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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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?

[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 .