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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."
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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 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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*?
College professors and because they love it.
Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,
Really? Bettering the health of the general population isn't any incentive at all?
pharma patents were removed, much of medical research would halt and never progress beyond where it is now.
Nope. It wouldn't change the demand for new drugs at all, just the process by which they are developed. Instead of handing over large chunks of public money to pharma companies which they then leverage into large chunks of private money, we could put both public and private money into public research. And in doing so we could better prioritize research. You know, fund the things that actually help people instead of what's just going to turn a quick buck.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
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.
So before we had these huge pharmaceutical companies and drug patents, we didn't have any medical research, right?
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.
I am so happy for you that you and people like you in your ivory towers have access to ALL the major journals. Not all of us have that sort of access to those articles, even though our tax money paid for the research that allowed them to be written.
American public funds it, but placing it into public domain — as GGP poster wants — would make it automatically freely available to the rest of the world too.
Making stuff is easy these days — designing, researching, developing it is hard. I would like us to be able to pick and choose, what we give away, and what we keep.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Ultimately, the money should come from grants. Pay the researchers reasonable salaries, don't waste money on marketing and we should be in a better position to fund research than we are now. The money the pharmaceutical industry spends on research comes from the public anyway, either in the form of grants or selling the drugs to the public. Why not cut out the middle man? I really don't care if research isn't profitable because it's best done by non-profit institutions anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
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.
Whaa? You might get paid to publish a Harry Potter novel, but not a scientific article. In fact, it isn't uncommon for authors to have to pay to have their work published (e.g., there are many journals for which the authors must pay to publish if their paper exceeds a certain number of pages).
If anything, pushing toward a free publication model would only serve to help researchers who have limited funding because that would be less $ spent on accessing the research of others. (Though this expense tends to be borne not by individual researchers as much as by their institutions, and thus is more of an indirect overhead expense to them.)
Well, you must not have worked on a journal before. I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more And we have a fairly high budget. If my university's general funds and outside grants didn't cover our costs, our journal would disappear instantly. You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
The argument that the legislation will force journals to go open access might have some merit; however, I don't foresee t. The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
Hope that makes more sense...
The only consistency in life is the lack thereof
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.
I love the idea that this might happen...
My only concern is that publicly available scientific material might cause the cerebrally challenged (as frequents the Bush Whitehouse), to be more inclined to censor scientific material paid for by public funds before they even get to be displayed. They've made it perfectly clear that when the truth is either incovenient, or embarassing to their religious affiliations, or whichever corporate interest that owns them this week, they haven't the slightest discomfort in hacking the truth right out of a good scientific research paper.
I'm all for public information... sadly we don't currently live in time or place that empowers great thinking... or any other thinking for that matter.
"Comrades, what is our research quota this month?"
"2000 science-hours! We have already reached half that!"
"Good, then we will be assured of our grant next month!"
The point is...the free market is best (not perfect, but best) at directing funds to the 'best' research.
If research were centrally funded, how would one decide which to fund? How would one pick a decider?
Full costs for publishing are around $10k, and journals generally do only marginally better than break even.
I don't believe that. Everything that you have to do to have a paper published costs YOU money. You have to pay for the research, and to get the paper published you have to pay a fee of around 80 USD per page. To get your paper published you usually have to give up the copyright, and to read your own paper you have to pay for the journal subscription, which usually is an insane amount of money. On the other hand, the publisher is happy to not pay you anything for peer reviewing other papers (which costs at least an afternoon if you want to do it right), or do other work for them. Only if your are employed directly by the publisher you will get paid. So scientific publishers have much less costs than magazines and newspapers (they don't have to pay their authors), and they get much much more money from subscriptions. I think they earn quite a lot of money.
-- Cheers!
> 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).
You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
I said "$50k per journal". And, no, of course there is no way that Nature could get by with $50k/per journal; that's because Nature spends a lot of money on things unrelated to the core function of a scientific journal: they are spending money on increasing their ranking and citation index, they are spending money on making things better for authors (at least the ones that are accepted), they finance a big staff of journalists, etc.
But those are really abuses of scientific publishing. Not only is it unnecessary for Nature's function as a scientific journal to do any of the other, expensive stuff, it artificially distorts the importance and reputation of the journal.
The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
Or, alternatively, the journals will simply have to focus on the essentials: reviewing and distributing, essentials that can be provided at minimal cost. If behemoths like Nature can't be financed that way, all the better. Nature is a fun and interesting journal, but people should pay for the "fun and interesting" part separately from the peer reviewed journal paper part.
I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more
So am I. If you need a "big staff" for publishing 10 articles a year, you are doing something wrong and deserve to go out of business.
Simply stating something doesn't make it the case. The free market is poor at directing research for several reasons - there is more money to made in tweaking 'symptom relief' drugs than cures for difficult diseases, and the customers of products lack the necessary knowledge to buy the most effective treatments (just look at how well herbal, and worse, homeopathic remedies sell for evidence of that). Leave it to the free market, and all we'll have is flu capsules with slightlytweakedmolecule(tm) and snake-oil.
Research could be directed by the department of health informed by academics and doctors. Believe it or not, that's how an awful lot of research is done anyway.
This make for interesting listening on the subject: http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=59
About 70% percent of the papers I go looking for are under lock and key, with the key being upwards $30 per paper. This is just for an electronic, windows only, pdf file, which I download from an automated site. Precisely why papers cost this much is beyond me, as most are poorly written and not very useful. You're essentially playing lucky dip, looking for that paper that will be of use to you. The difference is that you're paying $30 a pop.
Strictly speaking, I had a problem. I have in fact simply given up on restricted content, and if my university doesn't have a subscription to a journal, and I see a "give us money" splash page, I just regard the paper as "lost" or "unavailable" and move on. It's not really much of an impediment to research, though there are drawbacks. The drawbacks are however significantly less that blowing $300 in one day on mostly useless pdf files.
Basically, if I can't get my hands on your paper, I'm not citing it, and frankly that's your problem, not mine. If people insist on publishing in restricted journals, they'll have to accept the consequences. In this digital age, online pay per view content may as well not exist.
May the Maths Be with you!
Whoever pays for the research ought to own the results. If that's the NIH, than the taxpayers, the public, own the results.
If you work for the public for less than you'd work for substantially less than you'd work for a corporation, then either you're very generous or you're a fool. But it's not the NIH's fault if you underbid yourself.
The point of funding basic research with public money is because it's generally not profitable. If there's profit to be made as the result of it, maybe you should be looking for industrial funding instead. But since it's generally assumed to not be the sort of thing you can patent and turn into a revenue stream, there ought not be a lot of problem putting it into the public domain.
What you seem to be asking for is to have your cake and eat it, too: you want the public to pay for your research, but then you want to own it at the end, and prevent the public from getting what it paid for. Sorry, but I don't think it should work that way. If you want to own the results of your research, and you think it has profit potential, go find some venture capitalists. The public's purse is not your bank.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."