Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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!