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New Bill Would Repeal NIH Open Access Policy
pigah writes "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act has been reintroduced into Congress. The bill will ban open access policies in federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These policies require scientists to provide public access to their work if it has been funded with money from an agency with an open access policy. Such policies ensure that the public has access to read the results of research that it has funded. It appears that Representative John Conyers (D-MI), the author of the bill, is doing the bidding of publishing companies who do not want to lose control of this valuable information that they sell for exorbitant fees thereby restricting access by the general public to an essentially public good."
perhaps we should outsource our entire government to buddhist monks
I totally agree. The current policy is broken. It looks good on paper, but creates major headaches for the researchers.
In my view, the NIH is taking the easy way out. Instead of negotiating with journals directly, NIH just puts the burden on the researchers to figure out, for every publication separately, what is the correct way to handle it.
To get a sense of the hoops you have to jump through to do it properly,
read e.g. this blog post by a person whose job it is to take care of pubmed central submissions.
In practice, a highly productive lab would need an extra administrative person just to deal with these issues. That doesn't seem like a good way to spend research money to me.
Slowly, the scientific world is starting to realize that they are no longer beholden to the publishing companies to distribute the results of their research.
A few days ago, at his first press conference, Barak Obama called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post to ask a question. For those that don't understand the significance of this event, The Huffington post is a web-only newspaper. No paper.
Some day, the journal publishers will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that the one essential step in the publishing process that they control, the hugely expensive printing presses, is no longer essential. Most of the value the journals add in the editorial arena (reviewing and editing) is done by the peers of the people who are submitting the articles. That same level of editorial review can just as easily happen on a web site, at far less cost. We're moving in that direction slowly, and if bills like this become law, that will just accelerate the pressure to move there.
Why does this suprise anyone. Congress has been preventing it's own taxpayer research from being made public for almost 30 years! If not for wikileaks and renegade congressional staffers these 6,780 reports would never see the light of day.
The expensive-journal commercial publishers don't have much of a competitive moat: anyone can publish PDFs on the internet with the word "Journal" attached to groups of them, and you've got a journal. If that anyone is well-respected in the field and the PDFs are hosted by a well-known university that also prints off some paper copies for archival, you've got yourself a new journal.
In my area this revolt against the commercial publishers has been quite rapid and successful. The entire board of editors left the journal Machine Learning in 2000, setting up the non-profit, open-access JMLR instead, which is now at least as prestigious (possibly moreso). In more general AI, the open-access, non-profit JAIR now has a much higher impact factor than the old Elsevier journal in the area, "Artificial Intelligence".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, make all contributions to federal candidates go into a common political fund that is distributed to all runners in a fair spread. Constant revision of income is based on popularity voting run by federal independent program. All contributions to state candidates go into the same system except on a state level and are spread to all parties involved. All contributions must go through the federal organization are are available to view online at anytime.
Actually, when Kucinich was asked that exact question, his response which was not totally dissimilar to yours ("I saw something flying that I couldn't identify, and have no idea what it was") was still treated as a statement that he believed in extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
I am officially gone from
Conyers is one of the kookiest politicians we have and is famous for being owned by Disney, RIAA, MPAA and Big Pharma. I am a hardcore Dem but Pelosi and Conyers piss me off. Basically, he's a dick.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Repealing Open Access is a protectionist economic policy that has long been associated with the American Left. This shouldn't surprise anybody. Just like it shouldn't surprise anybody when the Democrats start opposing Net Neutrality, having the government police online copyright violations to prop up the established content distribution industries, and do everything in their power to keep Detroit auto makers in business.
It's amusing to me that we have a "liberal" and "conservative" party when it comes to social/wedge issues, but when it comes to just about everything else the two parties swap sides.
The scientific journal publishers (Elsevier/Science Direct etc.) are the worst of the worst of humanity. Scientists across the world work for a pittance (we have the worst salaries, even janitors earn more) researching and trying to contribute something that will benefit the whole humanity. They try to publish their research, but while doing so they accept to
- give copyrights of their text to the publisher
- give copyrights to all the pictures in the paper to the publisher
- PAY for their work to be published
At the same time
- other scientists review these papers for free
And finally
- the publisher charges EVERYONE (including us, the scientists who wrote the article) to access the material.
WHAT the FUCK is wrong with the academic world? I mean, I see all my colleagues bend over to take it up the ass from the publishers. Elsevier has basically a licence to print money - you coulnd't find a better business model, since everything is done by others, including review and editing.
Fuck you Elsevier, IEEE and also Nature (not as scummy, but fuck you, too) etc.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I have read it and not being a lawyer I'm confused. If research is funded by Federal money, how can they smack down it's open access?
No sig for you!!
Actually, Poppa Bush was not that bad
See I think Poppa Bush was the worst of the last four Presidents. Yes, he did win a bit of a victory in Desert Storm, but, in doing so he created a foreign policy nightmare that contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda (by basing US forces in Saudi Arabia). Clinton was deft enough to avoid the Saddam problem but the coalition that let him do it was breaking down by the time Bush Jr stepped in. If Bush Jr does not invade Iraq, he gets to go down in history as the President that let Saddam off of the hook and then watched as he got the bomb. I would argue that, if we were not willing to take Saddam out in 1991, then we should probably have been better off not having had Desert Storm at all. In a sense, Bush the Senior's "moderate" war only set the stage for a lot of killing to come.
This is my sig.