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

For people not in the know...

[byolinux]

...NIH seems to be the National Institutes of Health.

Re:For people not in the know...

[dr_labrat]

Nothing to do with knights then.....?

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

[Reality Master 101]

Microsoft: "Let's add a browser to the operating system."

Netscape: "But that would put us out of business!"

----

Apple: "Your O/S license is hereby yanked."

Clones: "But that would put us out of business!"

----

Repeat with AT&T, IBM, Standard Oil, Newspapers, employment offshoring, or anything else that puts people out of business.

Am I the only one who thinks its utterly bizarre that we have so many people on Slashdot who mindlessly think that putting someone out of business is always a good thing? Do these people not have jobs?

Re:Go science

[Megasphaera Elsdenii]

> Am I the only one who thinks its utterly bizarre that we have so many people on Slashdot who mindlessly think that putting someone out of business is always a good thing? Do these people not have jobs?

Possibly. The whole point is that scientists, being
dependent on publications to keep the grant money
flowing are practically forced to publish in the
mostly highly regarded journals. Ergo: such publications
become valuable, simple because they are scarce.
(There is only so much room in Nature, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,
Cell, Phys. Rev. Lett, and all the rest). Ergo:
publishers raise their prices to extortionate levels.
This is all the more scandalous since the whole
peer review process costs absolutely nothing.

Anyways, what the NIH now seem to be doing (and very
rightly so) is to force the scientists to use different
journals to publish in. In other words, they are
trying to do away with a completely artificial
monopoly.

Economic theory says that monopolies are always
deleterious. It has nothing to do with putting people
out of work; quite the contrary. Money not spent
lining the pockets of Elsevier and others will
be spent for other, hopefully better purposes.

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.

What about patents?

[michaelmalak]

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

Re:What about patents?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

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

Perheaps you could use some of their products to make your braincells function again...

Yes it is a ripoff because a particular company was gifted the money to make its monopoly and thus exorbitant pricing work. On something the public paid for. The proper way would be to have all generic drug makers make it.

You have fallen pray to the classic scam run by drug companies who make big eyes and in cute tearful voice say: "but, but ... we cure people, we need public resarch, governmeny grants, patent laws for protection .." (and as soon as they get it, cue change to an evil monster and snickering voice) "And give us all your fucking money or die, suckers! And you cant make anyone else make this drug cheaper, we own it, yes we own your asses!"

Re:What about patents?

[tunabomber]

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

Oh, c'mon. Give those Bristol-Meyers guys some credit. After all, they generously named the drug after us taxpayers.

Re:What about patents?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

That's what drug companies do: cure people for a profit

That they do. Emphasis on profit. Deemphassis on cure.

The type of advocacy you're engaged in -- if it were turned into action -- would result in fewer cures.

No. There would be less frivolous drugs (viagra?) which consume bulk of the private research funds. Instead there would be publically founded research (which apparently is already done) coupled with a large array of generic drug makers, competing on manufacuring quality and price.

It is simply a choice of two approaches: 1 where everything is done for the drug companies to enable them monopoly status and vast profits at the expense of dying people and 2. where research is done for the benefit of all and the drug companies are competing aggressively on delivery of that research.

What we have now instead is the worst combination of all: an incestous relationship between people in government, handing out public funds and research to their cronies in chosen corporations to make a killing, and at the same time to try to appear as "saviours" of sick people.

Re:What about patents?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

think the people who didn't die of cancer would argue with your emphasis.

Particularly the ones who died by not being to afford the $400 a day.

If you have a less-expensive model that has a long term track-record of producing more and better drugs, let's see the link.

Ah the age old cry of a thieving tyrant. You know, that is probably exactly the same tone in which some two-bit lordling in the middle ages would say to a rebellious peasant: "And if there is a place the likes of you have a voice in any of the kingdoms about, show me! No? Off with your head.".

Times on the other hand showed there was a better way after all.

On a serious note, yes, there are places like Canada, where at least partially an effort is being made. In Canada in return for the priviledge of 20 year patents, the drug prices are controlled. Perheaps you heard of that slight spat that the Northrn states are having with the FDA over importing those drugs to save their dying seniors?

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.

Probably Not

[orion024]

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.

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...

It's a bit like saying...

[Hamster Lover]

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.

It's not the publishing

[geneing]

that's expensive. Proofreading and editing is expensive. Sending out papers for peer review and keeping track of the comments. Keep in mind that many scientific journals publish less then a thousand copies.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

How would it actually work?

[bcrowell]

And without journals, who would do the expensive work of selecting, peer-reviewing and editing research results into the clean and scientifically reliable products upon which scientists and the public have come to rely?
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:

• Traditional print journals (ones that charge subscription fees) should all be forced out of business. They're dinosaurs. They have absolutely no excuse for continuing to exist.
• The success of arxiv.org should be emulated in other sciences besides physics. But note that this has nothing to do with peer review.
• There should be nonprofit peer-reviewing societies; peer reviewing is already unpaid work, so this is something that should be possible to accomplish with fairly easily. It should be hard to get the seal of approval of the most selective peer-reviewing societies (as hard as publishing in Phys Rev Letters), and easy to get the seal of approval of the least selective ones (as easy as publishing in Phys Rev).

Re:How would it actually work?

[Hoplite3]

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.

That's the way it is my my field too (math). The print journals are yesterday's way of paying organizers to setup peer review systems. Now they exist to tax research institutions with subscription costs. No one wants to photocopy articles out of a journal. They get the preprint online. There are other electronic preprint archives, such as the Stanford one.

The essential problem is to pay an administrator to parcel out reviewing assignments to researchers. These people could be effectively funded by a coalition of universities, because god knows they'll get that money from government grants anyway.

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 .

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.

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 about time

[3opan]

It is very important and good news:
many authors of research papers,
especially in medicine, have to transfer
copyrights to journals in order to publish
(and get tenure or senior positions in
their institutions).

Copyrighted material is then owned by journals
that are NOT necessary nowdays. Peer review
can be done in better way over the Net,
since peer reviewers rarely get any money
for their effort. Some money gets into
editors pockets, but even that is often
minor. So, why should researchers give
copyright to journals who are not important
anymore, and also reduce accessibility to
their papers. That is definitely the next step
in freeing science (which is based on openness
for many centuries).

BTW, related site:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

This is fantastic

[0x0d0a]

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.

Re:peer review...

[Idarubicin]

what I dont agree with is that the reviewers in most case for publications get paid pitance or are completely out of their depth

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.