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