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

It's about time

[oneishy]

hopefully this will help filter out bogus research by opening it up to more eyes.

Re:It's about time

[Decaff]

Peer review can be done in better way over the Net,since peer reviewers rarely get any money
for their effort

The amount of money that reviewers are paid (I was never paid anything) is irrelevant. Someone has to organise the reviewing, and act as referee in conflicts between reviewers and authors. This is conventionally the editor of the journal. These editors have a lot of work to do. There will need to be a whole new structure set up to organise reviewing, and to categorise publications and to ensure quality of presentation.

Simply stating that everything will be 'open and free', could potentially demolish a centuries-old and tested mechanism for maintaining quality in science.

Go science

[CGP314]

You know it's a good idea when companies start screaming, "But that would put us out of business!"

Re:Go science

[BWJones]

The cost of publication is not insignificant, and the issues related to electronic publishing are similar to those faced by all publication houses. However, the right business model will take advantage of this market and be able to compete with new practices where other companies are either unwilling or unable to succeed in. Many of the existing companies already have the means in place, just not the willingness to capitalize on this potential.

Under the old model, when one would like to have their results published in journals like Journal of Comparative Neurology or Science or Nature, there are going to be publication costs, particularly if publishing lots of color images. Internet related journals like MolVis are significantly cheaper to publish in given that one is not making printing plates and such, but there are still labor costs associated with assembling the articles as most scientists know little about the nuts and bolts of publication.

Publishing my last article in Journal of Comparative Neurology cost something like $4000 US due to the color images, and then there are costs associated with subscribing to those journals that universities and such have to incur. Again, moving to Internet related journals are significantly less expensive, but journals now have to worry about piracy issues as well as distribution issues and quality issues that for the most part the .pdf standard rectifies. Most of the journals are now publishing on the Internet with the .pdf standard, and now are dealing with issues related to how competition in the publishing business using the Internet.

Now if we could only get a decent tablet design that allows for .pdf reading and markup.......Apple, are you listening? Do you want to leverage OS X, Quicktime, Preview, Inkwell, and the iTMS to gain entry into the publishing business? The academic markets would be ideal for just such an entry and could be a profitable cost center that for the most part has the standard (.pdf) but is missing 1) distribution model 2) appropriate hardware to deal with all of the e-book issues that as of yet have not had a decent solution.

What about patents?

[michaelmalak]

U.S. taxpayers pay $700m for Taxol wonder cancer drug; Bristol-Myers reaps $1700m profit

Re:What about patents?

[Waffle Iron]

What a ripoff. A company gets almost 2 billion dollars and all their customers get is "not dying from cancer"?

That's great. But you forgot about the other $700 million taken from the taxpayers, most of whom weren't dying from cancer. The company now has that money, too.

Perhaps the first $700M of any patent-related profits on this drug should go to reimbursing the taxpayers for the risk-free capital provided to the company.

This is already happening sometimes!

[calebb]

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...

peer review...

[johnjones]

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

Gasp! But isn't that "socialism"??!!

[Cryofan]

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."

Re:Just to play devil's advocate here...

[Kohath]

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.)

Cosmo for scientists?

[mmmmmhotpants]

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.

Set up a replicated network for papers online

[hattig]

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.

Re:businesses suckling from the taxpayer's teat

[grolaw]

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.