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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."
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
"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.
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
My only problem with this is what makes it into a scientific journal? Since it's public, I would want as many studies included, but this may include junk science. But having a lower bar of entry could also be used for controversial subjects.
As rigorous as scientific method is, the definition of science has become fodder for political debate. (I initially had examples of good and bad science, but it seems that each person has their own idea of what they mean.) Whether this fodder will benefit humanity long term or even the country short term has yet to be determined. Perhaps ironically, science, like art, must push the boundaries of our own preconceptions and be willing to be bold, even when society does not wish it. Embryonic stem cell research comes to mind as a clear example between science and society (no "religious" war intended; just citing an example).
I'm hesitant of a government-backed publisher simply because science would then be defined by who is in office. Even if this was done by non-partisan people, politicians can still "withhold funding" until they get the results they want.
I think forcing studies that were paid for by taxpayers to be open is a great and important start. That way, any study, regardless of outcome, will have to be published and available for all taxpayers. To make it fully accountable, there would need to be a list of studies being conducted so that some senator/representative can't bury the results because it gets in the way of their political ideology. For added paranoia, several independent servers can archive the list and make sure every study conducted is published. For ultimate paranoia, provide a way to contact whomever is conducting the study.
We don't live in Shouldland.
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.
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.
Although that might please the anti-patent croud, I think, you would find pretty much no-takers for funding for FDA trials. Why would any company pay for an FDA trial when the outcome is uncertain and if it turned out okay they would be in competion with every other company to manufacture the drug, but the other companies didn't have to pay so every company takes one step back...
The only solutions to this problem seem to be:
1. Maybe the government would pay for all drug trials as well (hmm, try making that process non-political, like publically funded elections)...
2. Maybe we'd not have FDA trials at all (the libertarian idea, let the market sort it out)...
3. Maybe we'd have the govt subsidize failed drug trials (and have the govt trial all sorts of crap the industry threw at it, a windfall to the drug trial industry)
4. Maybe that we'd give the company that funded the trial a short term monopoly to recoup the risk of the money tendered on the drug trial (gasp, is that a patent?)
5. Maybe we can force companies to fund a certain percentage of trials in order to maintain the ability to legally sell a certain volume of drugs in the US (the pooled risk pool idea, kinda pari-mutual betting or forced insurance)...
Although I personally like #5, I think that companies would tend to gravitate to the least risky drugs that are the cheapest to trial or conversely the most obscure conditions that would probably reduce the quality of break-through drugs available to the general public. Sadly, it seems to me that #4 is currently the best practical option and the other ones are mostly just fantasies (esp #2, I don't think anyone but a die-hard libertarian wants that)... You might argue that the patents are too long, but that is merely a technicality of the current patent regime, not a reason to throw out the idea of patents altogether...