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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.