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."

Comments

Not so easy

[smoondog]

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.

Re:Not so easy

[gEvil (beta)]

Honestly, I've given up on this debate around here (and for the record I fully support these open access policies). I used to work at a nonprofit scientific journal (small 3 person office, 15 AEs, ~45 review board members). Our print run was a little over 20,000. Our operating budget was a bit less than 1M a year. We barely broke even each year, and any extra that was made was funneled back into the next year's operating budget. We were all making average salaries and could easily have been making more in the for-profit world. Slashdotters are all convinced that they know how to run a publication for absolutely nothing. Save your breath. They simply don't want to understand that regularly producing a quality journal has costs, time, and effort associated with it.

This needs support

[digitalderbs]

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.

Re:horrible idea

[Kadin2048]

I don't think the parent was talking about putting privately-funded research into the public domain; the issue is research funded with public monies, by the NIH.

I agree with him, that research paid for by the public ought to belong to the public; you shouldn't be able to get the government to pay for your research and then use it to get a patent that lets you deprive others of the fruits of that research for a few decades.

Nobody is saying that a company can't pay for research itself and reap the benefits of it.