Slashdot Mirror
Congress May Kill NIH Open Access Research Rules
Savuka writes "A policy that mandates public, open access to all National Institutes of Health research is in danger. The House of Representatives is considering legislation that would change the open access policy to make it more publisher-friendly, under the false pretense of protecting copyrights. The Ars author paints the new legislation as somewhat reflective of a turf battle in Congress: 'The Intellectual Property Subcommittee clearly felt that it had been ignored during the original passage of the bill that compelled the NIH's open access policy...' The article concludes: 'Currently, the disruptions wrought by the Internet and expectations of open access are too new for a viable alternative to traditional publishing to have emerged. But it doesn't appear that the NIH policy is making a significant contribution to that disruption, and the benefits of the policy appear likely to be significant. If Congress rolls back that policy in response to disagreements with other countries over film piracy, then it could really be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.'"
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. They charge huge amounts so that Universities (or anyone else) can have access to their journals. why do Universities (and others) pay these huge amounts? Because they need the journals. Why because of the CONTENT, i.e. the academic research papers. Who pays for researchers and academics to carry out the research to write up those papers? Universities, funding councils, tax payers. So how much do Universities get from publishers for this valuable content. NOTHING!
We (universities, the tax paying public) are paying huge amount to publishers to access content which we (universities, tax payers) have given them for free.
The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK).
The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), they are unpaid (with a few exceptions).
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a page template (actually a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars/UKpounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and edited (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
Their are also open access REPOSITORIES. These are either subject based (pubmed, arXiv.org, etc) or institution based, ie based at a university. An academic publishes in to a traditional (high cost) journal, for the peer review and kudos, and then puts their article in to their institutional (or pubmed/arXiv.org) so that it is freely available to everyone. Even though publishers put huge restrictions on this, such as embargos and which copy can be used (normally the academics original copy, not the publisher's version) they unsurprisingly don't like this. Think about it, though the academic/university paid for and created the research, the publisher still tells them when they can upload their own version of the article (i.e. not before a year after publication).
For this story see:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1
For more information, google for "open access"
Chris
You will forget this sig before you next see it
Why isn't all government (i.e. taxpayer) funded research public?
Just wondering.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It certainly would be right up their alley, attempting to legislate profits for their corporations.
Oh, wait...
The biggest publishers are foreign owned (example : Georg von Holtzbrinck runs Nature Publishing ). US Congress is an agent of Globalism and no longer even cares about US taxpayers.
When the IP people start to threaten other people's health, it's a great opportunity to show the harm they really do. When they attempted to kill people in Africa in order to over charge for AIDS drugs this really backfired. Try to make this change backfire too.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
As we see who the real enemies of intellectual freedom are.
It wasn't invented here, anyway.
Just like the results of any other endevaour funded by tax-payers, the results of the government-funded research should be accessible to the public unless there are compelling security reasons against it.
That's exactly what NIH did - mandate public access. I can only imagine the arcane arguments being conjured up by the lobbyist groups to explain why publishing companies should retain copyright to works that they neither funded, conducted nor authored. Given that one side of the argument is just common sense, and the other is backed by cash, I fully expect the congress to roll over in their usual manner.
The only consolation that I see is that the market will quickly render those publishing models obsolete. Since the margins of publishing works on the web are extremely low, the large publishing houses are faced with hard competition from the open-access journals. They'll either reform to provide some additional value (e.g. prompt reviews instead of several-month haggle) or die out.
A government employee is BARRED from initiating copyright on any document. They can patent up the whazzooo, but copyright does not exist for government employees. Now contracters are a complete different story... I was a Government employee for 5 years and all dozen+ of my academic papers published (including in journals that required a fee) were exempt from copyright (and we made them available for free on our website at the time, much to the annoyance of the journals, but there wasn't anything they could do about it).
except all the reps in the article are Democrats - didn't someone post a chart with who supports who (copyright == mostly Democrats).
This must be the change we've all been hoping for. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Whatever that means. And all that other vacuous, feel-good nonsense.
If the results of research funded by the public do indeed belong to the public, why should universities and researchers be allowed to patent products coming from that same research. The universities where I've worked rely heavily on their patent portfolios for funding, as do many professors. I wonder how many scientists are willing to give up intellectual property rights from the fruits of their research?
It's certainly not to protect the originator of these ideas : the researcher. All of the high-tiered journals I've published in have required a copyright sign-over to the publisher -- for free. This is to protect the publisher and not the people that create these ideas/research. Copyright protection in this case certainly isn't promoting the production/producers of ideas.
This system is backwards and broken.
But they aren't the party in power. Hmmmm
"False Pretense"? How do we know that? Maybe they sincerely believe it. Not everything you don't agree with is fraudulent.
Brett
Guess who has their main office within NIH grounds? Kellogg Brown & Root... the other side of Halliburton. They don't want their dirty little secrets to get mixed up in the frey and exposed.
This is your public service announcement.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Science must 'push copyright aside' by Richard Stallman
In defense of the journals, there is a nice feedback system where the journals for a field are tiered by impact factor (cited/submitted ratio) and important articles are found in and submitted to a few top level journals. It would be unfortunate to see this system break down. Granted, the publishers could certainly lower their prices, and make anything more than a decade old available online. (Opinion comes from a researcher who has access to most journals but still finds it really annoying when an article is not available at the library)
Cheers.
Has there been any effort to establish an open, reputation-based peer review system for papers? If not, are there big reasons it wouldn't work? (Apart from the vast effort required to screen out every nutjob with a "revolutionary new theory" that they will cling to no matter how much reality disagrees with them, that is.)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
BTW, if you want to view the subcommittee hearing, here's a link to it.
Also, don't /. it, I want to be able to watch it later tonight!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
No doubt we'll be hearing of a PIAA soon. Got to learn the American way, get a government grant, steal or connive the answer or product from someone else, then charge a one time charge again and again....
This controversy concerns just the works created by NIH (government) employees. The policy of open access should extend equally to academics who receive NIH funding.
People say "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater"
but what if there's no baby?
What if there's NOTHING there?
What if it's a xenomorph? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)/
Write your representative
Let them know you're not happy about this mess.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Government shouldn't providing loans to businesses. Instead it should reduce if not eliminate taxes and some regulations. Why should a law care business be required to be licensed when they do the same thing a do-it-yourself homeowner does? Are homeowners going to need a license as well? Big and established businesses like these regulations because it reduces their competition.
How come I don't get free corn from all the farm subsidies my taxes go to fund?
Farm subsidies, which the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill get billions of dollars from, massively distort the market. Early this year by a veto proof margin congress passed a farm bill with almost $300 Billion in subsidies. Subsidies are only supposed to be temperary, to get a business or industry going, or help get through hard tymes after which they are supposed to make their own way. However farm subsides are not only permanent but get bigger every year.
And it's not just the US that gives large farm subsidies, of which very little goes to small farmers, Canada, Europe, and Japan also give large subsidies.
Falocn
Should there be a Law?
PubMed and other NIH open access resources and they all protect copyright material already. They only put the title, authors, publisher, volume, date, pages,PMID, related articles and short abstract of the full article. There is a link to publisher which holds part of copyright so they can sell you the full article to you. There is no copyright infringement that I can see or any from infringement of intellectual property rights in what is giving out by PubMed Central. They only show you a short abstract of your full article what is published and they link you to the full article to publisher.
However there are a few articles in PubMed Central that are open without copyright that author and publisher have allow open access without copyright issues other than you must quote them in bibliography.
I don't understand why is congress changing current open access rules?
Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property Membership
Speaking as a scientist, part of the problem is that the system is admittedly broken but extremely entrenched.
In my field (Cognitive Psychology / Neuroscience) publishers do NOT typically charge page costs for printing, and so researchers did not request that the cost be covered by their grants (standard practice in fields that do require these page costs). Now, NIH says that research must be open access, but to defray the incredible costs in lost subscriptions for doing so, large publication houses are deciding that the best way to do so is by charging researchers page costs.
Would this be a problem if the legislation was written in such a way as to be progressive? No. But, as it currently stands, Journals want to charge researchers for publication - even if they don't have the money to pay for it. For example, suppose you researched the interaction of some protein and some drug as a post-doc while on an NIH funded grant that has subsequently expired - how do you afford to publish that research if you are currently funded by another institution or lab?
In theory, open-access research is great. You'll notice that it's not scientists who want closed access research - most of them have the majority of their work up on websites (flagrantly violating copyright, which they no longer own to their own work) because the journal would never dare attack a scientist (it would be terrible karma and invite a huge backlash). Scientists are incredibly pro-access. But, the business model is so broken that there's really no alternative unless the legislation carefully reworks the industry rather than simply changing the rules overnight, putting it into a blender, and hoping that what comes out is what you intended.
The other major problem, as a scientist, is that the large majority of work is really published for the scientific community and not for the layperson. It is simply a tragic fact that since the majority of Americans do not believe in Evolution, they do not need access to journals about Evolutionary Biology, nor would they understand the research if it was published there. Before people get up in arms - I know that there are plenty of good examples of places where people DO need access or could make use of access to publicly funded research and that it ought to be available (e.g., private radiology practices should have access to the best and newest in radiological findings, but these journal costs are so prohibitive that only the best libraries can afford them).
So, the business model is broken, the solutions to the business model are broken, and the rationale for fixing it is really just as broken. It's really a bad set of circumstances all around.
there is a nice feedback system where the journals for a field are tiered by impact factor (cited/submitted ratio) and important articles are found in and submitted to a few top level journals. It would be unfortunate to see this system break down.
And why is this tier system necessary? Other than for the profits of the publishers that is?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Congress might reverse the decision to require open access, but it can't legislate the publishers to prevent them from individually choosing to participate. Many do so willingly and with less restriction than the present regulations require, as TFA notes. They will likely continue. If others revert to the previous stance, they will be signing their own death warrants, as the open access journals will get wider reference, and so become the journals of choice for publication.
In any case, I think it's an election year stunt by IP business supported legislators. I think they're trying to drum up votes in the manner in which they've been accustom, FUDmongering.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Anthony Weiner is on the committee and even if you don't live in the 9th you know he's running for Mayor or Governor in the next couple of years. He's gonna want the science / internet vote.
Also, from what little I can tell, he's not an idiot.
Drop him an email
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Since the NIH is a government agency, why not just screw the publisher and demand the information under the Freedom of Information Act? (yes, USA only I know) I'm sure there would be a fee under the FOIA but it could be a whole lot less than paying a publisher, who would get squat out of the arrangement.
Maybe that's a bit far-fetched but even if everyone just did that for a while as a form of protest it might get the point across to the folks on Capitol Hill.
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
Here is the letter I just sent my representative (Rick Larsen). You might consider doing the same.
Hello, Rick. I am a Democrat and an Associate Professor of Geology at Western WA University and I just found out about HR 6845, introduced by John Conyers. This is a bad bill, because it takes a dramatic step backwards on the issue of scientific publication. Please take a stand against it.
The current state of science publication is untenable. Every year, journal costs rise faster than library budgets and we must cut our access to valuable journals, which hampers scientific research. Authors are not paid for their work, nor are peer reviewers, and yet the journals are making money hand over fist. Everybody knows that the ultimate solution lies in free and open internet-based publication, but getting there is tricky.
The government made a remarkable step forward a few years ago when the National Institutes of Health required that the results of any NIH-funded research be freely available to the public online at PubMedCentral after a one-year delay (to allow the publication in a print journal). This set a valuable precedent and was obviously fair: if the US taxpayers are funding the research, they should be able to see the results without paying again! The Conyers bill (HR 6845) would reverse this positive step.
I urge you to instead come out in favor of expanding this principle to the National Science Foundation. The progress of science will be dramatically enhanced if all NSF-funded research is also subject to the same free-access rule. I would welcome further discussions with you on this topic if you wish.
... to Web 2.0
The "social" web isn't a new way of doing business or exploiting people, but merely the translation of existing methods into a new medium.
25% of the [Intellectual Property Subcommittee] is from California.
For the few who may be unaware:
Hollywood is a district in the city of Los Angeles, California
(so sayeth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood)
That's of course why it's interesting to note the numerousity of Californians in that particular committee.
People complain that the publishers make money hand-over fist, but the alternative has been tried and it is equally costly. Many journals went open-access several years ago, meaning that investigators now pay to publish their papers there (after full peer review etc.), and online access is then free and open to all. This was projected to cost $1000-1500 per article (which already seems like a lot), but most recently I paid an astonishing $3600 to publish a single 10-page article in such a journal, and that is not an atypical fee. In fact there are many nonprofit open-access journals and they charge about the same fees. Can it possibly cost that much to process an article and then simply post it? You would think there would be huge savings in not having to actually print and distribute the journal, keep track of subscriptions, or control access to the site. Yet despite the frictionless efficiency of electronic communication, costs seem somehow to have exploded far beyond what it used to cost when we had physical journals instead -- never mind the fact that now it is individual investigators instead of university libraries who have to pay.
We have the best congress money can buy.
What are we going to have to do to see the results of research we have paid for with our tax dollars? Sign in with our SSNs as our user names and electronically sign a non-disclosure agreement? ;)
Be as you would have the world become.