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Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."
Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers
Oh, they'll give you free access to all the papers you want. But nobody said anything about charging for the ink.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Having access to papers is one step, but surely any fruits of this research should also be placed in the public domain.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As a search scientist, I am a huge fan of open access and I have published and promoted its use in the past. However, there are more issues than just making it law. For example, PLOS Biology charges $2750 US for a single paper. Right now, a budget of $2-3k per year for publication is a reasonable cost, if that were to rise to $2-3k per paper, it could get very expensive, at tax payer cost and at the expense of research activity. How are we going to bring down the cost of open access, perhpas the feds should get into publishing? I am personally a fan of looking at other, perhaps less expensive options, such as creating open data repositories that are publicly funded or focusing on community driven knowledgebases that are in the public domain. Lots of papers aren't very interesting, requiring those authors to pay open access costs is a recipe for useless expense.
Unless things have changed since I was a grad student, scientific papers are circulated as preprints to others active on the subject matter. I have read that lately preprints are often hosted on PCs in the authors' lab. While this is often cited as being unfair to less well known researchers, one of my advisers pointed out that he sent out significantly more preprints than the number of people actually likely to be able to build on his work. Still, it does seem if the government is paying for the research, it should be publicly available without charge. For that matter, it should probably be unpatentable also.
Publishers make cash from advertisers, from readers (subscription costs) and even the authors (charges for publications, color figures). As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public -- I further believe that all academic publications should be free, but that's a different topic. NIH and NSF (National Science Foundation) research is really the property of the people that pay for it -- the public -- and authors have been somewhat powerless to change this broken system. We're required to adhere to the policies of high-impact journals as well as sign over copyrights in many cases.
I hope this is the beginning of new open policy for academic reports. At the very least it belongs to the US public (or whichever gov't funds the research), and at best, it belongs to the public in general. With digital costs being a fraction of printed costs, there's really no reason this shouldn't happen.
I have modpoints, but I just had to post here.
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious. This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit, do layout, maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks. It makes sense then that there should be a way for journals to recoup their expenses. I don't think forcing top authors to publish in lesser known journals is the way.
A better solution, I feel, would be to ensure that the (NIH grant winning) authors pay an up-front cost to ensure open-access for their articles. Most of the big name publishing groups I'm familiar with (i.e. Science, Nature, Elsevier, etc.) allow this. The cost is usually not prohibitive (~1000 USD) and would be a better solution for ensuring that the science paid for by government agencies is open to everyone.
I have been for some time... Creating a global hegemony on information is the purpose of academia, however. Which is why I will be somewhat surprised if it passes. The thing is, these days, its just not needed... people are so caught up in the importance of the degree and the academic experience, there will always been a need for the high-cost academic world. So why make the access to their information, just as high cost?! A reformation of the patent system would also go very nicely with freedom of information!
...and it should be known by now
>Having access to papers is one step, but surely any fruits of this research should also be
>placed in the public domain.
Place the fruits of research in the public domain? Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*? Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop a new drug?
Most people agree that the current software patent system is bullshit, but even if you think software patents should be thrown out entirely, what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug, or to publish the results of research. As it is, if pharma patents were removed, much of medical research would halt and never progress beyond where it is now.
We want researchers to publish the results of their research without worrying about giving away the product of their companies research to competitors. Currently, patents and only patents protect this system.
Well, if they can do this with our gov. sponsered research (and they can), then why not require network neutrality for all networks that are based on monopolies? For example, comcast has the local monopoly for coax (and I believe fiber). The feds can require that they have network neutrality as a means of having the monopoly. If they give up the monopoly, then they should be free to do what they want.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Speaking as one who has had occasion to do research, there is a choice of ways to find research, but they're all mediocre at best. It's so easy for them all to be a lot better.
Libraries suck. To be fair, many of the reasons why they suck are beyond their control. They've still got the old card catalogs, which aren't too bad considering the obvious limitations. Nowadays they tend to have a few computers with various quirky proprietary search programs and data that are of course not available over the Internet like the library's catalog is likely to be. If you're lucky, you don't have to put your name on a waiting list for those very scarce machines. You won't have to let someone else on the machine just as you were getting the hang of it, because you're up against a time limit. You might even be able to save your search results in some other form than printouts that cost $0.25 a sheet. Often the library doesn't carry some journal. On one occasion when they did carry a journal I wanted an article from, their collection started 3 months later than the article I wanted. Another time I discovered the volume I wanted had been checked out, or so it seemed. When I asked, their records showed it hadn't been checked out, so I went back for another look and found that volume had been misplaced, one shelf over. Yet another time, they had the journal and volume, but someone else had got there first and ripped out the pages containing the article I wanted.
The other major way, the Internet, is not bad. The biggest problems are you won't find the old or the very newest, and quite a bit of stuff that should be there isn't thanks to publishers extorting copyright on material from their suppliers. Still, Citeseer manages. You can at least find out a paper exists and get an abstract even when you can't get the whole thing. Nothing quite so infuriating as paying $10 for some article that sounded promising but turns out to be crap. This legislation will make research via the Internet better.
And, this leaves one less example the likes of the MAFIAA can use for their propaganda.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
If a scientific journal wants a piece of my tax dollar, they should be thanking me that they get ANY taste of the proceeds. Beyond the cost of production (editing, reviewing, web serving, rainy day reserve, and limited printings), they have no business being "well heeled" on the public dollar.
Funding their other endeavors on the profits is great, but in that case they're gonna have to sell Congress on the width and breadth of what are in fact publicly financed activities. How nice are their offices? How much are the execs paid? How much are they pissing away on boondoggles? Do they sue citizens for redistributing material that their government paid to publish?
The margins for DoD contractors are limited by law, our shit gets audited constantly, and designs developed on the Federal dime belong to the Federal Government. Gotta play if you wanna get paid.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Most university researchers probably don't have a problem. Most of the major journals I can get through the university library, even online access from home via the university library.
They don't get everything, but they get a pretty large chunk of what's out there. I've rarely had problems finding stuff I need.
I suspect most companies doing research can afford access to these as well. While not cheap, by any means, it's certainly within the reach of most moderate sized companies.
About freaking time. In today's day and age there is no excuse for access restrictions to federally funded research. I've found there's a small but active group of people who don't work in our field but nevertheless are intelligent and willing to take the time to learn about a specific area due to a real need; they or a family member has a disease and they want to learn everything they can about it. They'll never be 'experts' but that doesn't mean they can't make some sort of contribution (Lorenzo's oil). Besides which, who the hell are these journals to tell us that we have to pay them X amount of dollars to have the privilege of getting OUR work published in their journal and then effectively turning over all publication rights to them. Talk about a crock; it's one of the biggest cons in the business. With today's digital revolution we don't even need hard copies of these things eliminating the need for the asinine journal system.
It'll be interesting to see if the bill passes. Shit head has threatened to veto it and the dumbacrats have threatened to override (because there's a bunch of other crap in the bill they want passed). Apparently the only way to anything done in congress is to sneak a bunch of crap in a bill and hope there's enough garbage to appeal to enough morons that they'll do the 'right' thing and vote for it when what there actually doing is catering to what ever PAC is whispering in their ears. In spite of everything we seem to continually survive in spite of ourselves. Hopefully we'll continue to survive but do so via a method that makes more sense with better leadership in both parties.
Hoo-goddamn-ray! Scientific journals charge huge page charges to author and gigantic subscription fees. This outmoded system is inefficient and the lag between discovery and publication is years. It is pointless and stupid! It's about tiime we didn't have to pay these expensive intermediaries (who pay zilch to editors and authors) for the privelege of overcharging us.
what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,
Drug patents are an even better candidate for throwing out because the drug patent system isn't working.
Right now, a big part of drug development is already publicly funded. Furthermore, the government pays a huge amount of money for those patented drugs. If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug.
And that's assuming that the drugs that are being developed are actually useful. In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Drugs that provide symptomatic relief for common, non-fatal illnesses are profitable. They become even more profitable if they are simply minor variations on well-known drugs (i.e., provide little additional benefit). Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances, or that go for risky and small patient populations are not profitable, but those are the drugs that we actually need.
If the people have already paid for the development (through NIH funding) then who should benefit from the patent?
The whole ethics of patenting is a seperate subject, but in general, I'd think that if public money funded the development then the fruits should be put in the public domain.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What the hell is the point of making it require yearly renewal? If it's a good law, it should be permanent; if it's a bad law it shouldn't be passed at all. In this case, making it require yearly renewal means universities and such can't depend on the journals remaining open.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious.
Well, and this legislation fixes that by forcing prestigious journals to either become open access or go out of business.
This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit,
Peer review, editing, and peer review management are handled by unpaid volunteers.
do layout
Even if the journal does all the typesetting, that is a trivial cost given the uniformity of layout and desktop publishing tools available.
maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks.
The "highly dynamic websites" are based on standard software packages that require about as much work to install and maintain as your average Wiki. Furthermore, that work is usually shared between dozens of journals for the same publisher, so the cost per journal is negligible.
If publishers need more than 1/2 admin position for a journal plus overhead, they are doing something wrong. We're talking a cost of maybe $50k/year.
this is about a comprimise. It basically says that if the publishers are using OUR research to feed from, then we want it back after a certain period. Basically, it says that if you are feeding at the public trough, then the public should get some back. What I was suggesting was the same. Yeah, slightly different subject, but in the end, same idea.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm really sympathetic to this idea. Personally, it'd be great. When I was on a university faculty, I never thought twice about access to papers. If the journal had an online version, it was pretty much guaranteed that the university had a subscription and (thanks the magic of IP mapped subscription) I could just access the stuff from my office computer.
Now, in private industry, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. If I don't want to trudge down to the God-damned library to read papers, which is very expensive in terms of my time, I'm screwed. I work for a small company, and there's no way we could afford subscriptions to all the journals I might like to occasionally read an article or two from.
But on the other hand...who is going to pay the salaries of all the people who collect and publish scientific papers? I realize we don't have so many typesetters and draftsmen and layout artists needed, since stuff can be distributed right from the author's PDF file. But that just means we have to pay for server bandwidth, people to set up good security so that the server doesn't get hacked and start spewing a billion penis-pill ads, people to program a simple but robust user interface so people can upload and download papers, pay other (expensive) people to maintain a database and good search engine so you can find what you're looking for, et cetera and so forth. No way it won't cost loads of money to distribute high-quality work broadly.
So who's going to pay for this? Should the taxpayers just take on this cost, too? The gummint set up a big server and run it? Is it really fair that all taxpayers pay for a service that a relatively miniscule number (mostly research scientists in academia and industry) are going to use? Or should it be some kind of overhead charged to each grant? (But in that case what happens to the private industry researcher not supported by a grant?)
It's a nice academic-minded wish, that stuff should just be free, but it misses the ugly fact of TANSTAAFL that all of us outside the ivory tower understand all too well. "Free" just means you personally don't pay the cost, which means some other poor schlub is paying his cost and yours. (Indeed, the fact of the matter right now is that university researchers get virtually free access to scientific journals, since the subscription fees are typically paid by the university with tax-free money, and the massive cost of providing that is paid for my researchers in the private sector, who pay enormous fees out of taxable income for their subscriptions.)
I don't have any good simple answers, and I agree something should be done, as the present system is Byzantine and unfair, and probably needlessly expensive -- but a blind mandate from Congress that research results should be "freely" available, unless accompanied by some plausible, fully-funded plan to pay for making it available, is just more unreal lawyerly crap like legislating that all children must test above average, declaring poverty and stupidity illegal, requiring all cars to get a billion miles per gallon by 2025, or defining pi as 3.
I work for a publishing company that shall remain unnamed, but has a rather large stake in scientific publishing. Several years ago, our company president commented, in reference to state legislation that was being pushed to control the cost of college textbooks, that "campaign contributions just don't have the effect they used to anymore" and that the state PIRGs were just a bunch of fearmongers. While it it true that the cost of textbooks has gone up, because our customers are demanding more and more elaborate kinds of books, it is also true that our profit margins have remained the same: very large. His comment simply disgusted me. You can't go from talking about how "sudoku books are pure profit" to bemoaning the fact that people don't want to pay $200 for their intro psych book. Obviously, I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I think this is a bad company to work for (quite the contrary), however this kind of shortsightedness is exactly what is wrong with the world. I expect them to fight this legislation with equal vigor.
Well heeled my ass. At least in the life sciences, those journals are non-profit organizations with slim margins. Yes, some of the biggest ones turn a profit, but the vast majority barely hang on, being supported by their parent organization.
Oh, and many of them don't have offices. Its just a collection of people who do the work mostly by email and snail mail, and then send the proofs to a publishing company to print and mail. They have about as much in common with DoD contractors as Saddam did with WMD.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
Peter Suber who maintains the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access newsletter and the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) newsletter has been following this story for years.
You can find a lot of contextual detail relevant to the discussion by starting with the 11/2/2007 copy of this newsletter.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm
I was on the board of a small scientific journal deciding whether to go open access. We decided not to for two main reasons. First, though, you need to realize that peer reviewed journals are expensive, especially the "nichey" ones like us. The peer reviewers themselves are volunteers, but precisely because they're volunteers, you need a lot of paid staff hours to make sure everybody's got what they need and is getting it turned over in a reasonable timeframe. Most small journals barely break even. So why didn't we go open access?
1) "Open access" sounds great, but you have to realize that "open access" means "author pays." Someone has to cover the journal expenses. Right now, it's largely the library budgets of research universities that fund journals, as they take out expensive institutional subscriptions. (Individual subscriptions generally lose money, by comparison.) Once a journal goes open access, the libraries drop their subscriptions and journal revenue plummets. To make up that money, journals have to raise the publication fees they charge authors dramatically. So "open access" just moves the barrier from access to publication. We have interests in attracting more international authors, and when we told these authors, particularly those from developing countries, what it would cost to publish in an open access journal, they said there was no way.
2) There's a perception that open access is cheap, because a lot of journals are only charging around $1000 or so to make a single article open access. But the fact is that those journals are radically underpricing open access. They can do that because right now, only a few of the articles in each issue are open access, so the research libraries aren't dropping their institutional subscriptions just yet. So at the moment, that $1k is just gravy for the journal. But if you actually price out what it costs to publish a journal article, it's 3-10 times what they're charging. So once the scientific publishing world really shifts to open access, those journals are either going to sink or have to boost drastically their open access fees.
I'm sure you meant to actually learn how academic publishing works before issuing strongly worded opinions... maybe you ran out of time, etc.
However, I might be able to help by correcting a few points: 1) journal publishing isn't lucrative, and 2) the Government does not pay the publishers--they're on their own to figure out how to cover their costs, usually through subscriptions.
Thanks a lot, big brain. (K. Vonnegut, "Galapagos")
Even if there is open access to the articles, that will hardly change much. Few people skip on reading pertinent articles in the current setting. What is missing is access to data. Most "scientific" articles do not publish their experimental data. So there is no way to check their conclusions without trying to reproduce the experiments and then running the same analysis methods. If experimental data were required to be published, it would be possible to mine for information that original investigators missed. Since most of the cost is in conducting the experiments themselves, this would give taxpayers much, much, much more "bang for the buck".
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service funds a large amount of criminology/criminal justice research, and as a requirement, the author(s) must submit the article to the NCJRS so that it can be put online for the public. These articles are still published in journals, which are purchased by universities and the such. Why wouldn't a similar system work in the health field? I would think that if anything the health industry would find this particularly useful; easily accessible research would mean more educated health professionals, while most applicable research is simply ignored in the Criminal Justice system.
A peer reviewed journal for geeks. What we need is to take the same approach to the peer reviewed scientific journals. Currently, they leech off the authors, and turn around and charge exorbitant fees to the readers to boot!
Example: Just today, I needed some information on a relatively esoteric mathematical topic: maximal count linear feedback shift registers. I'm interested in relatively fast ways of finding dense polynomials, without doing the brute force try and see approach. However, most of the articles returned by Google were either to simple - they just discussed the general theory - or they were pay to view. Not only is the abstract uninformative, I have to pay in advance to read, which means that even if I should fork over the exorbitant fee, I might still end up with an article which reveals little more than Wikipedia. To folks like me, who do need this knowledge for professional work, even the peer-reviewed articles are worthless to me if I have to pay for them in advance, without a preview. I can't help but wonder how someone supposedly well-versed in math can't figure out the economics of publishing: that if they pay to have their article published, and the publisher charges readers a fee, that their article isn't likely to be read by anyone of consequence. Because I do professional work in this field, such an article would be of great interest to me; however, those who go the pay-to-publish route literally work themselves into obscurity.
Honestly, I don't understand why the prestigious research institutions don't offer their grant-funded research for free. Rather than publish in a little-read, expensive, journal, they could publish on the net and let advertising pay their editorial costs. Instead of hiring experts, articles could be rated by experts across the world, using digital signatures to verify the authenticity of not just the author, but the moderator as well. Readers could choose articles for reading based on their endorsements by recognized authorities in the field, rather than the selections of a few ivory-tower types.
Some might say that top research journals must be pay-to-publish in order to retain editors who are experts in their field. However, this argument doesn't really hold that much weight in light of the Alan Sokal Affair in which a peer-reviewed journal published rubbish that was easily recognizable as rubbish to even the most casual reader.
Interestingly, names like Schneier, Daemen, etc... are well known because their work is widely available, without a fee. I can't help but wonder if paying to publish in one of these peer-reviewed journals actually does anyone any good - because they are generally ignored by both industry and the public at large.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Bottom line: journals that publish freely online will be quoted more often than those that don't. This works, because several highly respected journals currently publish online. So it's self-reinforcing. So I guess I don't care if congress passes a law or not -- I think it's inevitable. Closing thought: a year ago I was searching all available libraries to get a copy of paper X, which was published in the 60s -- way before the www or internet. Finally I found it online! Someone had scanned it. And I'm much happier now that I've got the original source, and can read/interpret it for myself, instead of relying on others to summarise this oft-quoted paper. What does this mean? Journals that publish freely -- of for minimal cost -- online, will flourish. Those that don't, won't. -regards, dh
But on the other hand...who is going to pay the salaries of all the people who collect and publish scientific papers? I realize we don't have so many typesetters and draftsmen and layout artists needed, since stuff can be distributed right from the author's PDF file. But that just means we have to pay for server bandwidth, people to set up good security so that the server doesn't get hacked and start spewing a billion penis-pill ads, people to program a simple but robust user interface so people can upload and download papers, pay other (expensive) people to maintain a database and good search engine so you can find what you're looking for, et cetera and so forth. No way it won't cost loads of money to distribute high-quality work broadly.
We're already paying for all of that! Where do you think journals come up with the money for layout, printing and bandwidth? By charging us for access to research that we paid for in the first place! And aside from the physical costs, add salaries for these middle men, plus their lobbying to Congress to insure they can keep being leeches. Publicly financed access would be a insignificant fraction of continuing the private journal racket, and complaining about it is just another penny-wise pound-stupid reaction with those of an irrational fear of government.
PS: Here's a link to the current NIH Open Access Policy:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html
Folks who do not publish in scientific, refereed journals may not realize this but authors pay a lot in Publication charges. There are some that are open and free for the author but they are few. I suspect if this bill passes page charges in many of our higher-end journals (e.g., Science, Nature, PNAS, Cell, Virology) are going to increase. Now if this happens researchers will need to allocate more money from there NIH grants to cover higher page charges. And where does the funding for NIH come from? Federal taxes. Just something to think about in time when funding for science research has been scaled back and you puzzle as to why some scientist might not be so keen on the idea.
Maybe this will cause more journals to go the way of Machine Learning, which IMO would be awesome.
From wiki: The [Journal of Machine Learning Research] was founded as an open-access alternative to the journal Machine Learning. In 2001, forty editors of Machine Learning resigned in order to support JMLR, saying that in the era of the internet, it was detrimental for researchers to continue publishing their papers in expensive journals with pay-access archives. Instead, they wrote, they supported the model of JMLR, in which authors retained copyright over their papers and archives were freely available on the internet.
...are a serious demand economy, that isn't going away anytime soon. Big for profit pharmcos spend way more on marketing than they do on research. A combination of medical x-prizes and funding from large insurance companies and medical co-op type orgs (HMOs that didn't suck in other words) that could be organized by consumers would result in *more* money going directly to research and *cheaper* medical care for all, especially if the results were universally open sourced. Remember, the researchers and insurance carriers, etc are all humans, too, they need medical care the same as anyone else, and the more effective medical care gets, the more loot the insurance carriers can keep, meaning they could still drop rates yet make more money. I mean, damn, this is a winning combination if we could snatch the damn vultures away from medicine.. What would get cut out would be the middleman skimming and that's about it. So who cares really?
If you want out of the box thinking for new medical advances, out of the box economic thinking should be a part of it. Your tired old uber closed source capitalist model for medicine was semi OK in the 19th and 20th centuries, but this is a new time now with new universal high speed communications and the potential for fast knowledge sharing and fast development and collaborative research. Look at the other article about the medical researchers using shared grid time, look at folding@home and etc. Sharing *works*. Greed works, but not as good as sharing. Linux and FOSS works, from sharing. Medical care expenses are going up way faster than inflation, and that is fast enough. If it isn't fixed soon, only the very richest people will be able to afford modern medical care. Is that what we as human society want, a few billionaires at the top and a few more people under them as the only ones to afford good medical advances, because they get a lock on it, close the source off? I think that's just a stupid idea myself.
Look at the US a rich nation, yet every year for the past several years the number of people who have full medical coverage as a percentage of the population is dropping, and those that do have it keep paying higher premiums and have to absorb higher co payments, when there is *no need for that* to happen, if we were to open the process up and remove the middleman skikmmers who add *nothing* to the solutions other than their take.
Open access scholarly articles are a very welcome step in the right direction, we can all be friendly together as humans when it comes to something as necessary as medical care, and especially when it is already publiclly fnded. They shouldn't even wait a year, it should be immediately available, like the stuff at doaj.org and PlosOne. We can use the same bulk dollars that are thrown at the medical establishment today and get way more results just by sharing, and the actual thinkers and doers (HG2TG) there can still be compensated adequately.
Superwiz is most definitely correct to point out there is gold in them thar data.
However, it's not strictly true that either Open Access to journal articles "misses the real problem", nor is it true NIH and other organizations are not moving on this issue of Open Access to data.
1) The NIH has a Data Sharing and Access Policy which strives to get such data out there where all can reap the full benefits of mining it.
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm
2) NIH is also committed to funding both repositories and application of algorithmic tools for mining such data (e.g., all of the resources hosted by NCBI such as the Entrez data sets and tools). For some of the more complex data types that are being generated, NIH is funding grants and contracts to help make this data more available.
3) The Science Commons (associated with the Creative Commons) has as one of its primary objectives to create and persistently host a richly expressed repository of public research data (primary data and derived data) specifically to catalyze discovery by the broader community.
http://sciencecommons.org/
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The recognition is there. Some significant technical obstacles still need to be addressed. But I do think the desire SuperWiz expresses here will gradually become a given over the next decade.
I would also add that prior to the 1990's, no research lab made much effort to get their data (raw & derived) out into the "commons". Most didn't think of it as valuable, and there is some truth to the thought that such a deluge would slow - as opposed to hasten scientific discovery.
I believe this view is changing, and we will see the expectation data needs to be published will be a given within a decade.
Researchers, particularly young ones, do not have much of an option in deciding where to publish. Their tenure, funding, life depends on them publishing in a prestigious journal.
It's not really their choice. The people who can make tenure decisions are deans, but deans tend beancounters who only look at the historical prestige of a journal.
been there, done that.
And why does he need open access?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I see this as a potentially very bad thing, but I might be mistaken. Tell me where I'm wrong here.
1. NIH requires articles be published in journals that are free after a year.
2. Since NIH funds a TON of stuff, basically ALL journals must go free after a year.
3. Very small institutions and groups drop their subscriptions to journals because hey, they get the articles free now.
4. Those journals have to raise subscription prices to make up for the lost customers (because despite the summary's tone, I get the feeling they're not all swimming in profits right now).
5. Medium-sized groups and institutions have to be more selective in which journals when they subscribe to (since they have limited funds for subscriptions).
6. Lesser-known journals lose circulation, and therefore prestige, and therefore can't find those great "free" peer reviewers and go out of business.
END RESULT: There are fewer peer-reviewed journals out there, which means fewer peer-reviewed scientific publications. But hey, the ones that are left are open to everyone!
Who's this "Bill" guy and why does he want open access to papers?
They're certainly a big enough institution to just put out a quarterly or monthly "proceedings of the NIH".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Researchers have a job, and their job is to research things. That's how they earn their living.
Free software developers usually have jobs as well, many times as programmers. That's how they earn their living, but when they get home they start hacking free software projects and contribute to the free software communities.
I see no reason why a researcher couldn't do the same if they wanted: Keep their day jobs and when they get home start doing some research for free, network with other like-minded individuals to build amateur laboratories, etc.
When I find some free time I will start a wiki where researchers will be able to upload copylefted papers, and I hope I will have the time to write a few pages teaching how citizens can become researchers themselves and help science. If you want to help in the effort, drop me a mail.
This needs to be the case for all research, full stop. And no 'within a year'. All published research should need to be published with free access, or not published at all. This is a clear case of a way in which the government can help the vast majority of people and should do so.
Yes, I did fly off the handle. No, I did not take the time to cite the sources of my grumpiness. In almost any industry, when something comes along that might cut into the big boys' action, they trot out the little guys in whichever trade association. It's like watching the US GOP cry about family farms, when what they're really trying to protect is ADM's stockholders, when they cut estate taxes.
In academic publishing, as with publishing in general, there's been a lot of consolidation. As a result, what we're really talking about in this market are Elsevier, Cinven & Candover, Blackwell, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Sage, covering 40% of the market, and all continuing to buy out more of the non-profit journal contracts. The economies of scale you'd expect from this hoovering haven't occurred, and it seems that while the costs of publishing these journals has risen rather moderately, the subscription rates have not: monographs in the range of 60%+ and serials 150%+ over the last ten years.
Then there's the cable TV-like bundling practices: subscribe to the whole set, or do without.
I realize that the Federal Government (in the guise of the NIH, NSF, etc) aren't paying the publishers. But, they are paying the authors who must publish the results of what their grants funded, and it's a given that they should publish in a peer reviewed journal.
Luke, help me take this mask off
> In fact these journals provide for a significant source of grants for projects which are not qualified for federal
> funding.
I have never in my ten years working with scientists heard of anyone getting a grant from a journal.
Can you provide any numbers that suggest this should be a significant source for anything?
(Even if it was, with a few exceptions scientific journals are read almost exclusively by scientist, usually paid for by the basis research money for the institution. Thus, it would just move research money from one pocket to another, with a lot of overhead loss in the process).
Most of the world have public health care, which means that the development of the new drugs are going to be paid by the tax payers through the government anyway. Instead of the government financing the research indirectly through time limited monopolies, it could be financed directly through grants. This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary overheads, and more important, eliminate a lot of bad side effect from patents. Such as poor people being unable to afford medicine, despite the production price being well within their economic ability. That alone has most likely cost millions of lives in the third world. Add to that all the drawbacks of a monopoly (even time limited) that any economist will tell you about.
The research could still be done by private companies, competing for the grants.
PLoS Biology has an insanely high impact factor. If I got a paper accepted in a journal with an impact factor of 14.1 I'd be an instant star in my department, and my department head would certainly have no problem finding the money. It is really a small amount compared to the price of doing research. A Danish university researcher cost about 100.000 USD per year including overheads, so it would be 3% of the budget for dissemination of the research results. Not that bad. (They would probably like us to publish more than one paper per year, but most papers have more than one author, so one paper per author per year is acceptable).
And that is a worst (or best) case. PLoS Biology gets lots of submission because of the high impact factor, which means they have to reject lots of papers, which create a large overhead. Their other journals are somewhat cheaper to publish in, even though all of them have what I'd consider very high impact factors.
Also, the subscription fee for the PLoS journals is much lower than for the old style journals, so roughly, for every two old style journals we could cancel subscriptions to, we could publish one article in a PLoS journal.
We still see pre-prints occasionally. And we do sometimes read journals. But the vast majority of the articles we read are results from online search queries.
It is probably more extreme here than elsewhere, because we make models that integrate many different disciplines, but I suggest that the trend is universal. There are simply too many papers published in too many journals for you to even skim, so you rely on search.
Open Access journals obviously score high this way, as we are not dependent on our institution having a (online) subscription to the journal.
I was fine with your comment until you dropped this little turd at the end:
And, this leaves one less example the likes of the MAFIAA can use for their propaganda.
excuse me? are you 15? no digg, asshole.
This is a complete and utter no brainer.... Well okay it MIGHT require no thought but really.... If your tax dollars help pay for research, you damn well better be able to see where your money went... Not just see the bits and pieces the government thinks it's safe to let you have a look at
I can remember many CFP's where it says to only submit a paper if you or your institution can fund having it published... this reminds me of my old advisor telling us if we published in IEEE we'd have to get permission to cite the paper in our dissertation... I hope it was FUD, but I always thought IEEE was too expensive anyway...
We're talking about research funded by NIH grants, so if it costs $X,000 extra to publish in an OA journal, that's money the NIH will have to provide one way or another.
"The point is...the free market is best (not perfect, but best) at directing funds to the 'best' research."
Well, the answer is to stop the government from paying for all the research, since that's what happens now. The pharmaceutical companies can pay for the research themselves instead of spending all that money on marketing to doctors and TV advertisements.
The main journal in my field has a similar model: open access, no fees for either publication or reading. Oh, and authors retain full copyright. I guess these examples are all impossible eh?
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In the world of computer science, statistics, and related areas, many of us have put our volunteer effort where our ideology is and actually do run top journals in the field, completely for free. Some generous assistance is provided by sponsoring institutions in most cases, which isn't hard to get if you just ask, as many institutions are keen to get their name associated with a journal.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
etc.
In fact, you can just take a look at this directory and scan for the entries that say "Publication fee: no"---hundreds of them.
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In physics, it's now standard practice to digitally publish preprints on arxiv.org, which is where everyone gets their new results. It serves as an informal peer-review process, since people peruse and comment on new results as they come out. By the time something hits a journal, most people doing relevant work have already seen the preprint, so the journal is basically just a way of archiving the no-longer-new results. Or at least that's especially true in some parts of physics.
In many areas of computer science, conferences are now the standard publication venue, and journals are again mainly an archival depository, though this varies a bit by sub-area. In some sub-areas journals almost don't even exist, or have much lower prestige than the top conferences. And in any case, authors invariably post PDFs of their papers on their personal websites, and many publishers have given in to this de facto practice and officially allow it (it would be unseemly to sue your own authors).
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The NIH doesn't only fund research that's useful to researchers and companies, though it does do that (e.g. new drug research), but also research that's useful to practicing physicians, like studies of the real-world efficacy of treatment options, prevalence and severity of side effects, meta-analyses of the literature, etc., etc. There is a strong governmental interest in having the results of these taxpayer-funded studies actually be available to doctors, since that was the purpose of funding them in the first place. That requires: 1) that someone not keeping up with all the literature can still locate studies relevant to their practice; and 2) that they can actually read the study. The NIH created the PubMed online abstract indexing service to address #1; this bill would address #2.
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The main open-access journals in my field don't require author payment at all. They're run through a combination of volunteer labor, frugality, and institutional or professional-society sponsorship. And they're among the top journals in their areas, maybe even the top journals now: JAIR and JMLR. There are a lot of top-tier open-access, no-publication-fee statistics journals as well. Seems to vary by area.
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As an academic with publications, I find
the quality of the proofreaders and of the typesetters to be
abyssimal. I can accept that from a non profit journal that lacks manpower
but not from well known publishers (Elsevier cough Elsevier) that are sitting
on a pile of gold but are too cheap to hire good proofreaders and good typesetters.
Of course it is cheaper to hire monkeys typesetters and not to hire proofreaders.
Just read http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
to see what kind of work knowned publishers do. And it is a best case scenario:
cosmetic changes that neither add nor remove anything. In many cases, the typesetters
destroy the paper while editing it and since he doesn't indicate his changes, you have to reread
it line by line.
I am corrected... should have looked it up first (d'oh)
Looking around at some of PLOS's competitors, the fees for open access look about right. It doesn't look like PLOS is gouging by any stretch of the imagination.
You can't really expect publishers to publish for free because there are real costs associated with academic publishing. Most academic journal publishers are nonprofits. It's not like your $2-3k is to eek out 1 more cent per share to meet quarterly estimates or something.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
how about fixing copyright? (Neutering the Disney lobby) How many innovative derivative works will never be because the term of copyright is so long that works in the public domain are no longer (due to colloquial language of the era, at least, if not thematically) relevant? [btw: there's as much ground as I'm willing to cede to relativist linguists.] :P
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Anyhow, last I checked, NIH has a website. If they want their material published free of charge, nobody is stopping them from self-publishing. It is a free country, after all.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I would like this to prevent the large textbook manufactorers from buying the rights to an all holy metric crap-ton of case studies, making it where they are the only source for the study, so if they leave the study out of the international version (on accident) then we can find it.
In God we trust, all others require data.
A few years back Donald Knuth wrote a very enlightening open letter to the editorial board of his Journal of Algorithms. It gives a fascinating insider view of the process of journal publishing. My interpretation of Knuth's arguments is that traditional journals are now next to useless. Scientists already do all the typesetting and peer-reviewing of articles, and the internet means anybody can get together and start a free online journal with a very modest investment.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
Allowing open access to journals will make it easier for people to research diagnosing and treatments for new emerging biological threats, including those from a possible bioterror attack.
When first responders can find out the information we need, it can make us all safer.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Dude, at most universities there's a close match between physical and electronic subscriptions. Dude, if you don't have one, you often don't have the other, so you can't look it up first.
Dude, that may apply to archival material - say Science from 1962 that you don't have the archive subscription, but your university had a paper subscription at the time; but then again, dude, some people work at newer universities that haven't been around for a century. And dude, some university are actually downgrading their paper-holdings.
Dude!
It comes from the institution that subscribe. Where do the institutions get that money? Out of grants that researchers get as "overhead costs". Where does that funding come? Your tax dollars. If anything, this will increase transparency in the cost structure, in this day and age were overhead costs keep on rising much faster than salaries and actual research costs.
Something to think about the next time you decide to just FUD the issue.
You assume that subscriptions are the only business model available, or even that it is the current business model. Currently, a chunk of the money comes from author-pays. I would assume that under open access, many journals would increase author pays. On the other hand, I doubt that many even small institutions would drop subscriptions, because it's fairly important for researchers to have timely access.
Finally, under author pays successful universities would take up more of the burden of supporting publishing, giving the small institution low overhead to improve their research. So 2) is weak, 3) is wrong, which then leads 5) and 6) to be utter nonsense, finally dropping end result.
If anything, this may help decentralize publishing by decreasing the importance of publishing in "Nature" or "Science". Those guys are important because everyone reads them; everyone reads them because everyone has a subscription. With open-access, the smaller journals are just as accessible, so they get more readers, so they get more prestigious authors which then allow them to raise their page-rates or increase web-advertising... and so on and so forth.
Give people credit. They're not so stupid that they can't figure out how to make a buck. And the status-quo usually helps those who are already winning, not the underdog.
But since I see so much crap in my field make it to Nature, I'm pretty willing to bet that the stuff in other fields in Nature is mostly crap too. Since the good stuff is in the techniques and details, that stuff usually goes to the second tier.
On top of that, it's surprisingly often that editors pick the wrong reviewers to review, so really obvious mistakes makes it through. You're best off just not forming an opinion until you know enough, rather than going by prestige.
And really, what value is it to you if you don't understand the details?
In much of mathematics and computer science, authors write their papers in LaTeX, and produce final, print-ready PDFs of their own papers, so there are virtually no production costs---the journal just has to collate these PDFs and stamp page numbers on them, or complain to the author if there's something wrong. If you don't want to do the formatting yourself, you, not the journal, are expected to hire someone to do it. Perhaps in biology and medicine authors still use the old system where they provide the journal with an unformatted manuscript and expect the journal to do the print-ready formatting for them?
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Quite simply, I believe that all, and I mean all government funded (federal, state, local) information gathering or discovery should be by definition publicly published with library access (at a minimum). We have paid for it, it should be openly available to all. The Library of Congress should be assigned responsibility for the free access to this information with no delay (at least at the federal level). It should plainly be a fundamental requirement of government grants. Government exists to serve us, not the other way around and special interests be damned. We have been complacent for so long now that people fall right into line with whatever abuse we receive from government. Impeachment should be commonplace. When elected officials begin favoring anything other than the public welfare they should be promptly removed. Things like this "But Hill watchers said that -- given President Bush's threat to veto the bill for budgetary reasons and the likelihood of a continuing resolution, which would not have the new language -- it is too soon for the open-access movement to publish a victory paper." should be dealt with quickly and with conviction. Serving in political office should be just that, serving. Quick removal of self-interested persons will help inspire the remaining to pay attention to what people want and need. We got rid of one king -- we shouldn't help to create new ones.
Be as you would have the world become.
Many very important research articles are now unavailable to the public who pays the salaries and associated costs for researchers and their many colleagues down to the level of undergrads and summer research students to:
The public which largely has no access to the product - via the process described above - is essentially supplying the capital to power the current publisher business models largely - as others have said here - providing services (online publishing frameworks; bureaucratic support for the editorial staff; distribution networks to get the final product to the customers) that now-a-days can nearly be performed by a few sharp, motivated college students in their spare time, if the final distributed product were electronic only (e.g., if creating hard-copies of articles were left to the purchaser/reader).
Historically, what gave rise to this current situation?
Coincident with the accelerating government investment in science and engineering that grew during and after WWII, the number of scienctific, technical, and medical (STM) manuscripts began to grow way beyond what the typical professional society not-for-profit publisher could contend with. During the 50's & 60's, as the printing industry began to digitize, these same society publishers were strapped not only to cope with the editorial burden, but also the technical burden of linking in to increasingly digital print workflows.
Larger, for-profit publishing concerns could leverage economies of scale to handle both the increase in manuscripts as well as the need for advanced IT practices in handling that last step in the process (sending electronic proofs to the printer to create hard-copy for distribution). It was at this point - taking advantage of a market need - many of the publishers now charging these large subscription fees came into inheriting the responsibility for documenting and disseminating the collective knowledge of modern civilization - and locked in some significant profits (as sub prices have risen over the last 50 years) based on the value of this service to society.
So - as many have pointed out - these constraints and requirements that brought the publishers into the business have gradually melted away due to the rise both of ubiquitous, richly functional digital word processing & desktop publishing tools and the growth of the web in mid-to-late 1990s as a ubiquitious and user friendly platform for publishing information. Most of those former advantages the publishers had over the smaller publishers (and individuals) regarding the layout, publishing, and dissemination of research articles have disappeared.
As many others have said on this thread, it's a given now the raw published articles (in HTML, PDF, OOXML, etc.) have become very low value commodities. It doesn't make economic sense such commodities which the former slave labor (researchers/reviewers/editors) can fairly easily produce without any assistance from the publishers be able to support large, locked-in revenue streams.
Given that is the case, the question that remains is:
What will the NEW value-added services be that can enable the publishers to continue to make a living into the future?
This is not a new question.
But congressional Democrats have attached to the measure an unrelated but politically popular bill funding the Department of Veterans Affairs. They hope that this will generate the two-thirds support needed in both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.
These swindlers will never work for us until we formalize "no riders". It's the only way to get to "no pork".
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..