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White House Petition For Open Access To Research
dstates writes "You paid for it, you should be able to read the results of publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health have had a very successful open access mandate requiring that the results of federally funded biomedical research be published in open access journals. Now there is a White House petition to broaden this mandate. This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research. It is a health care issue, patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes, and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable."
patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes
If handled wrong, it'll just become a few CEOs who were first to rush to the patent office.
Oh wow! An online petition!
Now things will really start to change!
For the next step we need to stage a sit-in at a Starbucks.
"We the People"...ha!
This is nothing more than a tool to give us the illusion of influence.
Now we can have a nice, bullshit, boilerplate response to a legitimate question!
Seriously, is anyone still falling for this obvious scam?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
we did something about the scholarly publishing racket that funnels taxpayer money into CEO pockets.
"This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research"
Yeah, sure, it's nice that businesses hire people that can read and I'm sure they do important work. Blah blah blah.
This is a public good. We're talking about basic research funded with public funds. Everyone who pays taxes should have access to works published from that funding (within reason). (Maybe if you don't pay US taxes you shouldn't have access, but that's a point for another time.)
To be specific, science should communicated to the public. I don't mean that the public should be viewed as having a "say" in what gets studied/published or not - that's for peer review and ethics boards. Feynman talks about how important this is. If your hypothesis can't ever be communicated to someone outside the discipline, then just maybe it's not a sound hypothesis. (I'm not sure he said that exactly, but that's as I see things.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
What is a scam here?
I didn't see any response yet.
The petition seems ok.
One of the highest ranked petitions on the site called on the President to advocate for the regulation of Cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol. The administrations response did not mention alcohol once. Further, it was written by the drug czar, who is legally required to oppose any measures that would legalize Cannabis.
Don't think for a moment that anyone is listening to your petition. This is a marketing tool for the president to co-opt your issue. If he can respond to a few unimportant petitions, he gets to claim that he listens to "the people", while ignoring anything that's really important.
For example, after the debacle I described above, someone created a petition for the president to take these petitions seriously. It got the requisite peitions and got a response. They gave some examples of how the petitions influenced policy. Among them were banning puppy mills, digitizing federal records, and a "conversation" on online piracy. Not exactly heavy hitting issues here.
"The People" have absolutely no say on anything that matters in this country. Fuck these petitions, and fuck this president.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would be in full support of this mandate as long as it includes a provision that all federal research funding must also pay for publishing costs. I am a big fan of open-access journals, but the reality is that many of them are very expensive to publish in. For example, authors are charged almost $3,000 to publish a single article in PLoS Biology. For many researchers who are working off of limited grants, that price makes publishing in those journals impossible. In contrast, many "closed" journals have no costs to the authors because publishing costs are covered by subscription fees. I absolutely do want to see a larger migration to open-access publishing, but I also don't want "open access" mandates to forget about who actually pays for publication.
Mr. President, pick one:
1. Continued cooperation from wealthy drug companies on your healthcare agenda
2. Sudden shift in big pharma campaign contributions (> oil+gas+wallstreet) to Romney's 527s.
so if they do it because 25k sign this does that mean we let the 0.0083% control the country?
Also repell patents on drugs that were funded in a material way by the public. Because nearly all drugs are funded by the public. Labs almost invariably hook into the process at the very last stage, when the gory details have been worked out already, and reap the benefits for the entire process.
IMO one good fit for government is to build infrastructure upon which commerce can flourish. Usually I think of this as roads, water, sewer, communications - places where to some extent or another a duplicate system has a large barrier to entry, but upon which duplicate, redundant companies can compete to distinguish themselves.
So then I have to wonder how basic research fits into this. If the research is done and paid for by private companies, then the government is already going to step in and restrict the market by giving that company patent opportunity as reward. So does government-funded research compete against private research firms (and thereby restrict competition), or does government-funded research made publicly available jump-start private business, growing the competitive market?
I don't know the answer to this. Obviously if the research is defense- or injury-recovery-related then someone can shout "national security!" or "think of the troops!" and get it funded by the feds. I just wish there was a way to quantify the return on basic research paid for by the government then given away. ("But," you say, "sometimes basic research has no immediate return. That's why it's called basic research and that's why few companies bother with it any more." Good point.) Is there a way to restrict free usage to companies that pay U.S. taxes and grow the U.S. economy as other countries do with their research, or is that even desired? Any thoughts?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Who could have possibly thought that a 2-year Senator who never published anything while editor of Harvard Law Review, who never produced any course material while a "professor" of Constitutional law, who demagogued about closing Gitmo and repealing the Patriot Act as a candidate but who couldn't wait to prepeptuate them once in office, whose foreign policy is pretty indistinguishable from a hypothetical Bush III, would be all style and no substance.
I followed the link to the petition, and it told me I had already signed it.
I most certainly have not, though I might have if I weren't a Canadian and possibly ineligible to do so. But telling me I have already signed it is just plain wrong.
-- hendrik
I've been on grant review boards -- a large number of the grants submitted make an assumption that they'll publish a paper a year, and include the 'page fees' (or whatever is appropriate in their field) in their grant proposal to cover the publishing of the research information.
Now, conversely, I really liked Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger's recent article, 'Decoupling the Scholarly Journal', which talks about the basic tasks that a journal does, and how they don't all need to be done by a single entity. (I admit, I've only scanned it, I need to go back and read it more thoroughly, so hopefully I haven't misrepresented it)
The problem with your assumption that journals are covered by subscription fees is that the rates for library subscriptions has been rising so significantly that many are rebelling, and just dropping the subscriptions entirely. Some have designated the savings to go into a pool to pay author fees, but I'm also personally against the current model of author-pays-on-acceptance. (as it means they're subsidizing all of the rejections; it's been pointed out that journals pride themselves on exclusivity ("we only accept 2%"), so are unlikely to establish fees on submission as it may pre-filter the rejections)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Thanks for your openness, Americans
Very truly yours,
China
Russia
"and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable"
Well, I - and a lot of others - in turn find the publication prices of open access journals unpayable. And some people keep forgetting that if major journals - lots of which are US-based - would switch to open access publication models, the wide majority of non-US researchers would simply not be able to afford publishing in those journals. Well, it would reduce competition in high impact journals, that's for sure, some might enjoy that scenario. And an issue most of these advocates don't seem to care much about is that if such model would go through, there would be cases when you'd need to pay even when their papers don't get published (i.e. comes with switching all costs onto the authors).
While I don't like the prices some publishing houses use, and surely it could be improved, I don't think a simple switch to these open access models could be a quick fix. And, as I said before, if the high impact journals don't switch, and all at once (which won't happen anytime soon), then there would be no point in the whole thing anyway.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Suppose I got a federal grant to attend school. Does this entitle Joe taxpayer access to my papers, homework assignments, and/or thesis or senior project?
Do people understand that most "open" journals do charge authors page charges ? That the present day egregious paper publishers are also in the game?
so, if the goal is to make some publishing houses make money out of tax payer funded research for little value added and getting in the way of full dissemination of research, this may not cut it. We need more such as authors retaining full rights to their work and no publisher of any sort being able to abridge them. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!