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White House Plans Open Access For Research
Hugh Pickens writes "Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. Now the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President is launching a 'Public Access Policy Forum' to determine whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented. 'The NIH model has a variety of features that can be evaluated, and there are other ways to offer the public enhanced access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications,' OSTP says in the request for information. 'The best models may [be] influenced by agency mission, the culture and rate of scientific development of the discipline, funding to develop archival capabilities, and research funding mechanisms.' The OSTP will conduct an interactive, online discussion that will focus on three major questions: Should this policy be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented? In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information? What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? 'It's very encouraging to see the Obama Administration focus on ensuring public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research [reg. required] as a key way to maximize our collective investment in science,' says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition."
...what arguments Springer-Verlag, Elzevier and the like will find to fight this. Since in my (humble, but competent) opinion there can be no honest reason to oppose this, they will need to be very creative. And yes, as a scientific researcher, I have very often been hampered in my search for references by the unjustifiable monopoly held by those vultures, and the hefty subscription prices that go with it. Heck, they even made me transfer the copyrights on my own publications to them. I may not even cite myself extensively!
Why not the oil that's pumped out of public lands? Instead, we subsidize the exploration and pay through the nose for the gasoline.
You are welcome on my lawn.
While I have no doubt that the first part of the statement will come true, with regards to journals trying to ramp up publishing costs, I have doubts that the scientific community will bear that much more extortion. As it stands, we're practically at the breaking point, where scientists would almost rather not publish than do so, but have no other choice as you have stated, their livelihoods depend on it. As it stands, you already have to pay, give up an irrevocable copyright license... you just about have to give over your first born child to get any notoriety at all.
Once the government grant money for publishing is increased, you'll likely see scientists push to keep some of that money for themselves and their research, and more alternative services such as arXiv will being to pop up and grow and replace the stodgy old journals. The fact is, scientific journals are just as close to becoming obsolete with the invention of the internet as newspapers are, and it's very likely they'll try the same exact tactics as newspapers to hold on: increasing fees on both sides of the equation, going to governments and schools to try to ill-legitimize other services, form exclusive contracts with various schools, etc.
You can argue about journals being more peer reviewed and such, but even the internet serves as a better tool for those purposes as well: being able to instantly expose anyone in your field to your work and have anyone criticize or improve upon it immediately rather than going through various journal's information back-channels or blackbox review committees will vastly speed up science.
So, while things may look more bleak in the short-run with such a plan, in the mid- to long-term, it should help restore the US's place in science.
Wow, it really sounds like your community should just revolt and publish exclusively in PLoS. If enough high-profile researchers can be convinced of the value of it, there won't be a stigma regarding recognition. The problem is convincing them of the value in switching.
'It's very encouraging to see the Obama Administration focus on ensuring public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research [reg. required] as a key way to maximize our collective investment in science,' says Heather Joseph
Ms. Joseph should thank the Bush administration for starting the ball rolling by opening up the NIH. Going forward, as long as the government applies the same peer review and quality standards to publishing the results that reputable journals do, the policy makes sense. But what happens if the researcher's peers don't like the quality of the work? Today it's quietly buried, will the government still publish it but with some kind of a caveat/stigma?
As a professor myself, I hope that the unintended consequence will be that we move away from the restrictive, expensive, academic journal publishers like Elsevier and toward an open model of academic publication where your recognition and peer review come from broad, open, dissemination.
I, for one, would like to see a peer review system where articles are posted on-line and evaluations (i.e. referee reports) are also posted in an open, strongly authenticated, way. I don't know about you, but one thing that really annoys me is to receive a referee report on a paper where it is obvious that the referee hasn't even read past the introduction. I believe that forcing the evaluations to be open, and strongly-authenticated (so that everyone knows exactly who is writing it) would improve the quality and credibility of research.
I suspect that some people would claim that if referee reports aren't anonymous, then they won't be honest. But, a referee report should not be about opinions, it should be a straight forward analysis of the results reported in the paper. If it's really science, then it should be completely objective, thus opinion and personality should have nothing to do with it. Hence, there should be no need for anonymity. When I grade my students' papers, it certainly isn't anonymous, but it doesn't need to be because I am giving them objective feedback (e.g. "this is wrong because you said cos(x+h) = cos(x) + cos(h) which is not true.").
Using an open system would allow articles to receive recognition and ranking based upon the open discussion of their merits. Individuals doing the ranking could also receive recognition for the quality of their work, which is important because it can sometimes take weeks of work to thoroughly understand a new result. That work should receive more acknowledgment in the academic system than it currently does. (I suspect it's the current lack of acknowledgment for refereeing which makes many people into lazy referees. After all, why bother putting much effort into that referee report when it won't count toward promotion. You are better off spending that time writing your own papers.)
Finally, using an open system gives the public greater credibility in the system. When people want to know why paper A is considered correct and paper B isn't, the analysis and discussion will be available, too.
Some provision should also be made for making data available as well. For controversial and issues of practical importance, the benefit is obvious. There could also be unexpected benefits for esoteric subjects. The experiment I worked on for my physics dissertation cost around $10^7, and the data is sitting on shelves at three universities, if it hasn't been chucked yet. Admittedly, in my case the only people who would concievably care are the hundred or so people in the subfield, and they probably care more about working on their own experiments. But making the data available would also preserve it for potential inquiries that have not yet been concieved.
Of course there are practical problems such as the volumes of data and organizing it to make sense, but I suspect that any work done to make the data interpretable by others would improve scientist's own analysis.
But, a referee report should not be about opinions, it should be a straight forward analysis of the results reported in the paper. If it's really science, then it should be completely objective, thus opinion and personality should have nothing to do with it. Hence, there should be no need for anonymity. When I grade my students' papers, it certainly isn't anonymous, but it doesn't need to be because I am giving them objective feedback (e.g. "this is wrong because you said cos(x+h) = cos(x) + cos(h) which is not true.").
Your idea is interesting, but I guess opinion matters more than you think it does. I recently recommended rejection or major revision on a paper about "Economic forecasting". I think the math was all fine and dandy. In your view, I should have recommended publication. But I simply could not stand the way terms like prediction or forecasting were used. I asked the author to use terms like "data extrapolation". If economic prediction were possible, why publish? The function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable; and all those clich'es.
My point is, something could be totally right inside the little confines of a model, while the premises of the model become a matter of opinion and philosophy. So I don't see how you can actually separate the two; what's opinion and what's objective, so cleanly like that.