Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.