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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."
hopefully this will help filter out bogus research by opening it up to more eyes.
You know it's a good idea when companies start screaming, "But that would put us out of business!"
U.S. taxpayers pay $700m for Taxol wonder cancer drug; Bristol-Myers reaps $1700m profit
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 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
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
Please explain the precise benefits of the UN-involvement you propose. It might also help to cite examples of similar endeavors where the UN's involvement has proved beneficial.
This question is genuine. A lot (a majority?) of the American people are sceptical of the UN, including myself. Here's an opportunity to show how the UN can help with something.
(It might also help to show what the benefit is to the United States. It's easy to show that one side benefits in a completely one-sided arrangement.)
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.
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.
No it is not. At least not in the same terms as physical objects. Since it only has two states (known/unknown). The only economic barrier you can place is at the boundary of the two. With physical property, the boundary is set at the right to control the physical object (car, house, etc). So yes, you can get paid to keep your mouth shut, but that is only a delaying tactics, because information can be independently discovered and also deduced from someone's elses actions (product) and the secret is out. "Owning" information on the other hand is like trying to "own" the Sun and then demand royalties for its "use".
Only 1 company would benifit, possibly for eternity, or until somebody else "discovers" the same thing.
No. Untill 1 month later a first reverse-engineered knock-off is out. And 3 months later untill the market is flooded with knockoffs all competing on price and quality. That is how PC revolution came about. IBM (mistakingly as it turns out) allowed the design information to be released free and the piece that was not (BIOS) was quickly duplicated. The rest is history. In your way of doing things we would be still paying for IBM ATs $10k a pop since IBM would be the only maker with the "Intellectual Property" for it. You are arguing the exact reverse of what you think you are. Free markets (free from frivolous protections like "Intellectual Property" laws) are the only way Capitalism can surivive and not turn into cronie-corporatism.
The concept of intellectual property isn't flawed (its worked well for 200 years)
The concept of "intellectual property" is fundamentally flawed, the only saving grace was that this was not apparent for the last 200 years whereby the only applications were books, art and specific industrial designs. But a logical progression of that approach is to treat DNA sequences as "property" and demand royalties on one's offspring, claim that radio waves beaming through your body from a satelite are not yours to decipher, that a schoolchild singing a song violates copyright etc etc etc. And it is only going to got worse, because the concepts of "information" (as in whiffs of electrons in someone's brain) and "private property" (as in a brick house) are mutually irreconcilable.
You know, the general public has free access to all of the peer-reviewed journals. They call them libraries. They, too, are paid for with our tax dollars.
On the other hand, printing non-reviewed data or preliminary data results in "cold fusion" BS.
In another field, the lack of prestige that a peer-reviewed journal carries would have permitted the nay-sayers to swamp Peter Mitchell's chemi-osmotic membrane transport theory (that lead to the discovery of active ion channel pumps). The establishment roundly criticized him. Absent the peer-review panel that critically examined his work, I doubt that cellular microchemistry would have made the advances it did in the early 1980's.
You are correct, the big journals will continue...but what do we lose by consolidating yet another group of publishers? These aren't "The Enquirer"; these are rigorous niche publications and their loss will contribute to further losses in our access to controversial and innovative work on the edges of established fields.