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."

Comments

Commericialization is even more of an issue

[l2718]

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).

Re:Commericialization is even more of an issue

[aminorex]

If patents were required in order to incent pharmas to produce drugs, then there wouldn't be a vast market in generics. There is a vast market in generics, however. The only reasonable argument for patents as incentives is as incentives to invent. However, pharmas have concluded that it is not worthwhile to pay for your own research, when you can leverage off of publically subsidized research. A reasonable conclusion, based on self-interest, not on the public interest, that. Risk is thus avoided, and profits are still captured. This appears on the face of it to be against the public interest. However, Bob Dole did very, very well by it. Not well enough to be POTUS, but very well nonetheless.

Why is this restricted to journals?

[daeg]

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?

Re:Why is this restricted to journals?

[daeg]

I don't expect success. I realize that a lot of success in science comes from failure. Failure itself is unavoidable in that which is research. It's expected. But that doesn't mean that the information shouldn't be published, does it? If I'm researching or studying cell division under extremely toxic conditions and I notice that the radioactive particles from my experiment are causing my test cultures to suddenly multiply in an unknown way, why shouldn't I be able to easily -- and freely -- see that other "failed" research has seen the same thing?

Unfortunately, training the public-at-large that failed research != bad research would be near impossible. On the flip side, though, there is a lot of frivilous research that I'm sure we don't know about that "fails" and never makes it into peer-reviewed journals.

Re:Open Access

[AJWM]

My question, however, is just how much will the average citizen get out of reading a highly technical research report on a subject?

Irrelevant. True, most of them won't get anything out of it -- indeed won't even bother trying to find it. That's no reason not to make the information available to those who do want to read it and may well be capable of understanding it.

Unless they are well schooled in a particular field, they likely won't even understand what the abstract is talking about.

Likely? Perhaps -- but even if only 2% of the population is intelligent enough, (eg, those with an IQ high enough to qualify for Mensa), and only half of those have done enough reading in the field to undestand the abstract, (and people that smart tend to do a lot of reading in many fields), that's still well over a million people in this country who could read it and understand it, given the opportunity.