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Government Makes NIH Research Open Access
TaeKwonDood writes "Let's give some credit to the government when they do something right; in this case freeing $29 billion of taxpayer money in NIH research to actual taxpayers. Within one year after peer review, NIH-funded research has to be made freely available on PubMed.
A Democratic Congress passed it and a Republican president signed it. This is a tremendous asset to researchers who don't want to have to duplicate research or pay fees for every journal out there. Those media companies getting rich selling journals, like the ACS, don't like it, but everyone else will."
Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country. Back in 1998, scientists seeking funding had a 21% chance of getting funded on their first try and because of funding shortfalls among other reasons that chance fell to 8% in 2006.
Young scientists are absolutely struggling to launch their careers while senior scientists are worried about losing their funding and all of us are spending more time trying to look for money and apply for grants than we are spending time actually doing the science. All of this talk about open sourcing the science is great, but unless there is funding to actually do the science, it will all be for naught. The really scary thing is that I don't see any real fix in the near future. There has been so much damage done to the federal budget over the last six years or so that even if we started to fix the NIH budget tomorrow, it will likely take 5-10 years to rectify some of the problems and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
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To spare some the RTFA, In the USA, NIH = National Institutes of Health
The government is funding this research. Why does it get kept in private hands for an entire year?
Don't worry, there are a million examples of government screw ups for every one example of government doing something right.
I'd be interested to see if the journals that are missing out just forgot to pay their bribes on time.
In this age of open communication and online access to articles, there is no reason to artificially restrict access to research results. With a movie or a song, I can understand the argument for temporarily restricting free access to fictitous "intellectual property" as part of a broader scheme to encourage art. But when we are talking about paying to view the results of a labratory experiment, what the fuck? What many people don't know is that researchers have to pay journals to be published, usually on the order of $1000-2000.
What about the NSF?
All of this research is paid for by OUR dollars. It should be in the open from the gitgo (unless it is something that requires classification; I am not wild about China obtaining all of our laser tech).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The govt funds a lot of research through other agencies, so it would be nice to see some of that freed up as well. OTOH, I don't know that other agencies have something set up like PubMed.
This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.
At The New England Journal of Medicine, subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science, registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.
The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.
I'm all for open access, but I find the law problematic. Instead of requiring the journals to make their content available, it requires the researcher to deposit the article in a database. The result is yet another piece of paperwork we have to keep track of instead of doing research, and if we forget to deposit one of our articles, we are now breaking the law.
The only alternative is to publish in open access journals, which is fine in principle. However, for a cash-strapped lab, it can be hard to pay open access fees for several articles a year, even with NIH funding.
No, speaking as a librarian, this is not bad news at all. In fact, it is a boon. Instead of paying thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions, this legislation allows librarians to freely collect, preserve, organize, and re-dissemination this research in a way that will benefit all (except the publishers).
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate. The grant funding rate that you quote is from the period of rapid budget INCREASES.
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
I'm not pulling this all out of my ass, either. See here.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You already know why that is the case. The feds are shifting the priorities around. During early 80's, reagan came in, and shifted a great deal of research away from civilian dollars to DOD dollars. At the time, I was working at CDC, and our funding was cut. So, I went back to the university to do work (in 83). Initially, that group was picking up funding from NIH, nfs, and musclear dystrophy association. That was all cut and DARPA picked us up with some interesting twists to the research.
Now the problem is that DARPA is no longer doing long term research and instead is focused on only things that will pay today. Sadly, like ALL of the W. choices, this will costs America in a big way. Combine with W's tax cut for oil companies and yeah, it will be a while before research gets built back up. I feel sorry for you and the young researchers, but I feel sorrier for America. Our medium-term path, let alone long-term, is looking real bad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is not so much the absolute amount as the lack of planning. In the 90ies, NIH funding was increased rapidly during a short period of time, and then the funding increase was stopped abruptly. During the increase, universities and medical schools reacted by increasing their faculties, who then suddenly couldn't get any funding anymore when the budget increase stopped. The problem will correct itself when older scientists will have to close their labs because of lack of funding, and younger scientists won't get tenure for the same reason. The question is whether that is the correct way to treat some of the brightest and hardest-working people in this country.
All your research are belong to allofus.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These are peer reviewed papers. A paid editor has to find competent reviewers in the same specialised field, who are not known enemies of the writer, and get their consent to review. Reviewing is unpaid work, and all the reviewer gets is a preview of a paper in return for some professional risk. It takes some hours at a minimum to read, check out the oddities, and write back ones conclusions. There are two reviewers minimum. Conflicts have to be resolved, either by the writer(s) modifying the paper or the reviewers having something explained. Then an accepted paper has to be put into published format. Even web publishing costs.
It cannot be a free process. It could be a taxpayer paid process. So I can re-interpret your objection to mean: "If we paid for the research, why cannot the publication also be paid for?"
Perfectly reasonable. But you would need a policy on non-US research submitted for publication. Somewhat similar to entry into US universities. It's messy but feasible.
and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
This is one of the better arguments I've heard for funding science through means other than governments. Governments tend to do a bad job, are subject to bloat, corruption and influence peddling, and can't be fired. Plus, as you point out, their spending priorities are inconsistent over time. This makes staffing/careers wildly difficult, which is bad for science. Private charities and foundations would be a better source for funding science. I don't know how much exists currently to support this model, but it's worth pursuing.
Remember: Government != Society - those are two separate things, despite how much the US Government has tried to take over Society in the past century.
Plus, charity has a morally supportable philosophy if you're not in the "the ends justify the means" camp. I really want to find (or not find) the Higgs boson, but not if somebody's property has been confiscated under threat of violence for it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Don't worry, in the case of the NIH they can point to funding being doubled with no corresponding increase in publications.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Quantity != Quality
It's about time. There was a serious point to be made, though the parent was marked flamebait. Taxpayer funded research should be a public good--the public should benefit from it, since they paid for it. (In practice government revenue is spent on a mix of private goods to support the "winning coalition" and on public goods.) The libertarian impulse would be to privatize the research.
Since when has any government program been known for efficiency?
Be thankful for the earlier funding run-up, if you're of that mind. For the rest of us, this is just another illustration of how the free market is better than central planners at allocating scarce resources.
If you followed the link that I provided, they address that argument.
In any event the quality of the research has certainly not doubled (whatever that means) - it was already very, very good.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is in response to Mann and others refusing to share their data and their source code sited in their papers.
Did you read all the comments to the article you cite? The issue is certainly more complicated than you make it sound.
From my perspective, one conclusion is clear: If the current funding situation continues for much longer, either article quantity or article quality or both will significantly decline as researchers spend more and more of their time writing grant proposals instead of articles.
Suber's overview of the scene (there's an rss feed somewhere in there too)
- another blog
Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of Open Access Repositories
The "Open Knowledge" Definition
And Wikipedia has lots of text on the subject.
Now to go after NSF funded research as well
The issue is more complicated than I make it sound, but I was trying to balance what the original poster claimed. It may be frustrating spending a lot of time writing grant proposals, but blaming it on government spending is pretty unproductive.
Remember, the funding doubled during the period where grants became harder to get. There is no reason to expect doubling the funding again will change that situation. If the problem is that projects are getting more expensive, then they are clearly getting more expensive at some kind of square rate which won't get addressed by incremental funding increases - a 10% increase each year won't help much if the expenses are increasing exponentially. If the problem is that the funding is misdirected, then throwing more money at the same people who misdirected the funding won't help.
There are a lot of comments on that article, and some offer very good explanations or strategies to fix the problem - but I'd prefer to see the underlying cause identified and fixed rather than just throwing good money after bad.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Last time I checked, pharmaceutical companies pay taxes. In fact, they pay far more in taxes than I do, so they probably have more of a right to these research results than I do.
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate. The grant funding rate that you quote is from the period of rapid budget INCREASES.
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
So do you really think that the number of articles published is any real indicator of the productivity of NIH funded research? If that's the case, we should just ask the researchers to write more articles. Maybe they can split their bigger articles into smaller pieces? If each researcher split their articles in half we could easily double productivity!
For $10,000 I could build a modest "super computer" (imagine a beowulf cluster) to study problems in Agent Based Simulation (and there are many such problems that are health-related). For $100,000, I could build an even better "super computer" and study more interesting problems or go deeper into my problems of interest. I really only have the capacity to produce 4 papers in a year. From which scenario do you think I'll have the opportunity to produce the most interesting papers and most useful research?
I guess we can always just earmark the money for war-fighting instead.
"The government"? Of which country? Perhaps this new World Government(tm) i hear so much about.
You act like funding is a god-given right to scientists.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Please keep in mind, that the United States of America constituted it's government as a social contract amongst men to secure life, liberty, and property. Obviously, the US Govt doesn't always stick to this and I decry those problems as well. How did our government get so big that it could imprison you indefinitely? How did it get so big that it could make all the rules (and break them)?
Every time someone says, "the government should regulate/make a law/fund everything/give me healthcare" that person advocates for a larger government. Skateboarding isn't a crime until a gov't bean counter realizes that skateboarders take a larger share of socialized healthcare resources....etc.
This is of course, all off-topic. One bureaucracy must attach open-source rules to research done on it's dime. This is great news. Public dime, public property. I love it.
But please don't think that scientists are someone "entitled" to tax-payer money. If a majority or even plurality of tax-payers would like science to get money, only THEN should it be the case. Wars too. (:
THL phish sticks
Isn't the idea of being a nonprofit, you know, I mean, like, not getting rich?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The cost of the Iraq war is projected (by the GAO) to be around $2 trillion. That comes out to be about $300bn/year, counting the 6 years of Bush's tenure in which we'll be involved in it.
This is ten times the yearly expenditure on the NIH, yet there are more Americans who will develop (cancer | heart disease | diabetes/metabolic syndrome | clinical depression) than the entire population of Iraq.
Who's not spending their money wisely?
Yes, there is some dishonest stuff that goes on in the grant process, and the scientific community would appreciate any genuine help in stamping it out. But even if ten percent of NIH's funding is dumped in a pile and burned, NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military) that we spend our cash on.
So what you're saying is that the science isn't getting done? And we're not making a neat gun? And the people aren't even still alive?!
Oh Holy One of Blessed Name, we have to increase funding to the NIH!
Jesus, man, at least give me the benefit of the doubt and read the link that I posted.
No, the number of articles ALONE means nothing and that should be blatantly obvious. The problem is that the quantity of research funded did not seem to go up with the increased funding. In fact, scientists have experienced the opposite and are quite frustrated. However, like the original poster many of them seem to be under the impression that this is due to funding decreases, when in fact funding doubled. There are numerous theories as to why and how to fix the problem - but the important thing to note is that doubling the funding to the NIH has apparently NOT doubled the output.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Thanks for that (serious). I had presumed that they were the Knights That Say NIH (not so serious).
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
While depicting the apparent linearity to show no "jump" in productivity, the article you mentioned is actually comparing US vs. non-US paper output, which is showing a linear relationship.
What is to say that non-US science contributors are also received similar hikes in funding ? Where are the numbers on that? Where are the error bars on the graph ? What methods did he use to arrive at the conclusion, first , that the 4 keywords he used correctly reflect the quantity of papers generated ? Is there a standard curve that shows these keywords are good measurement parameters? I reckon that if he would have used the "-omics" words, such as proteomics, he would seen an exponential increase far in excess of what the funding justifies. Buzzwords are a bad strategy to assess research output. Every scientist knows that.
I know you did not write that article, but the article appears under a website called "The Scientist" , is it only I who sees the irony here? The article makes a flawed argument based on flawed methods. You point may be valid, but let's see some other evidence.
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
And then you said:
The defense rests, your honor....
i've spent so much time marvelling over battery technology lately due to all the remote control flying things i gave out at christmas, i thought this was about nickel metal hydride research.
You act like funding is a god-given right to scientists.
Hardly. However, if we are to maintain our position as a world leader, then we need to invest in research, education and development. The US got to where it is by investing big time in education (G.I. Bill and others) and science and research (NSF, NIH and others). Oh and by the way, you are sounding like one of those ignorant asses that tells a cop, "Hey, I pay your salary". Mind you that the cop and I pay our taxes as well and you are likely benefitting from tax dollars as well. Public education? Arts? Internet? etc...etc...etc...
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Ah...... you are losing credibility here...
But please don't think that scientists are someone "entitled" to tax-payer money. If a majority or even plurality of tax-payers would like science to get money, only THEN should it be the case. Wars too. (:
Society only benefits from education and research and have voted year after year to support science as the vast majority of Americans realize its benefits.
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I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Now that the US government has out-competed all the private basic science laboratories, we're kind of stuck.
I would be thrilled to have a company telling me what to do and paying me for it, but why should they do that when some government (US, EU, China...) will pay for basic research and grant them patent rights on the resulting engineering?
From one point of view, what we've done gives our companies an unfair advantage. From another, it's good business. That's why our science system is being duplicated in Asia and Europe.
Has the government lost money on scientific research, or has the increased economy led to more tax dollars? Should the government be required to spend "political capital" to increase the economy, or does that just make sense?
lazy good for nothing defense.
To me, the underlying problem is a lack of scientifically knowledgeable political leadership. Politicians don't want to hear about this and don't understand it. It would be nice if some of them were knowledgeable enough to take a critical look at the ways priorities in the grant giving agencies are determined. And really, it would be GREAT if Congress could figure out whether we have too few or too many scientists being trained in this country. My feeling is that we have far too many for the level of government and private funding we have available. I would like to see some conservative goals for the number of government funded grad students in a given field per year to try and rein in excessive growth and encourage growth in overlooked areas.
Of course, I don't have and probably never will have an NIH grant. Just because physics funding didn't double, doesn't mean we don't have the same problems.
Sorry, but your $29,000,000,000 was used to pay interest to the People's Republic of China for the loan we took from them to pay for the first year in Iraq.
Hope that makes you feel better.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Well, now, researchers can reallocate $28 billion of that $29 billion on something other than the companies selling other researchers information....
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The only "news" here is that the bill was passed -- after the program was implemented. I could access NIH funded work from my office in NIDCD. Anyone could walk in off the street and use the National Library of Medicine's library computers and do the same. Yeah, you had to be in Bethesda to do that, but it was in process in 2002. They started allowing the more directly controlled NIH work to be accessed from off campus in 2004. Since then they've been convincing the journal publishers this was going to happen, like it nor not (they didn't). The bill also specifies the funding, which was already in place because they couldn't test it without funding to pay for the equipment and salaries.
Having all those full articles is great for researchers. It's the right of the taxpayers to have it also. But for them, access to the abstracts is usually sufficient. Medline is too light, and the articles too heavy for general consumption. Access to abstracts has always been possible. I used to read the abstracts from Grateful Med (pre-PubMed)in plain old ASCII text at 1200 baud, from anywhere I happened to be. The front end back then was Gopher.
NIH is not the first government agency to go "open". NASA has already done so (except details of DoD stuff they do). Their storage and access system is far from PubMed convenience. It can take them weeks to find the documents that index the information you're looking for, and tell you where it's stored. Very often in boxes.
Bottom line, this was just a PR action. The work was already done.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This is a tremendous asset to researchers
It is, but is it only to them?
The assumption that research is useful only or primarily for researchers must stop: This assumption undermines the open access idea (it goes like this: "since research is read only by researchers, and most of them probably get access from their institutions or have the money to buy access if this is their job, there are no strong drivers for the adoption of open access"). This is wrong. Everyone can, should, and in many cases does read research.
Apart from researchers in the same field, there are other professional researchers from other fields who may be interested to read, for example a physicist may want to broad their horizons by reading some of the latest finds in archaeology. There are also the amateur researchers and gentleman scientists who may not have an official position in academia but nevertheless they also do research. But research can, should, and sometimes is being read by students as well. Moreover, even the general public should, and sometimes may, read some research if there is easy access to it.
Research must be democratised and ideally everything should be done publicly on a wiki (by the way I recently started CosmosWiki to support this idea). If research was more easily accessible and approachable, perhaps more people would take the steps to learn more about the world and become amateur or even professional researchers, and people's kids would perhaps feel more inclined to study science instead of becoming supermodels or office employees.
One could say that the public should read books instead of research, but the problem is that there are not enough authors who are capable of translating science in simple terms, therefore books often do not fully capture the available research in a meaningful way, and books quickly become outdated, and most importantly it usually takes a few years until the newest trends in research start appearing in book form. Therefore, if you only read books, you get maybe only 10-20% of what you could get by reading research papers (and when I say papers I mean real papers with actual results, not papers written simply to put one's name in a conference or spend a grant - you usually can distinguish betweenthe two categories of papers by checking whether the conclusions are testable or repeatable and whether the author makes extremely broad claims about the importance of their paper). I believe everyone should spend some time every week to skim through the most interesting papers on arxiv and similar sites where papers can be downloaded for free. Even though you may not understand everything, usually you can get the basic idea and keep yourself updated on the newest scientific findings.
We need to make people more inclined to integrate science in their daily lives. Open access can help with this. But another danger comes from the researchers themselves: They often assume that what they write is read only by people who are in their field. Papers authors should write keping in mind that interdisciplinary researchers or even students (and when I say students I also mean high school nerds, not only those in university) and the general public may read their paper, and they should do so without compromising the quality of their papers. For example, they could explain the various shorthands or abbreviations they use, rather than assume that every reader is familiar with them. So, please, when you write your next paper include a brief list of abbreviations to help people who need to search in order to understand some words or symbols they are unfamiliar with.
I really wonder why people generally don't understand these ideas... How can one in their right mind be more interested to learn the most uninteresting trivia about their favourite basketball player but not this? (by the way this guy is real
Must be /. judging by the level of the article and the comments. First, government funded research is normally free from copyright. Second, no one is getting rich from publishing academic journals.
/. has been the humor, and there's almost none of that these days, and this article is an especially unlikely venue. Perhaps karma for funny mods would help--but I doubt it.
Third, why am I wasting my time commenting? My only residual interest in
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military)
If it were not for the money we spent on our military, our military AND NIH budget would just end up getting spent on the German/Russian/Chinese military (depending on when you had decided to stop funding the military).
Now, if you s/military/pointless wars/g you might have something.
paintball
Hah! I used to dream of "Knights that say NIH".
When I were a lad, NIH was Not Invented Here.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
well i do have a funding problem so dig deep!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
What we might have developing here is a serious conflict-of-interest situation. NIH grants are generally reviewed by peer researchers within our scientific specialties. Since funds are now so limited, I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers themselves are thinking, "Well, if I score this grant favorably, that would leave less funding for my lab!"
But I digress. Star foreign scientists and students are no longer seeing a stint in the US as obligatory. Between the increasingly dire funding situation and immigration difficulties as well as rapidly increasing prestige of non-American research, they're opting to go elsewhere.
I also worry for the future of the US. But if the US doesn't want us back, I'll be more than happy living somewhere the people appreciate and respect science, and provide the funding to back it up.
The pentagon stop wasting tax payers money; here is an example, which always surprises me.
The US defence force when it is deployed, it ships a whole heap of equipment over, no attempt to find out what is and isn't needed, then once there, find our what is required, then ship back what is unneeded. Compare that ot most other defence forces. Take New Zealand, sure, we don't go into big battles, our main focus is on peace keeping, but when things are sent, the government demands that it comes out of the exiting defence force budget, that all the equipment is delivered on time and on budget.
The last big deployment by the NZ defence force was to East Timor. On that deployment, it was achieved under budget, before time - they came out of that with a surplus. Yes, a surplus.
The US government needs to start constricting spending, forcing efficiencies on these departments. Actually hold some REAL tendering of contracts rather than just rotating between the differing US defence force contractors - clue to the clueless, there are contractors outside America! and when they don't deliver on time, penalise them! This isn't charity, this is procurement. In the private sector, if suppliers aren't delivering their products ontime, there are penalties, its time the US defence force (and public service as a whole) woke up!
If the funding went up, the quality of research remeained constant, and the amount of articles published went up, then the awnser is simple.
Reduce funding, which if the quality of research remains constant, should produce more articles...
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
"Skateboarding isn't a crime until a gov't bean counter realizes that skateboarders take a larger share of socialized healthcare resources....etc."
;)
Heh, here in Australia skateboarding and Universal health cover both took off in the 70's, they have both been very popular ever since and have resisted all attacks by hostile bean counters.
"One bureaucracy must attach open-source rules to research done on it's dime. This is great news. Public dime, public property. I love it."
I second that motion in favour of socialized IP.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
From the vice-provost of CalTech, Dr. David Goodstein:
... If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion [of PhDs] has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. ... The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
That's the deeper problem; read the entire linked article for more on it and some possible solutions.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Dr. Zerhouni the Director of the NIH actually had a web chat about Peer Review through The Chronicle of Higher Education back on December 4th 2007. A transcript of the chat is available on The Chronicle of Higher Education's Website at http://chronicle.com/live/2007/12/zerhouni/ which has a Related article entitled NIH Casts Critical Eye on How It Gives Grants.
WTF is NIH?
I thought that acronym stood for Not Invented Here
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate
Thank you for highlighting one of the major problems in the scientific research community today - the fact that people think that the number of articles is a meaningful measure of value.
Consider some simple examples: Say somebody spent ten years on pure intensive research, finds the cure for cancer, and then publishes one paper on it --- is that person less productive than somebody who spent most their time churning out three or four papers per year that are little more than rehashes of previous topics, but never curing anything? (Rehashing has become a very common practice, partly due to this silly emphasis on number of papers.) Truly valuable research can take a long time; if we kick out all long-term projects because of short-term pressure to "produce papers", you may be doing harm.
I know it isn't an exhaustive methodology, and the author knows it too. He brings up the same points that you do. He's really playing a connect the dots game... He shows that several common keywords did not experience an increase in publication. He shows that it is actually HARDER to get grant money (that is the most damning, IMHO). He shows that there is no measure of quality that has gone up.
Basically, he's making the point that - hey - someone ought to show where all of this extra money went, because by several easy measures it vaporized. Many of the comments offer good explanations, but nothing rigorous enough to satisfy an accountant.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem as I see it is monoculture. There's nothing inherently wrong with lawyers, but there is something wrong with having congress composed of people of almost entirely one occupation: lawyers. We'd have problems if congress was 100% scientists, too. Monoculture is bad.
The other lesson is to not assume that funding is always the problem. The NIH is only one example. Look at education. We throw more money at education than any other country in the world. Per capita, total, vs. % GDP, whatever measure you want to use. And yet you still hear politicians going on about underfunded schools. Now I don't know if they are stupid, or if it is just an easy way to show that they are doing something about the problem, or if they are just capitulating to the teachers unions... but their approach isn't working. And meanwhile, schools are having to cut phys-ed, music, and art to try to meet misguided new federal guidelines.
If you disagree about education, that's fine too. We could get into the DOD, or Medicare, or my company trying to throw money at a failing development program - the situation is not limited to the government.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I would like to see something similar done for the AskERIC database. Currently there's a whole lot of information there, but occasionally I run into an article from some journal that my school doesn't get, and which would cost me a lot to subscribe. I don't even want to subscribe I just want the one article. I'm trying to improve practices in my classroom, or find some research to support some suspicions I have about classroom practices. I find that it's better to go to management with research backing your ideas than to just make vague claims. In a field where tax dollars are put to work every day, I would think there would be some interest in increasing availability of research.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Well, you are right of course. But two things... first, the article explores this as a possibility, but points out that the "lag time" is going on more than 10 years now. If the projects were simply more ambitious, they surely would have produced some results by now? Second, article count is only one measure that is discussed in the article. Just like with global warming, it is easy to dismiss each individual claim when addressed independently, but harder to argue against the data in aggregate unless some contrary evidence can be produced.
The original poster echoed the sentiment of most researchers: it is harder to get funding now that they've doubled funding. Seems like a paradox, but I'm sure there is a bureaucratic or political answer.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think you have missed several points when you claim there is a funding crisis. /. readers that under almost any math scenario, the number of PIs will increase faster then the funding, and that this increase has a "doubling time" which means things look fine untill they suddenly crash.
First, what is the right amount of money to spend on research, for, say, incurable pancreatic cancer ? Do we measure it by % of GDP, do we measure it by dollars on cancer/dollars on Iraq ? Untill we have some consensus, research will always be "underfunded"
Second, the basic structure of NIH funded reasearch ENSURES that there will always be a "funding crisis", because the increase in funding will always lag the increase in scientists - a classic malthusian argument.
lets assume Govt funds increase each year at, say 10%, maybe 5% a year after inflation.
However, the number of scientists increases exponentially - as follows. Govt grants (R01 in the jargon) are awarded, legally, to a principal investigator at some sort of institution -say a prof at a university. Each PI is on a treadmill: do research to publish papers to get more grants to... The easiest way to do research is graduate students - they are cheap and hardworking. so you hire as many grad students as you can, and although many will drop out or go to industry or other professions, some will become PIs of their own, and start the whole process over. It takes 5-8 years from college graduation to becoming a PI; one PI can train 5 or 6 or even more students at a time.
It should be clear to
OF course, this process requires job slots at universitys - who could cooperate and limit the number of jobs, but since RnD jobs add prestige and salary to univ deans and presidents, univeristy build the max number of buildings they can, so they can fill them ith profs....
Several posters have noted that prior to clinton, we had a funding crisis, and the nih budget was doubled, and all the universitys went and built HUGE new buildings, and greatly increased the number of NIH supported scientists....
untill these structural issues are solved, we will always have a funding crisis.
I also believe that good scientists are very rare, and they need and require long term support, another thing that is hard.
Wow, yeah, the defense is really good at taking stuff out of context.
Would you just read the damn article? I don't have time to paraphrase the whole thing in the forums. The gist is that article count is one of several measures that the author proposes. Read the article and then offer a better measure.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, I suspect the answer comes down to management quality/bureaucracy/politics.
That $29,000,000,000 is probably the best bargain WE'RE getting for OUR tax money. Now sit down and shut up, the adults are talking.
Can you please point out the part of that article where the author uses any measure but the number of publications? I can't seem to find it.
Funding science is exactly the kind of thing that government should be doing. It falls in with roads, parks, and libraries as the kind of thing that benefits everyone in the community. Many people (most people?) opt out of paying for such things if they are choosing individually, but are happy to if they know the choice is everyone pay or the service is gone.
Fundamental science benefits everyone. It scares the crap out of me to see intelligent people advocating that we move toward a medieval patron model for science.
Our government is more fucked up than usual right now, but that's because we've put a selfish idiot in power and caved to his every foolish demand. If we can put just a little effort into electing politicians who put just a little effort into working for the benefit of the people instead of living on hate and credit cards, we can turn that around.
In addition to those two snippets, he discusses how paper quality my have increased (but doesn't seem to have). The main problem is that there is no measure by which a politician could say, "Hey, we doubled the funding to the NIH and look at the success!" Instead, scientists are complaining more than ever - and why not? They find it harder than ever to get NIH funding.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For $10,000 I could build a modest "super computer" (imagine a beowulf cluster) to study problems in Agent Based Simulation (and there are many such problems that are health-related). For $100,000, I could build an even better "super computer" and study more interesting problems or go deeper into my problems of interest.
What stands between you and writing a more interesting paper is computing cycles?
This is for everyone who's been talking about the near doubling of NIH funding from 1999 to 2003 with no corresponding increase in the number of published papers. Consider the new fields of research that have opened up to the NIH in that time frame. Ever hear of gene sequencing? Do you think it was cheap to get the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center(founded in 1997) up and running? As for the number of papers even being a reasonable metric, go check out GenBank someday and realize that the NIH produces more than just papers. What about security? Didn't something happen somewhere between 1999 and 2003 that might have forced them to spend a couple extra bucks beefing things up a little? In my experience, the people at the NIH are good scientists who are serious about what they do. They are not wasting our money, except where the short bus we call our legislative and executive branches of government force them to. Consider this: can you name any government-sponsored project besides the Human Genome Project, funded largely by the NIH, to have been completed ahead of schedule and under budget?
It's more complicated than that. The number of published papers is more a function of the number of researchers than of funding. That number has dropped a little, since many researchers at NIH are from other countries and they're finding it harder to get into the U.S. Admittedly, NIH might have spent its money on research or facilities instead of building a giant iron fence and a brand-new visitor's center.
This is the stupidest metric I have ever seen. You can't measure science like you do a pile of cucumbers.
Few years ago our lab was doing biochemistry research. When new grant money came in we added animal models to our research. This gives us the opportunity to see how processes that happen on the molecular level, affect the development and the behavior of the animals.
Do we produce twice as many paper? Of course not, the time scale of these experiments is months and years vs. days for pure biochemistry work. What we get is higher quality data and deeper understanding of the world around us.
Right, but you have to offer taxpayers some metric by which to judge the NIH. The article that I linked argues that paper volume did not increase, paper quality did not increase, study time did not increase, and grants actually became harder to get.
So what kind of metric would you offer?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem is that the funding was doubled, there was no measurable progress, and all people can offer is "well, it's complicated...".
I think that there is a systemic problem, and I certainly wouldn't throw even more money at the NIH until someone figures out how to fix it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Who does this actually effect?
Since most journals are not making outrageous profits, it stands to reason that there will be no net savings for universities and other centers for research. The cost of publishing will just be pushed off onto the researcher.
Are there people out there doing actual research that don't have access to articles within their field? If someone really wanted an article, but didn't have access, a simple email to the author will yield a copy.
While it is a great idea that everyone should be able to read government funded works, in reality, who wants to? Most papers are written in such a way that they are mostly illegible without significant efforts to understand the field.
I think it highly unlikely that there are people who can afford to do high-quality research but can't afford journal subscriptions.
I'm not saying this law is a bad thing, just that its mostly pointless and a stunt.
It's Bush's fault! He signed the bill! It's his fault!
Come on now. You can't have it both ways. You can't keep claiming that everything bad that happens is his fault and then not give him credit for the good.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
BIG GOVERNMENT
The people who brought you:
The new deal end of the depression
Nazi and Soviet free Europe
An end to countless monopolies
Standards for a safe workplace
Seat belts in your car
The national expressway system
Protection of your water and air from egregious pollution
Nuclear power
Biotechnology, chemistry, particle physics, and solid state physics research that enables countless industries to improve life
Humanitarian assistance to countless natural disasters worldwide
Ever decreasing violent crime rates
And in the year 2000, we were doing it with ZERO DEBT. I think that libertarians really need to ponder about what their lives would actually be like if they got the "small government" that they want.
Some of the funding situations are even more dire: Psychology and psychiatry (including endeavors to in search of treatments) are getting funded somewhere between 4 and 6%. Take this also in light of the dramatic increases in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) we're seeing and the long lag (as you have indicated) that it takes to go from a theoretical treatment to a treatment in practice... Diverting some (perhaps defense) spending to primary and preventative mental care for these soldiers would be a first step towards stemming this particular tide. This aside, let us take a macro view for a minute: the U.S. is already losing its edge on the technology race, and if we continue to have these lapses and lags in funding, we're going to be further slowing progress and ultimately contributing to our own economic downturn. Take this downturn with the fact that universities are being run more and more like businesses, and that tenure is now more dependent upon the size of the grants you can pull in, and you have a cutthroat academic environment. This is effectively driving away researchers who pursue questions instead of monetary figures. I shudder to think how many penicillins we have lost over the last few years and how many we stand to lose.
Measuring scientific output is inherently difficult, because there is no fixed time frame between making a discovery and seeing the benefits for the society from this discovery. In fact a discovery may have an enormous impact but no immediate link to a specific product, service or anything else that we can reliably measure. How do you measure newly acquired knowledge? What is your benchmark? What time frame do you use to make the measurement?
So far the best bet has been for a society to commit tax money for basic research without putting time limits and milestones. Instead use a rigorous peer review system to ensure that money are not wasted. EU tried to grant research money based on the perceived 'benefit for the society' with the fifth and sixth frameworks for research and development (I am not familiar with the current framework) and failed miserably.
The government will be much more effective in controlling research costs if it enforces the basic rules designed to ensure competition in the economy. In the biomedical field there has been a wave of mergers and currently there are virtual monopolies established by few suppliers of equipment, consumables and reagents. As a result the prices have gone trough the roof. Fixing the FTC and the US patent law will do more in improving research efficiency than any metric of scientific output that you van come up with.
Research must be democratised and ideally everything should be done publicly on a wiki (by the way I recently started CosmosWiki to support this idea).
This is an exceptionally bad idea. Research is hard. Researchers are breaking new ground and it's very easy to make mistakes, to overlook an alternative explanation for the results, or to allow personal bias to color the presentation. The formal peer review process used by the scientific press is intended to minimize this and to make it easier for people to distinguish the good research from the wild speculation. A wiki, on the other hand, allows people to distinguish popular ideas with zealous proponents from less passionately supported ideas.
Truth should be available to everyone, but scientific truth is not a democratic construction. Roger Kornberg's observations are more credible than the homeless guy in the public library, but the homeless guy can be a more zealous editor.
I agree completely.
... but a congress of 100% scientists? I'd rather have the lawyers.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find scientists willing to get into politics. That's why we're not getting the direction and oversight we need, and why we don't have people in Congress who can speak intelligently to a scientist.
In my day, NIH meant Not Invented Here. Is that what they wish to fund?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
problem
You want to fix the NIH funding problem? How about starting with making Bristol-Myers Squibb pay a 50% royalty on the sales of Taxol. If BMS paid that'd be billions of dollars right there. I find it totally insane that the National cancer Institute, NCI, spend more than $180 million of taxpayers' money to develop Taxol but BMS was given exclusive rights to the test data needed by the FDA for drug approval for only $43 million. The NCI paid more than $140 million dollars more than BMS paid them, and BMS is making billions of dollars off of it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Which doesn't exactly address the libertarians mentioned in your parent post.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The last big deployment by the NZ defence force was to East Timor.
I know this is off topic but that deployment to East Timor wouldn't even had been needed if then US President Ford and Henry Kissinger hadn't supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor after Portugal granted independence to East Timor.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yeah some day I also had this idea, but later I understood that the researchers themselves aren't much better in terms of bias or of ethics than the average person. Even researchers "steal" ideas from others and sometimes from students as well, you know. And many do research not for the love of it but because they want grants, ie they see it only as a job. I think it's better to do anything under the public scrutiny. Some form of peer review system could be implemented into a wiki as well. And I also want to somehow integrate research with ethics in some way (you know, knowledge without ethics is dangerous).
Can you think of any government research that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollar, yet a business bought that research for less than 1/4 of the cost and made billions of dollars off that research? I can. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spend $183 million on research for Taxol then sold the rights to the data generated that was needed by the FDA to win drug approval for Taxol on an exclusive basis. Bristol-Myers Squib, BMS, paid the NCI $43 million for the data and has since made billions of dollars selling Taxol.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I would rather that they were commissioned as for original research, that publication was part of the contract, and it immediately went into the public domain.
For publicly, taxpayer, financed research all of it should be publicly and openly available. The same applies to tests and clinical trials for drugs submitted for FDA approval. It would be nice if all university, public universities, research was also publicly available.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The library has always worked very well for me. Are all the libraries in the world closing or something? Perhaps people have just forgotten about them?
P.S. To the summary author: It is good writing style to spell out an acronym or abbreviation the first time it is used and then use the abbreviation in subsequent text. e.g.: National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Oh I see what is going on here, this article is about health research NOT SCIENCE. Scientists know their fields and duplicated research is extremely rare - if there is any doubt a quick trip to the library is all it takes - I guess it is different for doctors and biologists. I bet it is because there is so much rote learning in biology and medicine and very little real knowledge that it is impossible to know where progress in the field stands. Once pure science is able to provide the knowledge required by medicine for full understanding instead of blindly stabbing in the dark like it does, then perhaps duplication of research will not be a problem, once there is an actual basis of scientific understanding.