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California Bill Would Mandate Open Access To Publicly Funded Research
ectoman writes "This week, advocates of open access to publicly funded research are keeping an eye on California's Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609), which could soon find its way to the California State Senate. The bill requires the final copy of any peer-reviewed research funded by California tax dollars to be made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. If passed, the legislation would become the first state-level law mandating this kind of access. Opensource.com is featuring a collection of articles on open access publishing, which you can read while you await the verdict on AB 609."
We pay for it, why should some private party reap the rewards?
I love the idea of research being available when funded by public resources. I always hear about research that is being performed, but I never know where to go to read the final report. If I do find a report it usually costs money.
Something reasonable finally coming from the California Legislature. Let see how well the (D) can screw this up, by exempting their buddies.
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Free and unlimited access to publicly funded research should already, without a law to enforce it, be a fact. So it is here in Europe, at least.
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If this passes, I would like to apply for a $1 grant even though I am not in California. Some publishers allow open access only when required by law and this would give me leverage. (As an academic it is in my interests to have my articles as easily accessible as possible. I never see a dime from the paywalls on my published articles.)
I would like to see the next step be that products, medicines, and continued research utilizing public research as a starting point should all be prohibited from utilizing patents.
sure, lets just raise taxes even higher.. in Cali no less...
Global warming people will kill this.
If they can't sell access and keep the research paywalled, then they'll have to raise taxes to cover the shortfall.
And how will it go if the research is part funded by private money? Is only some of the research to be disclosed?
That's exactly what's happening. Only the research that is funded by the public must be made available to the public.
Well, in the case that this law covers, the funding already came from public taxes. So why would there need to be further mandates for funding research?
Privately funded research, no openness mandate, publicly funded research, open access mandated.
This will save California money by reducing the number of grant requests. This is a great way to get the same result!
Despite how I feel about the openness of public funded research there will be those that will seek other sources of funding. In this case, you'd say "good riddance!"
Now if California was to openly state that they wanted to cut funding to research grants by 20%, you'd be very angry right now.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
An unintended consequence could well be to make it harder for researchers without a lot of funding (i.e. grad students, post docs) to publish. Publishers often offer the choice between paying them to publish it open access (several hundred dollars), or publishing it for free behind a paywall (a paywall that most researchers don't see because of institutional subscriptions). So, most of the work of my dissertation is technically behind a paywall because I had to.
Of course it's also on the preprint sever (http://arxiv.org), but noone trusts stuff there that does not link back to journal article.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
--Robert A. Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)
It really is just as well, public funds should serve the public good I hope the whole USA follows suit. If you are working on something proprietary seek private funds.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Academics will still need to publish in the high-impact journals, the journals know this, and the prices for them to provide open access will go up. More and more of the money supposed to fund research will be funnelled instead to support the publishers. It's already happening elsewhere where this kind of thing is mandated. You can mandate open access but I bet you can't mandate a reasonable price from the publishers.
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Academic publishers have had a very long and profitable run, and are now fighting back against the free flow of information that they once thrived upon. They are fighting a losing game.
Publication has now become essentially cost free, the only costs being those to maintain the online information resources, and the time invested to review. Since reviewers were never paid in the past, and because data storage and access are incredibly inexpensive, and becoming even less expensive, and because finding and researching subjects is far faster and more convenient in digital form, the old paper journal format will eventually pass away.
As a result, the only option for the old publishing industry is to try and legislate protections for its business model. Ultimately this too will fail, as economic and other considerations make the old model unsustainable.
While I agree whole-heartedly with open science/open access, most public research in California is federally funded, not state funded. Although some institutes, like the NIH, require publication to journals, the journals themselves can and do have commercial policies. This is where real battle is currently being waged.
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I work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), a large (4000-person) Department of Energy research lab that is, unfortunately but understandably, often confused with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We get lots of funding from DoE, of course, but also from other federal and state agencies.
Almost all of the work we do is published in the form of "LBNL reports", most of which are freely available, although hard to find. Much of the work is later published in scientific journals, and it is sometimes problematic that an LBNL report of the work already exists: some of my colleagues have had papers rejected on the grounds that the work was already 'published' as an LBNL report. (That's bad because LBNL reports are not usually peer reviewed, except for an internal review process). Perhaps because of that, LBNL does not make the LBNL report database searchable by outsiders. However, most (maybe all?) of the reports are supposedly available through the Science.gov portal. But the search facilities there are so primitive that I've never been able to find what I'm looking for there (for instance, even searching on my own name plus a few words from one of my report titles doesn't work reliably, turning up hundreds of hits that may or may not include my report).
Fortunately, the search engine of your choice is probably adequate. If you're looking for work that was done here at LBNL, simply putting "LBNL report" at the start of your search request will probably work. For instance, Google [LBNL report building electric load] and you will find a bunch of reports on analyzing electricity data from buildings, usually from the relevant LBNL department website. A lot of this work was also published in journals that are behind paywalls, but the same content is here for free. Often there is additional material that had to be cut in order to make it into the journal, so sometimes the reports are better than the papers. On the other hand, the papers do benefit from modifications due to reviewer comments, and are often prepared with more care, so sometimes the papers are better. I think several other federal agencies have similar policies.
So if you find a journal paper that you're interested in but can't read because it's behind a paywall, and the authors work for the government, then try searching on the author names and a few of the words from the title and add "report" to your search (or "LBNL report" or "NASA report" or whatever). You have a pretty good chance of finding what you want.
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Instead of focusing on disclosure, the bills should focus on ownership. A patent application is a public disclosure. The universities will simply file more patents making their research less useful to and less owned by the general public.
In principle, I'm all for using public money to "commission" public works/research etc.
On the other hand, a lot of public money is offered as seedcorn to help establish ongoing viable income streams. IE. we give you funding now, but not forever.
Right now it's "we give you funding now and forever", but perhaps a mix of the other two would be best...? The government can commission research as public property OR give a grant that allows the research institute to keep the profits on the understanding that their future ability to seek research grants will be diminished.
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if the state hires me to write new security software and I need to do a lot of reading on the subject, is that "Publically Funded Research"?
Do I then have to describe how it works to everyone on the internet (China, North Korea, Iran, etc...)
A similar bill exists at the federal level, Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2013 (H.R. 708 and S. 350). It actually requires any research papers are in the public domain within 6 months of publication, which I think is great and long overdue. If public money paid for it, it belongs to the public! I contacted my congressmen's office to voice my support, and made the suggestion that research papers also be required to be available in an open format (such as plain ASCII text or OpenDocument where appropriate) to make sure research can be archived properly, but other than that, it is a short and simple bill with a good objective. Highly recommend everyone start hammering their representatives to get it done.
The revenue goes towards a private company, not towards research therefore the funding can remain the same and that's the whole point. Why should the taxpayer pay for research that benefits a very small group of private companies?
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On a slightly more serious note, I wonder if California could start a series of grants just to pay for the "author-pays" fee ($2000-$8000 depending on publisher). Some publishers are typically closed, but allow an author to make a particular article Open Access if they pay this fee. Unfortunately, paying that fee could enough of a barrier to prevent young researchers without enough money from choosing Open Access (especially if they are publishing multiple papers per year), but a grant to cover just that fee could lead to many more Open Access articles.
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Yes and no - in order to publish open access, there is a publication fee and/or page fee from the journal. In some fields, these fees exist for non-open journals as well, but for others (mathematics for one) these are virtually non-existent for traditional journals. Strictly speaking switching to open access wouldn't lead to a loss of revenue, but an increase in costs for researchers. Take PLoS - one of the more prominent open access journals, they charge around $2-3000 per article for most of their journals. While that may be a drop in the bucket when you are running a million dollar lab, for those operating on small grants (or depending on how they define 'state funded' operating on salary from a Cal/Cal State school), it can be a significant cost.