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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."
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.
'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.