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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 $1000-2000.
No, speaking as a librarian, this is not bad news at all. In fact, it is a boon. Instead of paying thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions, this legislation allows librarians to freely collect, preserve, organize, and re-dissemination this research in a way that will benefit all (except the publishers).
and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
This is one of the better arguments I've heard for funding science through means other than governments. Governments tend to do a bad job, are subject to bloat, corruption and influence peddling, and can't be fired. Plus, as you point out, their spending priorities are inconsistent over time. This makes staffing/careers wildly difficult, which is bad for science. Private charities and foundations would be a better source for funding science. I don't know how much exists currently to support this model, but it's worth pursuing.
Remember: Government != Society - those are two separate things, despite how much the US Government has tried to take over Society in the past century.
Plus, charity has a morally supportable philosophy if you're not in the "the ends justify the means" camp. I really want to find (or not find) the Higgs boson, but not if somebody's property has been confiscated under threat of violence for it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As an academic researcher funded by the NSF and DARPA, among other sources, I'd simply point out that registering a copy of a published paper isn't a particularly onerous burden. NSF requires multiple-page yearly reports; DARPA requires the same on a quarterly basis. The NSF reports already require listing the bibliographic information for every paper published as a result of the research. It's actually very much in a researcher's interest to track these things carefully anyway---it's one way to show that you're doing what you promised with the grant and that your work is having an impact. While I don't publish in PubMed-related areas, I and many others I know in computer science already take care to upload new papers to indexes like CiteSeer. It benefits everyone---including the authors---to have your work more readily available and easy to find via major databases like PubMed.
This change is a good thing.