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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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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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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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!