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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."
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.
I think that should be the public's problem. If I want to get my hands dirty reading some very techincal jargon, maybe I will get it, maybe I won't. But I should have the opportunity to do so.
Gadget News at Gizmo.com
There's a problem with this: scientists can't promise success. I'll be afraid of accepting a grant if it's based on me promising to deliver results. The current system is that my next grant application will be reviewed based on what I did with the previous one. But it's crazy to expect basic research to work like clockwork. Moreover, it's difficult to judge things in hindsight. In mathematics in most cases people don't solve the problem they set out to solve, and in any case they do it in a completely different way from what they said they will. It's best to think of a theoretical science grant and giving someone money and saying "just do something good with it". What you really want to know is how many papers were written using the grant and if they were good, but not if the specific things the reseracher thought they might do three years ago were actually done.
Experimental science is very different. Grants are much bigger and are earmarked for specific projects. But still, say the project failed -- what the scientist wanted to do cannot be done. Then this is, in itself, a scientific result. Now it may be that in hindsight it may have been better to fund a different approach that might have worked, but the real question is whether this could have been figured out in advance.
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.
Slightly restated:
"I work for an operating system company, and fully support open source policies, especially for publically-funded projects. My question however, is just how much will the average citizen get out of having access to highly technical source code? Unless they are well schooled in programming, they likely won't even understand what the header files mean."
Surely nothing good could come out of something like that, since it's impossible for a mere layman to self-train and provide any help to existing researchers...