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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.'"
Why isn't all government (i.e. taxpayer) funded research public?
Just wondering.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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?
Something else that is interesting is the composition of the Intellectual Property Subcommittee.
Its composed of 24 members, 13 Democrat, 11 Republican.
25% of the subcommittee is from California.
http://judiciary.house.gov/about/subcourts.html
under the false pretense of protecting copyrights
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.
If you're allowed to sign over your copyright for free, you're in a relatively progressive discipline. I routinely pay $50-$250 per page, roughly $1000 per article, to get the publisher to accept those copyrights. To be fair, the terms of the license the publisher wants vary quite widely. Many of them now ask only for non-exclusive copyrights; most will allow the author to include the work in his own Ph.D. thesis (which is convenient); and even without the law, some allow you to submit your work to public repositories (like PubMed Central) 6-12 months after the journal's publication. Curiously, my experience has been that "Society Organs" have been associated with the most restrictive copyright transfers, where "for profit" journals have been more responsive to author concerns.
Page charges are not evil. Open access journals work on exactly this model: they fund themselves by page charges rather than subscription charges. This is on the face of it entirely reasonable. The real killer is that universities pay journal subscription costs out of overhead, so researchers publishing in open access journals pay twice: once in page charges, and once in overhead to cover library costs for the subscription-based journals they're not publishing in. Until this changes, open access journals are DOA. But it's not the page charges that are the problem, it's the blanket subsidy to closed-access journals from overhead. It's the academic equivalent of paying the RIAA a fee for every blank tape you buy. Good luck getting the university to reduce your overhead for the privilege of cutting off Elsevier's profit...
"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."
You can only fix this by providing a mechanism for free, verifiable, respectable peer review. Why are journals important? For computer science, ACM IEEE and all the other conferences and journals are simply a matter of recognition. Scientific today is a begging game. Scientists unfortunately have to "prove" themselves to society by doing work that is recognized by certain central bodies that bestow recognition. This is because scientists want to secure funding for their work, which (if purely scientific) will have nothing immediate to do with human beings and their resources and economies and lives. This obviously differs from field to field, and indeed within fields(applied and theoretical), but I am talking about science and math in the Greek sense, for the sake of knowledge alone. Pure math. Ordinarily, society would have no interest in funding such activity that has no announced goal to benefit said society in any way, except the most noble way, which is to further human understanding of the universe. The most meaningful human activity, the one that sets us apart from all other animals, is the ability to use abstraction and logical reflection to do science. It is also the least useful in materialist terms, until the work somehow finds its way into human civilization, usually without initial intention being as such.
So private bodies and government require this measure of worth to provide the money. Of course, millions are wasted in the process, which is exactly why it is a "broken" model as you said.
Even those of us in a field like comp.sci, which has direct applicative potential in almost all its branches (and is central to all sorts of industries, hence huge amounts of funding available), the ability to "publish" in peer-reviewed journals is the measure by which that potential is judged.
If someone can come up with a respectable publishing scheme with peer review from academia, the problem would go away. Expensive journals would be forced to adopt authors' conditions, and universities could fund their professors rather fund the publisher so that the professors could get grant funding in this bizarre roundabout way. Alternatively, scientists can devote themselves to well paying day jobs and publish wherever the hell they want, whatever they want. How will we know the good science from the bad? Voluntary peer review from other academics. And the fact that with less monetary incentive to publish, only those who truly think they have something to write will do so.