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."

Comments

The NIH isn't the first to do this..

[steinnes]

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.

One draw back...

[Froze]

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.

Good but devil is in the details

[glockenspieler]

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.

Particle Physics ahead of the game

[levell]

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.

Re:It's not the publishing

[buxton2k]

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.

Re:How would it actually work?

[platyk]

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.

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 .