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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."
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.
Here's the way things work right now in my field, astrophysics: a scientist has an idea. He writes a grant proposal to the NSF and receives money. He uses the money to (hire a grad student, travel to telescope, build an instrument, etc.). He writes a paper on the results. In order to have the paper published in one of the big journals -- which is necessary to gain credit for tenure, promotion, reputation among peers -- he PAYS THE JOURNAL ~$110 PER PAGE. The journal makes the information available only to subscribers, who pay around $50-$100 for individuals or $1500-$3000 for institutions.
If you don't publish in the big peer-reviewed journals, you don't get recognition.
So, suppose that the government changes things: now the journals must make government-funded research available to the public without charge. The journals will lose money from their subscriber base; after all, who would bother to pay for the articles when they are free? Where do the journals make up the money? My guess: they increase the page charges. Now it might cost $200 or $250 per page to publish an article in a journal. Whence comes that extra money? From the government grant.
Result: the scientific papers are now available freely to the public, but scientists must ask for more money from the NSF in order to pay the higher page charges.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
'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.
It's my understanding that people in congress have considered before the question of expanding open access requirements to other disciplines. Obviously publishers will oppose such a move because it cuts into their bottom line. How far it eats into the bottom line depends on the reasons people subscribe and just how the opening of access works: You can make new papers closed and older papers open, or you can do the reverse. Additionally, you can make papers totally open or you can institute some half-way measure, like something similar to Google Books or Amazon book previews, which are designed with the aim that you can read the content but not easily save a copy of it.
In Physics, the APS (the professional organization for physicists) publishes the Physical Review journals, which are some of the most influential in the field besides Nature and Science. Apparently the APS relies on subscription fees from the journals in part to subsidize many of their other (worthwhile) activities, e.g. scientific conferences. As a result, it's my understanding that they opposed open access requirements (though they might have been willing to accept them in some form). This is especially interesting because the Physical Review journals have relatively friendly policies that allow one to post a pre-print to the ArXiv (which physicists generally do) and host a copy of the paper on your own website, so most of the papers they publish (at least more recently) are already available for free one way or another.
I generally have a very favorable opinion of the APS, but I would very much like to see more openness in scientific journals, at the least for taxpayer funded research. If this means that the APS will have to raise dues and conference fees to more accurately reflect the cost of their activities, I think that's something we'll just have to accept.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
You'd need to implement something like that in a hierarchical manner, not unlike slashdot. The number of submissions would dramatically increase due to its free nature while the quality would surely decline, and nobody wants to sit there and read a large percentage of questionable work to determine if it's valid and if so if the results are correct. New submissions could be subject to quick reviews for validity testing (with moderation of course, people who troll by negatively reviewing and voting down new papers without actually reading them or considering their results, or for any bias should be barred from such reviews), and once a paper has been verified it can move on to a stage where people who don't want to sift through garbage to find the gold can really scrutinize them and see if they stand up.
:)
Why not make such a website?