Slashdot Mirror
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 $29 billion of taxpayer money in NIH research to actual taxpayers. Within one year after peer review, NIH-funded research has to be made freely available on PubMed.
A Democratic Congress passed it and a Republican president signed it. This is a tremendous asset to researchers who don't want to have to duplicate research or pay fees for every journal out there. Those media companies getting rich selling journals, like the ACS, don't like it, but everyone else will."
and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
This is one of the better arguments I've heard for funding science through means other than governments. Governments tend to do a bad job, are subject to bloat, corruption and influence peddling, and can't be fired. Plus, as you point out, their spending priorities are inconsistent over time. This makes staffing/careers wildly difficult, which is bad for science. Private charities and foundations would be a better source for funding science. I don't know how much exists currently to support this model, but it's worth pursuing.
Remember: Government != Society - those are two separate things, despite how much the US Government has tried to take over Society in the past century.
Plus, charity has a morally supportable philosophy if you're not in the "the ends justify the means" camp. I really want to find (or not find) the Higgs boson, but not if somebody's property has been confiscated under threat of violence for it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.
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.
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
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!