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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."
YOU BASTARDS!
I've gotten so cynical in my old age that I just expect this now, it doesn't even disappoint anymore, we've got the best government money can buy!!!
I voted for the Dem's this time around, but they're just as bad. Lying on their taxes, getting free drivers/limos, getting million $$ speaking deals as payoffs, and then getting their payoff from special interests to vote against the public good. They just get their payoffs from different groups.
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software. At a minimum the government should be able to transfer licenses from one branch to another. If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government. I love the way so many institutions, lately including banks, are acting like they're doing us a favor taking federal money. And there's always someone who will yap about government wouldn't be able to get access the best software tools. I doubt that. I'm not talking about making anything the government buys open source, just that government can move software licenses around based on need.
Funny a legislator from Michigan would be the tool of the publishing industry. I didn't realize textbooks were big business up there.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As a scientist, I don't own the notebooks, datasets, reports and publications I produce with grant funding. The only reason publishers take claim of these articles is because of a copyright transfer agreement article writers must sign when submitting papers to reputable journals. As academics (slowly) move to open format journals, which sustain themselves editorially and through the publications they receive, this will become less of a concern.
~
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
There is a simple answer to the corruption of John Conyers. Call his offices:
* Washington Office: 202-225-5126
* Detroit Office: 313-961-5670
* Trenton / Downriver Office: 734-675-4084
Be caring. Be friendly. Be authoritative. Tell the person who answers the phone that his sponsoring of a bill requiring closed government is corruption. Tell that person that he or she should not work for someone who wants government corruption. Try to convince that person to get a better job.
Once several members of his staff quit, John Conyers will no longer be as much of a threat.
Work to make sure John Conyers is never re-elected to anything.
The U.S. government is VERY corrupt. Join with me in stopping the corruption.
Okay, what went wrong? What happened? Has our government always been like this? Is there a single politician who won't be bought? How can we fix all this (not with these two parties, that's for sure). The Republicans have been bought by the religious and oil, and the Democrats have been bought by the copyright zealots and god-knows-who-else.
We need elections based on instant run-off or something so that third parties actually have a chance. I can't take this anymore. There needs to be some sort of fundamental change.
It seems like everything is ruined forever.
this is what happens when you let go of rules and regulations. the groups who want to prosper at the expense of everyone else goes berserk, and even tries to rob you of what you pay for.
balance is the key. government has to be a regulatory tool, a heavy handed hammer of ALL people against groups who seek privilege. that includes groups that seek to exploit free market principles by yelping and wanking 'deregulation' in order to propagate scams like wall street did in this hedge fund fraud.
before any holistic economists try to yelp the same criminal 'regulation is bad' line that alan greenspan et all yelped in the last 20 years, i want to warn them ; before you have any chance of doing that, you will have to explain me why we shouldnt let go of judiciary, police, and criminal law, if we were to let go of regulations in business.
because, they are in the same status - both are regulatory, order providing arrangements of rules and laws to ensure that noone pulls any shit on anyone else.
Read radical news here
I am a federally funded researcher who administrates a program that publishes quite a bit. First off, I am a supporter of open access publishing. Here is our challenge with the current policy, and why it has been very difficult to adopt.
Open access journals cost between $1-3k per publication (see PLOS or BMC). These journals automatically submit papers to the public repository. This is a direct cost that comes out of my grants that may not have been originally budgeted. Now, closed access journals are generally free or close to free to publish. The new policy requires submission of closed access papers, by the authors, to the central repository (if federally funded). Obviously, this violates the agreement the author had with the publisher, so the author, on their own, must negotiate a legal mechanism to do this. Some publishers charge to do this, maybe more than $1k. Every submitted paper gets an ID that must be submitted with a progress report. When we publish 5-10 papers per progress report, this is frankly a lot of work and sometimes, we fund papers partially that are published by other groups. So it is up to me to encourage these groups to figure this out, so I can include them in my reports. More work, and it adds another level of complexity to collaboration.
So far, this has been an administrative headache, it is expensive and considering most major university libraries already have licenses to the closed data, it seems, to me, unnecessarily complicated. I wish they had required the publishers to do this (each publisher would have to work with one source) instead of the researcher, because we have to work with a number of publishers and that takes time in an already very, very competitive field.
There are some really great aspects of open access publishing and the power of the resulting knowledgebase of manuscripts is going to be really exciting, however, $10-20k/year for page charges is only going to result in less science, IMO.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
Really - I mean *really* - you want to take research we fund explicitly for public enrichment, and deny public access to the results of that research on the basis of copyright interpretation?
There is no justification for slowing down the progress of science for the benefit of *publishers*.
Rep. Conyers, you truly are a dipshit of the highest caliber.
Let's start to put some teeth behind "government of the people, by the people."
We do have that pesky 2nd Amendment to help us remind them.
Republicans cost FAR more. Do some research: U.S. government debt. During the administration of George W. Bush, 5 trillion dollars of debt was added to U.S. government debt.
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software.
They do, in exactly the same sense that the taxpayers own Navy destroyers, which is to say, collectively, with no individualized control.
If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
That's not what's happening, nor is it federal money being taken. Federally-funded research products lead to patentable inventions. Those patents are held by the government. In order to make that research commercially valuable, additional research is needed and private investment is required to bring the research to a marketable level of maturity. In turn, private entities agree to fund the necessary further research, without which the first sets of patents are worthless.
If it's a 10 step process from theory to application and the federal project accomplishes the first four steps, and a private party comes in and develops 5 through 10, including patentable material, they have the right to that patent same as anyone else. Sometimes, a corporation will agree to continue/complete the research and pay the government for an exclusive license, which in turn funds further government research projects.
If you had a proposal to do the research for free, complete the project for free, and freely license the results, you would be an attractive bidder for the exclusive license. In the real world, though, no one ever makes such a proposal, so the whole notion is academic.
You've got $100 million to spend on research. Government projects don't care about commercialization, which is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process. The end result is one of two basic scenarios: (1) everybody gets a fair chance at the fruits of the research, and it's the standard patent race to see who can fill in the gaps first, or (2) private party partners with the government, writes a check that (more than) covers the taxpayer expenditure on the research, and gets an exclusive license (but not ownership of the patent).
The second scenario, so often shortsightedly maligned, generates money for further public research. In effect, when a company purchases the project, it is as if they funded it directly themselves. They get a license to it with varying levels of restrictions, which serves the public interest better than actually granting ownership of the patent, and the upside to this restriction for the corporations is that they didn't bear the risk of the research failing. It's a win-win situation plainly visible for anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government.
And here you go off the rails entirely. Sell what to the government? Banks? What? Wouldn't be able to access what? Seriously, think things out before posting, people.
It's not good, it's the lesser of two evils. Ludicrously restrictive intellectual property laws are purely a bureaucratic problem and can be reversed fairly easily. It's a preferable to have to deal with that sort of problem rather than wars, climate change, piss-poor education standards.... and so on.
I was doing some research for a project on OSHA. As I understand it, works produced by the federal government cannot be copyrighted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_of_the_United_States_Government
However, on the OSHA web site, not a word is said as to the copyright status that I can find. So is it public domain or not?
I guess, in relation to TFA, copyright doesn't matter anyway, they just won't make it available to the public either way.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I've long wondered--what is it that academic journals DO, precisely? They don't seem to provide any services that a vanity press couldn't do better and cheaper.
Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for, or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?
The President does not set the budget. He may suggest what he wants, but it is CONGRESS who holds the purse strings
The Budget is a law that the President may veto. During the years when Republicans ran all three branches of government (with of course the usual level of compromise in the Senate as they never had the 60 votes), Bush NEVER vetoed anything. He exerted no discipline over his own party, pretty mortgaging whatever political capital he had to get funding for his war.
Better take a look who was in charge of Congress during those years.
Republicans were. That's why there were so many independents that remembered Clinton's balanced budgets who voted for Obama, hoping he would continue the Clintonian fiscal restraint and prudent government. Clinton actually identified the budget deficit as an obstacle to economic recovery in 1991 and he was right to close that gap. By taking new Treasuries off of the market, investors had to look for other places to put their capital and they put it in the stock market. Now, the government borrows money hand over fist, the money goes there, and now we see completely economic irrationality when companies like Intel and Microsoft, that essentially have monopolies in growth industries, pay dividends, make profits hand over fist, and still wind up getting their market valuation tanked.
This is my sig.
...in peer reviewed journals. That is unless someone pays a fat subscription fee on my behalf.
So what you are really saying is that yes, you get paid enough to do the work but have no money to air the results in any meaningful way. So what we really need is a Research Data Office consisting of some number of research collectors. The collectors would basically be liased to the various institutions engaged in federal funding research and it would be their job to capture all of the particulars of all the experiments, load the steps and results into a federal database, which would then be available for public use. Scientists participating in federally funded research would be required to invest some time in peer review of this database, and in the very least the database could track of who has independently repeated an experiment set and achieved similar results. Traditional publishers, if they were American, could then cherry pick their favorite experiments for their own commercial use, as the data would be public domain, but the notes and particulars of the experiments would be available for everyone.
This is my sig.
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.
I blame Bush...Somehow.
so, one group spent more money in attempting to secure the financial health & fiscal saftey of it's own nation.
population 305 million
The other group spent less than that- on an unpopular invasion of a foreign country of 29.2 million..
but hey! the second group did spend less money!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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
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.
Congress requires all federal agencies to report to the SBA annually all SBIR and STTR awards made in the previous federal fiscal year. The SBA publishes this information in their site called TECH-Net. See for yourself:
http://web.sba.gov/tech-net/docrootpages/index2.cfm
You can search for over 85,000 awards there, covering the entire range of SBIR and STTR, from 1983 to 2007. The agencies aren't required to report 2008 awards until next month, but I see from a search just now that DoD has already entered over 500 of their 2008 awards. DoD comprises about half of all SBIR/STTR awards at the rate of around 3000 a year, out of around 6000 a year total.
Random observations: The keyword search doesn't seem to be working right now. The State Summary is sortable on the browser. You can get the search results in mail-merge format for copy and paste into Excel or your own database. When you drill down to an individual award, you initially get a composite, where phase 2 overrides phase 1, but you can drill down even further and view either phase individually (see how the title or abstract changed between phases, for example).
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!!
Pirate stuff. Yeah, some people will whine about ohhhhh, you're breaking the law; but when chances of being caught are very low and the media cartels are aggressively ceding the moral high ground to the pirates, who gives a crap?
We might add that people are missing a significant part by being ignorant of the history of this issue. For more than a century, ever since sound recordings became possible, the recording industry has a very consistent history of crying "Piracy!" for every new technology. They try mightily to stop every invention and new product, out of fear that it will kill their business that's based on the current technology. Then, a few years later when the "pirates" have become successful, the industry buys them out and proudly proclaims that the new technology was their invention all along. The companies that don't switch to the new technology go out of business, and sometimes newcomers make it big. And then, a new kind of recording gadget comes along, and the cry of "Piracy!" is heard again.
In another decade, we can expect to look back at the same thing. This newfangled "intarweb" thingy will be the established distribution system, and the recording industry will be claiming that they invented it and magnanimously delivered it to the masses. But some new technology will be appearing that will be a threat to the way they do business over the Internet, and they'll be hollering "Piracy!" all over again.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here's what we do:
To pick candidates, we put the smartest 0.1% of the population in a secret lottery. We choose a dozen or so. We then have federal marshalls abduct them for a few days, keeping them secluded until after the election. Each candidate gets 4 hours to write an essay to say what he intends to do if elected. We make the essays anonymous by using numbers to identify the candidates. Essays that identify the author are prohibited. Essays are only revealed to voters in the privacy of the voting booth.
Voters then get to vote, knowing only the numbers and the essays. We use something like approval voting, but requiring that the voter choose between 1/3 and 2/3 of the candidates. Each voter sees the essays in a random order and with a different set of random ID numbers, preventing any candidate from getting an advantage from ballot position. Votes are weighted by the voter's IQ.
Promises made in the essay are binding. Violations result in impeachment. Particularly grave violations are additionally punishable by death.
There. That does a fine job of keeping the power-hungry bastards out of office, gets the bright people elected, and greatly reduces the opportunity for corrupt deals. When nobody can even contact the candidate until he takes office, it's rather hard to buy him off.