Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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.
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...
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
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
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
And no patents may be granted arising from the research - all info automatically goes into the public domain.
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.
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.
You paid for the Space Shuttle too. That doesn't mean you can take it out for a joy ride whenever you want, much less go for a ride along next time they head to the ISS.
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.
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.
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
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
Of course, everybody knows that the US scientists never read papers published in European journals, never go to conferences sponsored by European institutions, never get funds from European countries (for example, getting paid by CERN) and, generally, never take any interest in, or profit from, European-made research. And, of course, all PhD students in the USA graduated American colleges and are pure-bred Americans.
Let me spell it out to you: science is i-n-t-e-r-n-a-t-i-o-n-a-l. You have friendly (sometimes not) competition between states, nations, cities, universities and colleagues. An open competition, where everybody can read everybody's papers (as long as they can afford the subscription rate, though) and this is the beauty of it. Go stick your nationalist head somewhere else, and don't try to spoil one of last bright aspects of our civilisation.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
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.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
---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.
Who sorts through the info to determine the junk from the real science?
Vote for Pedro
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.
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.
... 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.
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).
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.
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.