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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.'"
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'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.
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.