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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
As far as the NIH funded research is concerned, anyone can look up a topic on PubMed read the text of an abstract, obtain an author's e-mail and receive a reprint or pdf of any publication. Most researchers are eager to send along copies of their published work ...
What's all the fuss about?
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.
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
I'm an assistant editor on a small academic journal, so while my experience is limited, I have some knowledge of what it takes to put out a journal.
You're right, it's not really the publishing that's expensive. But neither are the high costs of journals due to the proofreading/editing/peer review stages. Almost every respectable peer reviewed journal (whether for-profit or non-profit) uses volunteer peer reviewers. The editors are also usually volunteers (certainly with any non-profit or association journal). And publishing costs are no higher than for printing any other type of work.
The high costs are due to the increasing consolidation of academic journals under a few journal corporations. Academics of all fields need access to journals, so their schools have to pay. So costs have soared several hundred percent in the last few years. Additionally, for-profit publishers often require schools to buy bundles of lower-quality journals if they want to gain any access to the higher-quality journals. And researchers have to publish, because failure to publish reduces chances for jobs, as well as destroys the open exchange and criticism of ideas that characterizes science.
However, for the journal to remain peer-reviewed, it depends on volunteer, unpaid articles and peer-reviewers.
No, the taxpayer paid for the research. The drug companies then use this research for next to nothing and reap most, if not all, of the rewards. It would be different if they paid back the gov the 700 million, but they don't.
The former is quite true. Actually, most reviewers aren't paid, period. It's seen as a way to contribute back to the research community. It works reasonably well that way--by the time someone is likely to be asked to review papers, they have quite a few publications under their belt, and they should have some familiarity with the review process.
I disagree strongly with the latter statement. It's been my experience that reviewers are generally highly competent to review the papers that they see. Part of this is down to the journal editorial board--they have to find appropriate reviewers, and perhaps there are some third-string journals that don't have the resources or contacts to find top-rate reviewers.
what the NIH needs to do is set up a publishing system that ANYONE can use and submit their work
Why? Instead of just being able to submit to a hypothetical future NIH journal, anyone is free to submit papers to any journal now. Granted, some journals do charge to publish--generally most will waive those page charges if you can demonstrate genuinely dire financial straits. You're also welcome to self-publish on the web, but then of course you don't get any of the credibility associated with formal peer review.
you get mod points and a team of very fancy reviewers who NIH appoints and have unlimted mod points
Eek. I'm not sure that 'mod points' would be a sufficiently precise tool for this type of review. In conventional peer review, reviewers do indeed offer a recommendation about the fate of a submitted paper. Usually there are three or so categories, roughly "acceptable for publication", "acceptable with significant revision", "not acceptable for publication". However, they don't stop there. Depending on the paper and the perceived flaws or areas for improvement, they will also return anywhere from a few sentences to several pages of comments. If a paper is rejected for publication, it's very useful for a scientist to know precisely why. Were there important controls missing? Is the manuscript inappropriate for the particular journal? Did the reviewer misunderstand the results? Properly reviewing a paper takes a significant amount of time--a few hours minimum, multiplied by the number of reviewers (two or three are typical; I know of very few exceptions.)
Also, where would this pool of highly-competent reviewers come from? Generally, the most up-to-date individuals in any field are very busy doing their own research. They don't have time to do detailed review and "moderation" of thousands of unfiltered web submissions. If you filter submissions past a paid part- or full-time editor, you're essentially right back to the old school peer review process.
those publications e.g. NATURE who charge me to view somone elses work are dead
You can have open publications without abandoning traditional peer review--you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. See for example PLoS Biology. It's an open publication--all articles are available for free, online. I think it's a very promising experiment, and I look forward to the launch of further PLoS (Public Library of Science) titles. Will they kill Nature or Science? Who knows? I'm willing to see how the journal ecology evolves.
~Idarubicin
Just how much do they pay for peer review?
Noone I know has ever been paid even one penny for doing a peer review.
Um, NIH already has a well developed infrastructure for this: PubMed Central. The problem is that not many journals are contributing full text to it right now. NIH does provide the abstracts only for just about every medical journal article in existence, as well as lots of other stuff through Entrez .
funny, though, when my daughter was born, she had a "left posterier cerebral artery blockage" (aka stroke), that wiped out her left temporal lobe.
Well, in my geeky nature, I was very glad to find the free Medline portal at the NIH website, and actually find out that one of the neurologists handling the case had submitted a case study with some similarities to my wife and daughter, as well as find out some other stats on neo-/perinatal stroke outcomes.
Very lucky for us, the ensuing seizures my daughter was having were caught in time (her presentation was apnea...), and she didn't have any ischemic damage due to lack of oxygen to the rest of her brain (hence, no cerebral palsy), nor any permanent effects from the anti-seizure drugs she was on for a year.
All in all, she's now a rather normal 4-yr old girl. We do count our blessings every day.
But find this kind of stuff out on Johns Hopkins' website, WebMD, etc.? Yeah, right!
Also helping us talk to the doctors involved, my wife is/was a nurse, and we both know enough general anatomy, etc., especially my wife's knowledge of drugs, etc., and I occupied my brain by scanning the big book of neonatal neurology, that we weren't totally in a fog when talking to the doctors, and could ask relatively intelligent questions and understand their answers and not be freaked out by the unknown, and be understanding when it was time to leave her in the NICU so they could draw blood from her.
So, yes, if a family member gets some weird cancer or other disease, guess where I'm going, if only to fill in the gaping holes on most diseases and conditions that are in "consumer" medical databases/websites/books?
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.
In this case it's different though:
The scientific magazines provide a service by organizing the review, choosing the material, organising it, then printing and delivering it. They don't do the review, that's done by other scientists. Now either that service is worth the money they're demanding or it isn't. If there's a cheaper way by spending the money on a few websites instead of all those magazines then they should either adapt their prices or go out of business.
At the moment the situation is unbearable. The scientists have to invest time, work and some money to get their articles printed and they have to spend a lot of money to read their own and other scientists work. I work in science and i think those magazines are simply too expensive and they're much too restrictive. The content they provide is contributed by scientists, yet those scientists may not even copy their own articles freely and give them away (or have them printed somewhere else).
This is really ridiculous. But for the editorial process (choosing and organizing what to publish) the scientists do all the work. This work is publicly funded. Yet the magazines insist that it's their god-given right to control the publication of that research and demand as much as they like for it. Now they even want to bar the scientists from publishing their work in a more convenient way.
I really don't want people put out of work, but those magazines definitely have to rethink their pricing. Also i think it's better to spend the money on a few more scientists than on greedy publishers.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Note also, that by-and-large, scientists are in favor of this change. They'd rather the money allocated to their science libraries go to having newer facilities, more staff, and a larger array of journals and search technology than to subscription costs. Many libraries are replacing printed journals with online subscriptions (since they can't afford both), and reading papers from screen or printouts just isn't as easy on the eyes. Scientists have to read a lot - and making it harder is not appreciated.
The problem was, the new, lower-cost journals weren't already "prestigious", so you only found papers there that couldn't get in to the high impact journals. Now, the new, lower-cost/open journals will be getting top notch papers, and as a result, their rankings will increase and scientists won't be disadvantaged by publishing there. Only the funding agencies had the power to make this hange happen. Scientists had been suggesting it for years.
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.