scientist, i have to say that its very important for the nih to address the public's access to publicly funded research results. i suspect that the nih is also trying to indirectly combat another problem - the enormous power and economic interest private science publishing groups wield. these publishing groups (nature publishing group is probably the best example) get to decide, by in large, what the scientific community pays attention to and what it ignores (.e. whats hot and whats not). this fact makes the nih nervous, as part of its policy mandate is to direct health research in the U.S.
the recognition that public investment implies public access in science research has important implications for pharmaceutical companies. these companies reap the benefits of publicly funded research in developing drugs (only 0.15c out of every drug company dollar is spent in R/D) and then make ridiculous profit selling drugs to the very same taxpayers who funded their development. if the nih were to extend this open access philosophy to the actual content of scientific publication, mandating that all publicly funded research remained in the public domain, the pharmaceutical industry as we know it would cease to exist. what would happen after that remains the subject of speculation - some say drug development would collapse due to the lack of (cash) incentive, others argue that it would revolutionize the healthcare industry by dramatically decreasing costs. either way, im glad to see the nih beginning to address these issues.
It's a nice idea, but how do you prevent someone from blackballing a competitor? Or helping a friend publish substandard material. The system is ripe for abuse.
The best scientists are going to be far too busy to participate except for the absolute minimum necessary. You're going to get the yahoos and the cheats participating more than anyone else.
Part of an editor's job is to find appropriate and fair reviewers for a paper. Something worth paying for.
You paid for the research, you should have access to it.
Who sorts through the info to determine the junk from the real science?
Vote for Pedro
Using public money to enrich the wealthy is called corruption.
The existance of government as a taxing and directing body is the opposite of Laissez Faire. How do you think the NIH gets its funding? Magic? Money trees?
I'll say it again.
Mandatory taxation + government direction of capital IS NOT Laissez Faire.
What most liberals (and you sound like one) don't seem to understand, is that if the implementation of a system is miscarried, it doesn't mean the system itself is at fault.
Using terms you don't understand gives the impression that you're a 17 year-old, "down with capitalism cause I heard RATM saying it on MTV" moron. Go read a book.
gears:
... I like to use "commonwealth" because the U.S. constitution specifically mentions the 'general welfare' being one of two things (the other being the common defense) that Congress is granted the power to spend money on; I think 'commonwealth' captures that much better than State or country do. As ignorant of it as I am, this is one of my favorite things about the U.S. Constitution :)
OK, so "State" is shorter, and "country" is just about right
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
NIH Proposal
The public comment link is at the bottom. I won't post it because I hope everyone reads the release before they spout off. :)
-Ian
You raise a good point.
t m)
...) Defense, I like. Traipsing about, I don't.
"Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all."
D'oh! Guess I should have thrown in an exception clause to limit my statement that tax-funded things 'had better be available.' There's certainly an edge case in weapons, especially of the mass-killing-machine kind.
Interesting point, though, is that in low-crime, high-gun Switzerland, though I see no mention of the government selling citizens lethal bioweapons, "The army sells a variety of machine guns, submachine guns, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guns, howitzers and cannons. Purchasers of these weapons require an easily obtained cantonal license, and the weapons are registered, In a nation of six million people, there are at least two million guns, including 600,00 fully automatic assault rifles, half a million pistols, and numerous machine guns." (from http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ae771eb4adb.h
Mostly though, I'd be happier if taxes *didn't* pay for foreign excursions, coups included. (Yessir, I'd like to see the clause is this here social contract that says I authorized that little adventure you have going on there
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Please, don't shoot me for rampant, naive idealism.
Unfortunately, it is this very attitude (ie, what do we get from it?) that continues to hamstring the U.N. If no country is willing to stake themselves in the U.N. - for good or bad, then why would any other take it seriously? It is unrealistic to expect that any ruling body will only produce positive results. It is also unrealistic to expect to be able to "opt-out" of any government influence which you don't like. (This seems to be what you want to do here. You don't think there will be any immediate positive benefits, so you want to avoid U.N. involvement.) IMHO, we continue to undermine the U.N. by continuing to work thru other organizations (particularly NATO). For an IT metaphor, think of a new Project Manager being brought in on an existing job. Now how difficult would it be for him to assert his authority if everyone continued to go to the previous manager for direction? Or if people just avoided approaching him because they didn't think he would give the answer they wanted? I've seen this in action, and it's a mess.
The benefits to the U.S. are not realized in the short term. When you are the top dog, what do you hope to gain from the others? We will benefit, when, through world cooperation, the "Third World" (also known as the "developing nations") are realized as our peers, and have become independent, productive nations of their own. In the beginning it will require us (the have's) to help others (the have-not's). [it's a bitch being born into privilege isn't it? you are actually expected to use your privilege to help others. it would be better if we'd been born into some starving, AIDS ridden, African tribe. then we could just sit and expect others to give to us, right?]
I'm sure that there is an adage which states this succinctly but here is my try: The fact of the matter is that we need some sort of protocol which allows differing nations to interact without resulting to violence. We've being trying the "many, individual nations" thing for thousands of years, and it only brings wars and conquest. Another option is the "one empire". Would you be willing to consider an Emperor of the World? The only other possibility which I see is a common body of equals - well quite like the U.N.!
The U.N. is by no means a perfect organization. But since we were party to it's creation as well as being a part of it, it's shortcomings are simply our own.
And what that means is that we have the power to fix them.
So the short answer might be something like:
rho
Too much of the American research investment has simply been pirated by other nations (China for one) with little or nothing given in return.
You mean like rocketry? Oh, not the rocketry, the germans did that for you. Perhaps it was the jet engine? Nope... Italians and English overtook you. Perhaps it was a nuclear reactor... Nope, german jews did it for you. If it would be up to IBM, we would still be using mainframes, but Chinese (Taiwan R.o.C) comotidized personal computing. Digital watch perhaps? Nope, mine was made in Japan. Actualy all I can remember right now is the fact that USA has managed to export was millions of deaths around the world, modern chemical warfare (Vietnam), lots of uranium (Kosovo, Iraq), two nukes (Japan), biological warfare (hmmm... who was the "big daddy" behind Saddam in '80s), ... why bother counting all the things.
On the other side, you have managed two quite extraordinary things: you have create Space Shuttle and you have put The Hubble ST in orbit. For this alone, I see that your nation has a great potential. When it chooses to channel it in scientific goals that benefit the human kind. Now, if you could only get rid of that patently stupid patent laws, so we could get rid of world hunger (think of the HUGE markets you could gain by not starving people) I would be just dindy-dandy with your country again.
The push to open access is probably only the beginning of an overdue restructuring of the whole enterprise of scientific publication,
The current structure of scientific journals is an arcane system that derives its organization from a time when you actually had to go to the library and read the journals. Because a person could only read a dozen or two journals per week, a few journals became more important than others - the ones that were well positioned at the time or had some other competitive advantage. Their standing depended on the fact that people read them, which then drew better papers and better reviewers - which caused more people to read them. But the underlying driving force that generated this hierarchy of journals is now gone - because you scan all of them in (0.25 seconds). There are probably two things that tend to keep the hierarchy in place. The most important is academic promotion and grants - review panels look at the journal names, and use them to judge the success of junior faculty or grant applicants. The "good" journals also tend to have better reviewers, which improves the quality of the journal. But in the absence of fundamental driving force - I believe these two advantages will wane. One reason they will wane is that the big journals have a significant old boy component to them; members of their editorial boards and their friends publish stuff in the journals that others could never get accepted. That means that poor science gets in and good science goes elsewhere. This will tend to erode other metrics of journal quality, such as impact factor (essentially how many times others cite papers in that journal). Review panels will begin to notice, the good reviewers will have less incentive to review mostly for the big journals, and the playing field will become increasingly level.
When one thinks about the issues above and why we have the journal selection we do - I don't think that it is unreasonable to consider the possibility (in my view likelihood) that scientific journals as we know them will go away entirely. What they will be replaced is an interesting question for which I am sure the Slashdot crowd is not lacking suggestions.
I think Laissez faire is a bad thing, as it is public funding to obtain private profits.
Read my lips: Laissez-faire has NOTHING to do with public funding. NONE.
What you have described is "crony capitalism". That is nothing at all like laissez-faire, free-market capitalism. It is, in fact, more like fascism -- something I think we can both agree is a Bad Thing...
A true laissez-faire, free-market approach removes as much government as possible from the market, leaving the competitors in the market to compete against one another.
Please, for the love of god, go read an economics textbook...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
It's about time!!!, its sooo expensive to get access to any science articles from the commercial journals...and the stupid thing is that this research was all ready paid for by your taxes!!! These greedy journals know that their days of gouging everybody ar quickly dwindling and they are sqauking like microsoft and open source!!!
That should NOT be our primary goal!
Why should we value growth over a higher quality of lifestyle for ALL citizens?
In fact, if the USA is any example, we can safely say that once a certain point has been reached, GDP growth rate can only be achieved at a cost of an ever-decreasing quality of life for more and more citizens.
You know, what works OK for a nation at one period in time, at one stage, does not necessarily work well at another time, another stage. At least it does not work well for MOST of the citizens. Of course if your priority is catering to the rich, then that is another matter. I have other priorities, as do most of my fellow citizens, I suspect....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I have always found it ridiculous how hard it is to get modern scientific papers online (without all sorts of subscriptions and memberships and such). I mean the interent was created partially for, and originally used mostly by researchers. I think it won't be long before movements like this and others will really change the situation.
One of the things that does not come out clearly is that NIH's main pitch for this (at least to members of Congress) is consoldating the in in the National Library of Medicine and making it avaialbe through PubMed. This allows for single source, full text searching for info by researcher and taxpayer alike. As long as the journal holds copyright, this is not possible.
While I understand the cost of the peer review process and publication, it is a poor excuse for limiting the flow of information and this could be the wedge that opens reform of this process.
reMUNerated
n-rt)
tr.v. remunerated, remunerating, remunerates
1. To pay (a person) a suitable equivalent in return for goods provided, services rendered, or losses incurred; recompense.
2. To compensate for; make payment for: remunerated his efforts.
(dictinary.com)
_- the (spelling and)grammar troll
... when any scientist could publish to more people, faster, cheaper?
Because Nature does the work for the reader of selecting what is worth looking at-- both by peer review and by editorial policy. That's what you're paying for: not the actual printed text.
So how about this: publish all papers free on the Web but ban any mention of whether they're also published in Nature? [since it's not fair to freeload on the value that the journal has added]
A different Modest Proposal: use Slashdot to publish scientific papers. It already has an incorruptible peer review system after all.
Do it.
This will be a great way to educate all americans. Usually reporters are not trained enough to interpret scientific results, and end up making judgements and generalizations not supported by the research. Like Kevin Costner said: publish the study and they will read it.
You wrote: .
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Laissez Faire:
An economic doctrine that opposes governmental regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free-enterprise system to operate according to its own economic laws. -- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language.
Using public money to enrich the wealthy is called corruption.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What exactly would STOP corruption under laissez faire? You know that the third world is basically laissez faire, for all practical purposes....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Monopolies are not always deleterious. As a general rule, the cost of producing a single unit of something goes down as more of them are produced. In most industries, this effect is reverses after a certain amount of product. But in some instances, the economies of scale continue for a very long time. These special cases are called natural monopolies; monopoly firms actually benefit the economy. But we're talking power companies and national defense. Scientific journals certainly should not be a monopolized.
It's simple in my view... the tax-payer pays for the research and the magazine-subscriber pays for the peer-review and the consequent confidence in the ACCURACY of the research. Separating the funding of these two activities is important - it ensures that responsibilities for each are not mixed, and that there is no conflict of interest. This is in the best interests of all, especially at a time when science/scientists seem to be regarded with some suspicion by the public (due largely to ill-informed/educated media hyperbole).
...peer review is completely voluntary and unpaid work.
* reducto ad absurdem
* nonsequitur
A very important question to ask to proponents of totally "free" markets is this: How "free" is "free"? Does anti-fraud legislation hinder teh free market? What about laws making it illegal for bounty hunters to capture their marks dead-or-alive? Where's the boundary?
It is about time. All publicly funded research should be available to the public. Period.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
---I'd imagine that papers would be presented at random for peer review when you submit your own paper---
The problem being that, if you're in a field that isn't huge, you are bound to end up reviewing papers by a direct competitor, something an editor can help avoid happening.
---If any are way off, you can ignore the score---
Who makes that call? Sounds like you'd need to hire someone, say, an editor to make judgement calls like that. And you're right back where you started.
As another replier to your comment said, publishing and subscription fees generally do NOT go to peer review. As an author, you submit to the big publishers' journals because you want the reputation of having published in brand-named journals.
Actually, re-read the Washington Post article carefully. What NIH is proposing is not a complete revamp of the publishing mechanics in place. It is saying to the publishers "if you don't make the article freely available after 6 months, we're going to put it up for free anyway on PubMed Central (the government's freely accessible repository of papers), whether you like it or not." There's nothing in the proposal about requiring publishers to change the review process.
Now consider the worse case scenario of this policy: all the journals go out of business. This will be unlikely, but I'll entertain the thought for this argument. I argue that the peer review system will still stay intact. Why? Becauses the reviewers were doing the reviews without being paid anyway. They're not going to stop reviewing and critiquing articles just because the high priced journals are out of business. Scientists will not lose their jobs overnight. Most likely the editors of the journals will still do what they yearned to do in the first place -- matching reviewers with submitted papers to be published online via PubMed Central. And those scientists who want to be top in their field will still take on papers to review. I certainly don't see how this current NIH proposal is detrimental to the taxpaying public. Sure, perhaps some additional expense may need to be shelled out initially to bolster PubMed Central, but in the long run, countless dollars will be saved on subscription fees that the public would have to pay anyway.
Lastly, I continue to argue and believe that even if the publishing industry collapses, we will still see peer-reviewed papers being published online. I have faith that scientists in their field will stick together to find, create, or develop a new publishing venue for their field. After all, what good is the work performed by scientists, if no one knew about it?
Linux at home
Salesman: Surely you can't put a price on your family's lives?
Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are. [slams door]
The ______ Agenda
the research is paid for, right?
I mean If the publishing houses want to sponsor some research for which they would then have the exclusive rights to, then whats stopping them, other than affordability?
Isn't the idea of capitalism about getting what you pay for?
If its not than perhaps someone needs to start explaining what capitalism really is... like in social science classes in high school.
Otherwise the term capitalism is going to become attached to concept of deception, bait and switch, pay for something that another, not you, benefist from, consumer deception, taxpayer deception, etc...
On the other hand, if classy publication is a value to the presentation of the research, then why is it apparently not included, payed for, by the grants? That would be a set number of copies that are distributed to qualified parties while also being made available to the general public, who paid for it, for their review (the benefits of which may include young adults looking into what field of work they might chose to enter or study for/in, etc...) Not to mention open peer review...
You don't get to take the shuttle for a ride, but you do get to access the data from major telescopes and instruments. Several years ago, NASA eliminated proprietary data rights from data from missions and instruments (there may still be some on small R&D contracts and sensitive earth observations [e.g. high res mapping data]). Mission data has to be deposited in one of the various NASA archives within ~6 months of reaching the ground, and is readily accessible. Any scientist who wants to use it can get access, and showing how you will do this is part of the proposal process. It hasn't stopped people from proposing missions that will take many years of their lives without any guarantee of success (and no personal financial gain other than having a job for that time).
Peer reviewed journals are not freely accessible to the public in libraries. Part of the problem many libraries (including at extremely well funded institutions) is that subscription prices are so high that they are dropping journal subscriptions, and there's no way they can carry everything anyway. The high impact journals (science, nature, phys. rev., NEJM, JACS, etc) won't get dropped, but then most of those aren't even that expensive for a personal subscription. A lot of the archival journals where longer, more detailed versions of research are published will get dropped. Another part of the problem is that you have to be near a major research university (preferably with a med school) that has library access for the general public. If you're in a major urban this is probably reasonable, but if you aren't, then you're out of luck. Plenty of people distribute pre-peer review versions of papers via the various preprint servers. Astronomy, math, much of physics (and probably other fields) have very active preprint servers and people often refer to the papers there as they come out. Papers still get contributed to the refereed journals in these fields because they do add value-- they provide comments that improve the quality of the papers, and they help distill things down to a managable number of papers to look at if you don't have time to read the daily digest of abstracts from the pre-print servers. Any journal that adds value through its peer review process will probably remain, as long as it can find a way to fund itself, which may be easier since costs will be lower too. Print costs can be very high, particularly considering the page counts, small print runs, and cost of high quality coler repro. The actual distribution cost of electronic journals is relatively low. And as mentioned elsewhere, the costs of electronic typesetting, reviewing, and some of the editing are borne by volunteers.
How will professors get tenured if there no screening body left to determine which research is publishable? Will the NIH also provide a new screening body to take place of science journals, or will the universities have to shoulder the cost and revamp their tenure related practices?
Agreed. Now if they would only apply the same standards to the Pentagon's research spending... ;-)
I work for one of those science publishers. The web gives us the ability to electronically link articles. How did people comment on an article? How did the author reply to the comments? Which articles did an author site? And best of all, who later footnoted or site the article you are reading? Want to search for a word or phrase? The web does all these things brilliantly, saving researchers time and money!
But, the web allows for Orwellian sceneros galore. Who will guarentee the text is unchanged? Print does that in way that web can NEVER promiss.
But print costs money. Peer review costs money. Proof readers cost money. Editors cost money. All this requires lots of money. The sum total, priceless.
Just a thought. Does anyone else see the exact parallels between opensource software, where you can see the work and modify and build on it?
All science is these days based (in fundamentals) on work that has gone before. Yet we still hoard it in paper form, hard to search, expensive to obtain and limited in its spread.
I would submit that journals are the Commercial Software world and that open research is the open source of the scientific world.
And a note on peer review: All of it is usually done for the company for free by academics.
...tax payer so, I didn't pay any money for...oh wait!
What's the big deal? We publish our work freely as preprints all the time. When/if they get published the information gets updated in the preprint archive.
I think it's a great idea, but it won't happen. Frequently the Federal government is so large that duplication of effort is common. If there were a central clearinghouse for information, redundant waste would be reduced. But, from what I saw personally, there is too much entrenched self-preservation in Federal organizations.
Some of NASA has too many arrogant managers and substandard 'scientists' fighting to grow their personal empires. The last thing they want is to have to reveal what they've (not) done.
Some of FAA (NOT controllers!) wastes so many billions of dollars researching the same thing repeatedly, over and over, again, that they have almost nothing to publish. It seems FAA employees spend most of their time applying for jobs at subcontractors involved in their projects -- and contractors spend all their time filling out SF171s. When FAA employees were ordered to produce items for contractors to use for programs within the FAA, they refused. When you point out errors in their algorithms or premise -- you lose 'most favored contractor' status.
Some of the Department of Energy flushes tons of money down toilets on junk science and rerun research that they could effectively publish the same magazine annually.
Some of ASD. What a waste of taxes. Remember the Assistant Secretary of Defense technology redistribution of military monies plans? Basically if you were a Beltway Bandit and showed up with your hand out to research anything EXCEPT military technology, you were paid. It was criminal. And what has come out of the ASD program? Seen anything?
On second thought, let's publish government org research, and, any department not publishing (or soundly humiliated in peer review) will be eliminated and their employees terminated.
As P.J. O'Rourke said of elected officials: we don't need term limits, we need public executions.
I see a new USG motto: Publish or perish!
Not only should publications funded with public money be made public, But I also think that both scientific data and profits Based on public works should be returned, in part, to the public.
Most, if not all, Biotech companies are simply trying to profit from using techniques developed by publicly funded science. There may be a few, specialized proprietary techniques invented at biotech firms, but Id hazard that they are relatively trivial compared to techniques such as PCR or Sanger sequencing. In fact, i think its pretty safe to say, that if you removed all the publicly-developed lab techniques from a biotech firm youd end up with a large, empty warehouse with a couple of confused marketing personnel wandering around.
Since public funding for science is drying up, It is only fitting (and indeed, in the biotech industries best interest), that Biotech firms be required to pay a certain percentage of their profits back to a public organization like the NSF or NIH, based on their usage of publicly-derived techniques.
Think of it like a scientific GPL. You want to sell stuff based on public research? Fine. Jsut give 10% back to the NSF so that other scientists can keep creating the techniques you exploit.
90% of the posts here are overly concerned with the cost of subscriptions and the peer review system. To both I say, "Who gives a flip!?!"
/. loves to scream about censorship. No one has a RIGHT to taxpayer funding, regardless of whether you call yourself an artist or a scientist.
First of all, the peer review system and high subscription cost exist due to the scarcity of page space. I would graciously direct you to the NASA Larc website. (Do a google search.) About 50 years of NASA studies have been opened for anyone to read. Do a search on whatever interest you have and be presented with a list of papers. An amazing resource, and no need for any sort of reviewer.
Second is the argument that scientist don't have time to read through every study. The government has already paid for the previous research. If you don't have time to read the papers in your area of study that the government has already for, then why should the government pay for you to create more verbage that wont' be read. Peer review!?! Damnit, if I'm going to pay you, you ARE the peer that is doing the reviewing. If you're not qualified to review the previous research, how are you qualified to do more!?!
Thirdly, are the American taxpayers paying for studies to determine if ketchup is a vegetable? How do we know when the results get locked away. All the funded research should be opened so that we can all review what we're paying for. If you're doing valuable research, then you'll have no problem. But if you're researching something that a large majority of the taxPAYERS find unworthy or reprehensible, then you need to look for funding from someone who agrees with you. I'll answer the objection now as
This is one of the few instances where the government is coming to their senses and using some basic logic. The one who pays the band gets to choose the song. Hooray for the NIH!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Indeed, that is an excellent question. And the answer varies depending on whom you talk to.
a s-long-as-we-carry-the-GOP-label George W. Bush types.
I tend to divide the pro-free-market crowd into about 4-5 categories:
1) Anarcho-capitalists -- Often seen quoting Ayn Rand and Austrian economist Murray Rothbard. these guys are crazy. To these guys, everything -- literally, everything -- should be privatized, even the military and police forces. All disputes should be settled between 2 parties, perhaps w/ govnt's *only* role being that of a contract-disputes resolution system (i.e. govn't = court system and that's it). To these guys, even fraud is OK...
2) Libertarians -- Also quote Rand and Rothbard, but more for the philosophical aspects of her work than the ideological absoluteness. They believe in only such government as is defined *strictly* by the Constitution -- essentially, only enough government to allow for a military and police force; even fire depts. and (to some Libs) roadways are verboten. At one time, I considered myself an out-and-out big-'L' "Libertarian". Now I consider myself a small-'l' "libertarian" (i.e. I agree the big-'L' philosophy, but I'm willing to compromise to see a policy with a libertarian tendency get passed), or even a member of the next group...
To answer your question of the freedom of the market, even the Libertarians believe fraud and deception should be illegal, because to Libs, fraud and deception are moral wrongs (as they are to most people, like murder).
3) libertarian Republicans -- Most-often seen referencing the work of Milton Friedman (as I do incessantly), Friedrich A. Hayek, and Adam Smith. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to fall generally into this category, and for the most part, so would I. libRepubs are willing to accept a little more govn't where the alternative produces results which are clearly too-great to ignore, but again, only so long as the *general* trend is towards increasing-libertarianism. So perhaps socialized education is OK, as long as it's done via a voucher system. Some environmental laws (against toxic waste dumping in rivers, for instance) are OK, seen as necessary evils. But the emphasis is still very very strongly on cutting taxes and reducing legal paperwork where necessary so that businesses can go to work and employ the citizens.
4) Republicans -- This is a *broad* definition. Includes everyone from the still fiscally very-conservative Wall Street types to the fiscally-moderate John McCain types, to the neocon don't-give-a-fuck-if-we're-socialist-in-practice-
5) conservative Democrats -- Favor capitalism, but only *very* barely; even so, it's mostly out of a hard, grudging realization that "communism" (Soviet socialism) failed. They demand heavy regulation, high taxes, and in effect cause low productivity and economic growth due to their fiscal policies. They favor the mixed economies similar to the economies found in Europe -- socialist, with enough market freedom to allow businesses to be created and allow people to, sometimes, have a choice in goods/services not seen as "harmful to the public good"...
Beyond that, you get the out-and-out lefties who want to abolish capitalism in all its forms, despite the fact that socialism (the only other viable alternative) proved a failure in the USSR (United Soviet Socialist Republics). They are irrational and don't mind using the means of govn't force to steal from people in order to achieve their personal ends... Most are wannabe Marxists; only a few really *are* Marxists...
Where do *I* stand? I believe fraud should be illegal. Bounty hunters should catch their marks within the bounds defined by the police (since Constitutionally, it's the govn'ts job to provide protection from enemies, foreign and domestic). If the police say "dead or alive," then the hunter gets to get the person dead or alive. If the police want him still-breathing, however, then the bounty hunter may not be allowed to kill him...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I maintain an FAQ on the NIH plan. It
answers a lot of the questions and objections raised in this thread. It also lists some concrete ways to help the cause at the end of the file.
Laws against dumping toxic waste in rivers are evil? So let me get this straight: lying and fraud are morally wrong, and should be regulated because they undermine the smooth functioning of the market, but regulation of mass-poisoining by dumping toxins into systems like rivers that by their very nature can't be constained by property boundaries is evil? That rivals Soviet communism in moronic adhesion to ideology.