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

Yes! A step closer to the Age of Info

[bzipitidoo]

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.