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US Research Open Access In Peril
luceth writes "Several years ago, the U.S. National Institutes of Health instituted a policy whereby publications whose research was supported by federal funds were to be made freely accessible a year after publication. The rationale was that the public paid for the research in the first place. This policy is now threatened by legislation introduced by, you guessed it, a Congresswoman who is the largest recipient of campaign contributions from the scientific publishing industry. The full text of the bill, H.R. 3699, is available online."
I read that as: US Research Open Access only in Perl
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Any of you get the feeling that anything coming out of Washington DC these days causes problems? While many bitch that Obama is a socialist/marxist (even though nobody in this country can describe what these are) it seems these people are hell bent on creating a Soviet Russia of sorts. I say this because I heard it difficulties USSR scientists had because of restrictions on reading publications and getting published. This has gots to rank as my Bitch Of The Month.
mfwright@batnet.com
Color me shocked.
This will never change until lobbying and donations on a corporate scale are either severely limited or outright made illegal and enforced with harsh punishment. However, since it would be Congress that would need to change those laws, it's never going to happen.
Who watches the watchers, fox guard the henhouse, etc.
There's a reason there is no "Disagree" mod...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Check your premises.
With this bill, the feds paying out the grants (NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc.) can't mandate the openness, but the research institutions and the researchers can do it themselves. There have already been a few discussions on here about some of the better known US schools mandating that all research be published in open conferences/journals. At the last conference I attended, there was a business meeting where it was discussed that we can (and should) attach copyright waivers to the standard ACM copyright form so that we retain copyright of our work and are free to distribute it.
Don't make us click on the stupid article to find out the name, location, and party affiliation of a politician.
Use: Rep Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) instead of "a congresswoman"
There was an interesting article on the academic publishing industry recently. When you get all the material refereed for free (actually, on the dime of the colleges and research institutes who pay the reviewer's salary), there's just no reason why the charges should be soaring up past $20 per article like they have in the last 10 years.
The greed doesn't stop there either. Not long ago I was a volunteer at a fairly prominent IEEE conference. The cost of attendance per person is in the $600-$1000 range. Despite contributing 12+ hours of work, one of the co-chairs had to fight with the organizers just to get them to foot the bill for our lunches.
With this definition, they've basically declared all work not done by Federal Employees "Private sector", even if paid for entirely by the Federal Government, so long as the work is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm serious, why is it even legal for politicians to accept any kinds of money outside of their salary?! If that one thing was done - illegal to accept any outside money - then I'd optimistically predict that politics wouldn't be the sh*t-hole it is today.
Shh.
You realize othing actually happens unless the bill gets passed, right?
Sure one representative can propose something but it takes a majority or representatives voting for it to actually pass.
TFA quotes the text of the bill as consisting of the following 3 lines:
"No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that:
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work."
At least it's a blatantly visible abuse of our lobby system as opposed to one buried at the end of a completely unrelated congressional effort.
Check out the co-sponsor; it's none other than one Darrell Issa (R-CA). Yup, the same one that is opposed to SOPA and has proposed the alternative OPEN. Not so opposed to abuses of the copyright system, it appears... I now can't help but wonder whether OPEN was merely put forward as a Plan B just in case SOPA flounders in the light of all the negative publicity. Time to check the small print, me thinks.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Make sure you let your representing congress critters know your displeasure for such legislation. Don't let corporate money be the only voice.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The bill specifically states that any research done by a private organization is covered even if all of the funding for the research comes from federal funds.
3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term `private-sector research work' means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
This is just a blatant attempt to misappropriate public funds for the sake of commercial interests.
The second link didn't come across properly with my make-link FF extension: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
just ban organizations from donating money. Only individuals can donate money to a politician. Next, ban donating to a campaign you can't vote in. If you can't vote in California's elections why are you donating money? Next, strict caps on donations. Lastly, enforce the policy with a lifetime ban on holding political office and/or long, long prison terms. Take your pick. It's clear, it's cut & dry, and it eliminates money.
As for tracking the money, how easy would it be to spot a candidate who has 10x the money of his closest rival?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I work for the government and every once in a while my boss says I should try to patent it. I always refuse because my paycheck comes from the taxpayers so it should be freely available. I have never been able to find if there is an easy way to release my designs in an open way. I don't think the lawyers want to deal with it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Choosing to publish in a journal that charges subscription fees has the advantage that it doesn't cost you anything to publish your work and the disadvantage that a restricted audience has access to your work (with the usual excuse being that most in research/academic settings can use institutional subscriptions and who else would be interested anyway?).
Choosing to publish in a journal that is free to all has the disadvantage that it can cost quite a bit (thousands of dollars for the last one I did) to publish your work and the advantage that anyone with a computer and internet access has access to your work.
Having said that, any grant funded project likely has money marked specifically for publication (dissemination) costs (personally I think publication costs are a better investment then conference presentations but that's just me). If you know you want to have your work freely available AND you are funded by an NIH grant there's no good reason why it can't be done without publishing in a subscription based journal that's going to bitch about letting everyone see your article for free after a year.
Leave the subscription journals for the poor SOBs that don't have grant money coming in (another problem).
Some would say liberty made the US great.
In natural justice (tm) or basic apolitical logic of the situation, liberating published science is not a crime. Hoarding it and charging a toll like a bridge troll ought to be.
It's a good thing natural justice trumps US "law".
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Do 'em like China did with the folks who contaminated infant formula.
Named, shamed, then shot in pubic.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Well, looking from the outside, there's a possible solution:
Form a political party which pledges to do only one thing: reform the constitution to allow for proportional representation voting (multi-party system), and then immediately have elections again.
It's the *only* way, because I thought there was a scientific study that showed that a two-party system is difficult to get rid of using normal elections.
That would put the USA more in line with more normal countries where there is a lively, albeit sometimes not very long lasting, sequence of coalition governments, and where it is normal for the people to vote for the party they like best, not just the left- and right-half of the Party of Power.
Such as Italy for example (OK.. *bad* example...).
You'll have to do it, because 1. I am not American and 2. I don't have the time.
PS If you'd already had done that, you wouldn't have had to suffer 8 years of G.W. Bush. Think about it.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?