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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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?
They basically provide quality control by making sure that the peer review process happens. A good journal will first screen out a lot of papers that are entirely unsuitable, they'll then find relevant experts in the field to review the paper. You're paper wont get published unless the referee's think it's good enough. So they manage that process. That process is attractive to authors because a good journal garners a lot of respect in the scientific community. More than that it effects how much funding the university gets (universities often get more government funding if they maintain staff with high impact publications). If you want to know more about how impact is measured look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor . Impact factor is a fairly stupid way to measure the quality of a paper, but it's what people do. Hopefully we will move towards citation counts or some similar metric, but essentially all these metrics are quite coarse.
But, back to the main point. Journals do provide a useful service in managing the peer review process. And yes they massively overcharge for that service and often force you to assign copyright to them so they can extract as much money as possible from your work. That's part of the reason people are now looking towards open access... however ironically open access tends to end up costing the author more (as the journal can no longer charge subscription fees they charge higher publication fees).
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
Top journals like Science and Nature have gotten much better with copyright, allowing authors to maintain copyright over their papers, and releasing content for free after some time (usually ~12 months). Also, personal subscriptions to the top journals (honestly, i don't know of anyone who reads through whole journals other than science, nature, and maybe 1 specialty journal) come down to $5 per issue. It tends to be the small specialists journals and publishers that get nasty with copyright. One of these publishers made us jump through hoops for permission to reprint a figure from an older review in a newer one. The best part is that we were publishing the new review with the same publisher! Also, does anyone know if the current open access policy covers review papers? Those would be of most value to the average taxpayer I believe.
The expensive-journal commercial publishers don't have much of a competitive moat: anyone can publish PDFs on the internet with the word "Journal" attached to groups of them, and you've got a journal. If that anyone is well-respected in the field and the PDFs are hosted by a well-known university that also prints off some paper copies for archival, you've got yourself a new journal.
In my area this revolt against the commercial publishers has been quite rapid and successful. The entire board of editors left the journal Machine Learning in 2000, setting up the non-profit, open-access JMLR instead, which is now at least as prestigious (possibly moreso). In more general AI, the open-access, non-profit JAIR now has a much higher impact factor than the old Elsevier journal in the area, "Artificial Intelligence".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let me elaborate on some of the replies you've received. I think there's a social component that needs to be understood. For background: I was an editor for a few years, have been an associate editor (responsibilities of this position can be significant or minimal, depending on the journal), and referee a reasonable number of papers.
The best academics view themselves as part of a community to which they can contribute and which in turn makes it possible for them to do the work they want to do (by funding their research, for example). One measure of the value of an academic is the number of others who cite their work. Everyone thinks about citation counts. Authors want to publish in journals that are heavily cited and journals want to publish papers that will be heavily cited. It's not just that top journals publish the best papers, it's also that the best academics send their papers first to the top journals. This creates tremendous inertia in the pecking order of journals with the result that it's *very* hard to raise the perception of a journal's quality. Journal quality is a consideration when publications are evaluated by tenure committees, because journal quality is a rough screen for the quality of the paper. It is not a perfect screen, but it is informative.
In many cases editors and referees are paid nothing or minimally, and they view themselves as contributing to this community. The best editors are generally highly-regarded academics who think that it is important to publish high-quality papers that others will find useful, i.e. papers that will contribute to the community. In deciding what to publish they use their judgment and they also rely heavily on reviewers. The reviewers in turn try to do a good job because the editors recognize the higher-quality reviewers --- they may ask them to serve on editorial boards, they will write them positive letters at a tenure review, they may take treat their papers more carefully when deciding what to publish.
There are lots of ways this process can fail: entrenched editors play favorites, referees suck up to editors and authors whose papers they review (even if the process is anonymous, reviewers sometimes reveal themselves informally), there is a "good old boy" network with favoritism, and sometimes outright mistakes get made. But by and large the process works astonishingly well, with the majority of players trying to do the "right" thing. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but OSS shouldn't work as well as it does either.
The publishers provide continuity in this process. You want to make sure, for example, that a paper published today will be available in 20 years; that if the editor gets hit by a bus, there is institutional backing to keep things going; that the journal has a quality web presence, etc.
Some publishers are leeches and I am appalled that the NIH access policy might be changed. But I think it will be a while before academia moves to a more open model. There will continue to be a need for a process to certify quality, and there will be a need for long-term access. Commercial journals, with all their flaws, do fill those needs.
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.
And the diff between Nobama and McSame was.....what exactly? I mean seriously, give me a break. They are two sides of the same coin. All you are picking is Coke VS Pepsi anymore.
Fuck off. It was that kind of talk that got us W in 2000.