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A Bid for Public Access to Fed-Sponsored Research
An anonymous reader submits "Your taxes support lots and lots and lots of research that gets published in journals that you can't access without paying absurd fees to the journal publishers. So, for example, if you'd like to read the latest research on SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) because your pregnant wife had two sibs die of it, you can't, even though you paid for it. Well, somebody's trying to fix this — there's a pending bill (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, S.2695) to require public access to Federally-funded research: This would let anybody access the work for free within six months of its acceptance for publication by a peer-reviewed journal."
As a scientist I have to say this is a great idea, but it misses the main problem of government-funded research. Certainly if the public paid for the research, they should be able to read the paper, but an even more important issue is that of patentability. The current situation is: we (taxpayers) pay for basic research. Then the universities get to patent the results. Next, private companies license the patents and get a monopoly on sale of products embodying the results of reserach we paid for. The rule has to be that the results of research that has been funded by the public are not patentable. If you want to patent the result, use private money (industry grants, university tutition money, whatever).
To really fix the research system to be what I would consider fair, it shouldn't be restricted to peer-reviewed journals. If it is truly financed solely with tax money, it should be open and completely public -- without restriction. I want to know and read what failed research is out there, who did it, why, and how much it cost. I want to know that $600 thousand was wasted on tiger and big cat research because some idiot left the cage unlocked and the tigers escaped. I want the data. Yes, of course being in a peer-reviewed journal helps ensure the research is correct -- but not all Americans want to read the "good" research.
This is a start, though. Does anyone think it will actually pass?
I work for a biomedical publisher and fully support open access policies, especially for publically-funded research. My question, however, is just how much will the average citizen get out of reading a highly technical research report on a subject? Unless they are well schooled in a particular field, they likely won't even understand what the abstract is talking about.
This guy's the limit!
Currently some journals (especially the very prestigious ones like Nature) want to have complete control of the paper. At the start this means they won't take anything the public has seen before -- that's part of their take on only publishing "original research" [hence the reasonable six-month delay in the proposed law]. But they also insist on having the copyright in the article assigned to them [they mostly need some form of this so they can disseminate the article in new ways that didn't exist when it was written]. Unfortunately, sometime they take these ideas too far (as in preventing people from publishing the papers on their own websites).
The internet is slowly forcing the journals to change. This law will make them chagne faster. They will have to accept that their function will be limited to providing reputation (via peer-review and editorial policy), and in some cases providing the first view of a paper. However, they will no longer be the only way to get the paper so the value of a journal subscription will go down.
In math and physics the researches are already annoyed by the system. Essentially it works like this: we do the research, often being paid by the public via a government grant. Then we write the papers. Then we referee papers for journals for free, and serve as journal editors for free -- no scientist gets paid by the journal for either writing the paper or checking that it's correct. Then the journal turns around and charges the community money to read the papers. Of course this is untenable and open-access journals are beginning to flourish. Moreover all journals live with people posting the paper to their website (either the preprint or the journal version) as well as having preprints freely available from the arXiV. Still some journals are expensive beyond belief (given that they get the content for free and all the editing is done for free and all they are giving is reputation). Many researchers will have nothign to do with an Elsevier journal because of this kind of behaviour.
What is your reason for asking this? Are you attempting to justify keeping the reports secret?
Where were you when the voynix came?
About time, I'd say.
Quick clarification up front: most universities will let you read their subscription to the appropriate journal either for free or for a modest fee. So it isn't as if there's some monumental hurdle here anywhere.
But yes -- I am definitely in favor of some kind of access system to the peer-reviewed literature that keeps the results that I produce on the public dime in the public domain. What good does it do me (and I'm strictly appealing to my own, personal selfishness here) to have reseaerchd X and Y and Z when I can't even prove that I've done it to anybody other than someone in the same field (who's probably my buddy anyways).
Science is, in the end, one big open source project. Where everybody is pooling their methods, their strategies, their ways of thinking, their experimental results. Science works because everybody can see what everybody else is doing and everybody can critique what everybody else has done (and ultimately improve upon it). Now, 99% of the population are plainly not qualified to comment on any one random scientific result -- but if we want to overcome this scientific illiteracy then it isn't going to happen by keeping scientific results out of the hands of people. It is going to happen by exposing them to them.
All progress humans have ever made is, in the end, scientific progress. And if we want for humanity to progress as a whole, we'll have to continue sharing that progress around.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
This all sounds good on paper, but the real effect is that it's going to just kill public funding of science, and the scientists that depend on public funding. In effect, this is making two separate tiers of research. Public research has to go into the public domain, but that will make it less valuable to the institution that is hosting the scientist that does the research. Private research is going to bring in more money to the hosting institution, and those researchers are going to be more highly valued.
Say we've got two candidates for a position at the University of Texas. Candidate A brings in a private grant for $5,000,000, and candidate B brings in a public grant for $5,000,000. In other respects, they are equal, and only one can be hired. Obviously, it's in the University of Texas' interest to hire the researcher with the private grant, because UT can then license any resulting patents. The publicly funded researcher is kicked to the curb. I'd say that the allure of the money is so strong that even two very unbalanced candidates (Candidate A is a slacker and candidate B is a superstar) would not be considered equally.
I'd make the bill much stronger - any research done at a public university anywhere goes into the public domain. If someone wants to take money and produce patents, they should do it with private money, at a private institution.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Just about all of the several respondents after me also wondered if your message implied some sort of justification for keeping the information away from the proles.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The granting of patents to federally-funded research was enabled by the Bayh-Dole Act. Yes, we "already paid for it". But the reason it was passed was (in part!!!) because well, the idea that a scientist could make some great discovery, and not see much material benefit beyond the salary he was paid for it, tends to get their undies in a wad. It can skew their incentives so that they don't put the time and effort into the work that would be later justfied by public demand for the fruits. "Ah, I'll come back to this tommorow."
Before I get a bunch of simplistic objections, I DID NOT JUST CLAIM THAT SCIENTISTS ARE LAZY DO-NOTHINGS WHO CARE ONLY ABOUT MARTERIAL BENEFIT. I DID NOT JUST CLAIM FEDERAL RESEARCH WOULD PRODUCE NOTHING IF IT COULD NOT GET PATENTS. I DID NOT CLAIM THE NUMEROUS OTHER STRAWMEN YOU'RE GOING TO SHOVE MY POST INTO. I'm just saying, that if all federal research were to be unpatentable, there would be a non-trivial penalty to the research progress, as scientists might suboptimally allocate less additional units of effort. How big this is, I have no idea, but it is not a costless shift, and the fact that we "already paid for it" is no excuse. I'm willing to bet many of you, by the way, would object to a professor not being able to get a copyright on books he wrote while working at a public university.
If you still believe in public-domaining federally funded research, great, but do it with knowledge of the costs.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I have no problem with some things I "pay for" via taxes not being available to me. Here are a few things taxes pay for that I don't care to have access to...
1. Detailed instructions on how to build a fighter jet.
2. Various couches and chairs in government facilities I'll never visit.
3. My grandmother's medicare payments.
I'm sure you can think of others.
... but how about making all government funded research created technology free to the government. For example, if my tax dollars helped develop and market drug X, why the hell should my tax dollars have to pay market price when someone on medicaid is perscribed drug X.
I think that all government funded research should be internationally patented by the US Governement and all rights to manufacture based on these patents should be free to any US owned and based corporation. This would give the US an edge in the global technology sector.
Some would argue that this would hurt competition. I agree, but not entirely. Sure Company X who developed technology X on a governement grant would never be able to own the patent on the technology... however they still paid their workers and maintained another year of success in the market. Next year, they can pursue private investments with thier new reputation and create a for-profit product based upon patented improvements to their previously disclosed discoveries.
This system would help prevent government funds from going into wasteful duplication of efforts in areas such as cancer/AIDS research who's goals should be the improvement of society rather than massive profits anyways. If the governement would dole out dollars according to the need in society, then this system would work for everyone.
Essentially this would turn the grant system into the Gates Foundation... where those recieving money must agree to share their findings.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I agree, local libraries often have multiple subscriptions, and university libraries should be open to the public (I have certainly never had to show ID to access the university libraries). All of this information is already avaliable to the public, if they are willing to go get it... subscription costs of journals are more involved in the physical printing and distribution costs of the articles. If you dictate that every journal should post all new publications online for 6 months, who do you send the bills to for hosting the data? Why should the publisher be required to pay the costs to give 'convenient' access to their publications? Also, as it has been pointed out, abstracts are always freely accessible (through services such as the NIH/NLM's Pubmed) and this data includes contact information for the authors, who are (most) always willing to email a PDF copy of the manuscript if you take the time and effort to ask them.
it is a pillar of the argument for anthropogenic global warming
No it's not. That paper hasn't been important for over a decade. This is just like the religious nuts who attack Darwin instead of current theory.
> your financial support of the intelligence community's operations does not imply that you have a right to the information they uncover
This is where we begin to disagree. Much of the black budget is black because in a democracy or under rule of law such behaviour would never be allowed. Never has any slogan been used to such evil ends as has "national security".
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
And wow, just look at the reaction from the self-titled nerd community. A whole 5 posts over +2.
The problems with this, as I see it, are at least fourfold:
1) The companies that want to keep the research results private have money and influence, and will likely lean on Senators and Congressmen to vote against it.
2) Someone will bring up the topic of weapons research.
3) The Bill [PDF Warning] specifically excludes research that is unpublished or rejected for publication, which boggles the mind.
4) The Bill claims that it will not materially alter the status of any copyright or patent, however I doubt the research papers' authors and publishers will agree.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You are kidding, right? Have you forgotten that monopolies violate the entire concept of laissez faire capitalism? Monopolies, in the case of patents, are considered to have some benefits for society. However, the history of research and development long predates monopoly patent protection. Do you really think the inventor of the wheel went broke because he could not find enough customers?
Patents expire, and companies that produce formerly patented inventions do not go out of business. Benadryl Allergy is twice as expensive the generic brands. However, drug stores still carry both. This means that people are spending twice as much money as they need to in order to get essentially the same thing as the lower priced product. Aspirin has similarly had a long history of making lots of drug companies money, even as a commodity, which it has been for quite some time (if it was ever patented). Your post implies that this situation is impossible.
The assumption that monopolies are a part of capitalism because monopolies are a part of the current system in most, or even all, capitalist countries does not make monopolies a part of capitalism. Monopolies are socialism by nature. It is society granting one individual or group of individuals the right to produce a thing. This is not very different from the East India Company having monopoly rights on trade with East Asia or Soviet Russia monopolizing production of shoes. These monopolies stopped all other people that wanted to trade with East Asia or produce shoes in Soviet Russia from doing so. It is hardly capitalist to exclude people from the market.
In a true capitalist system, anybody could produce any invention. Companies would have to compete on price, on materials, on product quality, and on customer satisfaction and perception. Whenever the government artificially increases the prices of goods in the market through grants of monopoly privileges, the government is acting in a socialist manner in direct opposition to laissez faire capitalism.
Note: Do not construe this post to mean that I am anti-patent. The argument about whether or not patents are necessary is a separate one. I am merely arguing that patents are not "capitalist" in nature.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
NIH and the National Library of Medicine has been working for years to make information available to the public. Grateful Med/PubMed has been online for at least 10 years that I know of. Yes, it consists primarily of abstracts. But abstracts tell you most of what you need to know. Ask a scientist to tell you honestly how many of the papers they reference in their work they actually read, or only read the abstract.
For the last several years NIH/NLM been making full articles to some publications available via a link on the abstract.
And, the idea of making all the research they oversee/fund available to the public? The head of NIH asked for this a year and a half ago: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm
As for material that the general public isn't able to understand, NIH translates and publishes an enormous amount of public oriented material on paper and on their web sites. They even have teams of people who go to large public gatherings (fairs, pow wows, etc.) and have vendor booths where they hand this stuff out.
NIH has already been pushing for more and faster release of information, and they already put out more useful information for the public than some entire departments. It'd be nice to have a law to make them all do it, I'm just saying they already have a good model to follow.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Perhaps "capitalist" was a poorly chosen word. Maybe "Profiteering" would be better. My concern is that if you limit a large corporation's ability to be profitable in one specific situation, they will find a way to be profitable in another situation and avoid the first.
CEO Joe Schmoe isn't going to continue to pump millions apon millions of dollars into a university research lab if he knows that the outcome will not be patentable. He will move his money and research into privately funded facilities. So the whole goal of opening up federally funded research will result in less federally funded research.
I would LOVE to see open research, I think it would be a huge boon to man kind to have that kind of information shared. But I don't think that opening all research will have that outcome. I think patent reform would be a significantly better way to acheive this goal.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
As a librarian, shifting the costs to the authors, even if the money is ultimately coming from the same source, is beneficial. Currently authors pick which journal to publish in mainly on the perceived prestige and whether or not they think they have a reasonable chance of getting their paper accepted. Making the authors sensitive to the costs is probably the only practical way to change publishing habits, though in of itself, it's not sufficient. Authors can reasonably claim they don't have a choice either, at least until they get tenure, as they need to publish often and in highly-regarded journals in order to survive in the academic world. Libraries, as servants of the researchers, have little influence over what journals we actually subscribe to. Our mission is to support the research goals of the faculty. If they need a journal, and our budget allows, we pretty much have to get it. We can suggest that the researches publish in open access journals, or society journals instead of commerical ones, but ultimately we don't have any levers of influence beyond simple persuasion. The only people that can actually influence to cost of a journal are the authors, as they have the ultimate club to use on the publishers: withholding content. From the point of view of libraries, this proposed legislation is a very good thing. At my library, we spend in excess of 2 million dollars (US) on journal subscriptions each year, the majority of them being science-technology-medical journals. Our budget is entirely paid for by state taxpayers, tuition, and bond funds (we're state university). While the university does skim off about 50% of all grant funds for 'overhead', the library does not see any of that money. We would certainly keep subscriptions to core journals in each discipline, where a 6 month wait would be undesirable. And this would not spell doom for the publishing industry. Many publishers already make their content freely available after a 6month - 2 year embargo and have not suffered (see Highwire). The people that would be impacted are the shareholders in the large commercial publisher, as the stocks prices might fall a bit when publishers like Elsevier can no longer deliver 5 billion dollar per year profits