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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?
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.
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.
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.
-- Alastair
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
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...