New Bill Would Repeal NIH Open Access Policy 223
pigah writes "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act has been reintroduced into Congress. The bill will ban open access policies in federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These policies require scientists to provide public access to their work if it has been funded with money from an agency with an open access policy. Such policies ensure that the public has access to read the results of research that it has funded. It appears that Representative John Conyers (D-MI), the author of the bill, is doing the bidding of publishing companies who do not want to lose control of this valuable information that they sell for exorbitant fees thereby restricting access by the general public to an essentially public good."
Why are they so easyly bought or manipulated (Score:5, Informative)
I've gotten so cynical in my old age that I just expect this now, it doesn't even disappoint anymore, we've got the best government money can buy!!!
I voted for the Dem's this time around, but they're just as bad. Lying on their taxes, getting free drivers/limos, getting million $$ speaking deals as payoffs, and then getting their payoff from special interests to vote against the public good. They just get their payoffs from different groups.
This is silly. (Score:5, Informative)
How to handle the corruption of John Conyers. (Score:4, Informative)
* Washington Office: 202-225-5126
* Detroit Office: 313-961-5670
* Trenton / Downriver Office: 734-675-4084
Be caring. Be friendly. Be authoritative. Tell the person who answers the phone that his sponsoring of a bill requiring closed government is corruption. Tell that person that he or she should not work for someone who wants government corruption. Try to convince that person to get a better job.
Once several members of his staff quit, John Conyers will no longer be as much of a threat.
Work to make sure John Conyers is never re-elected to anything.
The U.S. government is VERY corrupt. Join with me in stopping the corruption.
the challenges of the current policy (Score:5, Informative)
Open access journals cost between $1-3k per publication (see PLOS or BMC). These journals automatically submit papers to the public repository. This is a direct cost that comes out of my grants that may not have been originally budgeted. Now, closed access journals are generally free or close to free to publish. The new policy requires submission of closed access papers, by the authors, to the central repository (if federally funded). Obviously, this violates the agreement the author had with the publisher, so the author, on their own, must negotiate a legal mechanism to do this. Some publishers charge to do this, maybe more than $1k. Every submitted paper gets an ID that must be submitted with a progress report. When we publish 5-10 papers per progress report, this is frankly a lot of work and sometimes, we fund papers partially that are published by other groups. So it is up to me to encourage these groups to figure this out, so I can include them in my reports. More work, and it adds another level of complexity to collaboration.
So far, this has been an administrative headache, it is expensive and considering most major university libraries already have licenses to the closed data, it seems, to me, unnecessarily complicated. I wish they had required the publishers to do this (each publisher would have to work with one source) instead of the researcher, because we have to work with a number of publishers and that takes time in an already very, very competitive field.
There are some really great aspects of open access publishing and the power of the resulting knowledgebase of manuscripts is going to be really exciting, however, $10-20k/year for page charges is only going to result in less science, IMO.
But Wait... (Score:1, Informative)
I thought the Democrats represented "change" and "open government." I guess we can now add the word "liars" to that list.
Republicans cost FAR more. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Republicans cost FAR more. (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm... try again. The President does not set the budget. He may suggest what he wants, but it is CONGRESS who holds the purse strings. Better take a look who was in charge of Congress during those years.
Government work non-copyrighed? (Score:4, Informative)
I was doing some research for a project on OSHA. As I understand it, works produced by the federal government cannot be copyrighted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_of_the_United_States_Government [wikipedia.org]
However, on the OSHA web site, not a word is said as to the copyright status that I can find. So is it public domain or not?
I guess, in relation to TFA, copyright doesn't matter anyway, they just won't make it available to the public either way.
Transporter_ii
Uh, that doesn't help us... (Score:5, Informative)
The President does not set the budget. He may suggest what he wants, but it is CONGRESS who holds the purse strings
The Budget is a law that the President may veto. During the years when Republicans ran all three branches of government (with of course the usual level of compromise in the Senate as they never had the 60 votes), Bush NEVER vetoed anything. He exerted no discipline over his own party, pretty mortgaging whatever political capital he had to get funding for his war.
Better take a look who was in charge of Congress during those years.
Republicans were. That's why there were so many independents that remembered Clinton's balanced budgets who voted for Obama, hoping he would continue the Clintonian fiscal restraint and prudent government. Clinton actually identified the budget deficit as an obstacle to economic recovery in 1991 and he was right to close that gap. By taking new Treasuries off of the market, investors had to look for other places to put their capital and they put it in the stock market. Now, the government borrows money hand over fist, the money goes there, and now we see completely economic irrationality when companies like Intel and Microsoft, that essentially have monopolies in growth industries, pay dividends, make profits hand over fist, and still wind up getting their market valuation tanked.
Re:Since you seem to know how this works... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the journals with good reputations lend weight. An extremely highly respected journal like Nature or PNAS lends credibility to the study by publishing it. Better journals theoretically have a more careful peer review process and publish higher quality works.
I guess the bottom line is, anyone can start a journal and accept papers, but how do you convince people to referee, considering they don't get paid? How do you make sure you get only good papers? If you publish crap papers your journal will get a reputation for crap and your journal and submitters will have little impact.
So while there is a "house of cards" aspect to it all, its the academic system of article "impact", reputation, quality, and tenure that does much to drive this situation.
Re:You Liberal Asses have (Score:0, Informative)
It has nothing to do with the liberal way, and everything to do with the fact that you're a self-satisfied idiot.
I can't even access my own work... (Score:3, Informative)
...in peer reviewed journals. That is unless someone pays a fat subscription fee on my behalf.
Re:Republicans cost FAR more. (Score:2, Informative)
According to the estimate produced by the Congressional Budget Office [heritage.org], the total cost for the `stimulus` bill that the Democrats just forced through is going to be about $3.27 Trillion over the next ten years. In comparison, that's more than the entire projected cost of the Iraq War according to the Washington Post. If you really believe that Democrats spend less than Republicans, I would encourage you join the rest of us in reality.
Re:Since you seem to know how this works... (Score:5, Informative)
I've long wondered--what is it that academic journals DO, precisely? They don't seem to provide any services that a vanity press couldn't do better and cheaper.
Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for, or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?
They basically provide quality control by making sure that the peer review process happens. A good journal will first screen out a lot of papers that are entirely unsuitable, they'll then find relevant experts in the field to review the paper. You're paper wont get published unless the referee's think it's good enough. So they manage that process. That process is attractive to authors because a good journal garners a lot of respect in the scientific community. More than that it effects how much funding the university gets (universities often get more government funding if they maintain staff with high impact publications). If you want to know more about how impact is measured look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor [wikipedia.org] . Impact factor is a fairly stupid way to measure the quality of a paper, but it's what people do. Hopefully we will move towards citation counts or some similar metric, but essentially all these metrics are quite coarse.
But, back to the main point. Journals do provide a useful service in managing the peer review process. And yes they massively overcharge for that service and often force you to assign copyright to them so they can extract as much money as possible from your work. That's part of the reason people are now looking towards open access... however ironically open access tends to end up costing the author more (as the journal can no longer charge subscription fees they charge higher publication fees).
Re:the challenges of the current policy (Score:5, Informative)
You wrote that "most major university libraries already have licenses to the closed data", when you SHOULD have written "most major WEALTHY university libraries already have licenses to the closed data."
Even before the current economic problems, many public universities have been cutting journal subscriptions wholesale, and the trend is only increasing. I work at one of the campuses of the City University of New York and our journal subscriptions are abysmal. If you publish regularly in any of the more expensive commercial journals (outside of the very tip-top 5 or so in your field), I can guarantee you that your work is not being read as much as it perhaps should be at my institution.
Of course, the administrative and budgetary problems you describe with the current open access model are very real - I certainly don't have the budget to publish exclusively in these journals. Nonetheless, the ever-increasing costs of the commercial system are leading to some serious problems and contributing to a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots of the academic science world.
If there were only one or two commercial journals that I would like to access that my library does not subscribe to, I would be willing to bite the bullet and buy personal subscriptions, but I cannot afford to buy personal subscriptions to a dozen or more commercial journals.
While "$10-20k/year for page charges" may only "result in less science," it doesn't matter how much science you do if no one reads it... Instead of paying these charges out of our direct grant funds, our institutions need to make institution-wide deals with open access publishers out of our grant overhead (re-routing, for example, the money that they are currently spending on overpriced commercial journal subscriptions).
Re:Republicans cost FAR more. (Score:5, Informative)
Republicans cost FAR more. Do some research: U.S. government debt. During the administration of George W. Bush, 5 trillion dollars of debt was added to U.S. government debt.
Ummm... try again. The President does not set the budget. He may suggest what he wants, but it is CONGRESS who holds the purse strings. Better take a look who was in charge of Congress during those years.
And Republicans held a majority in Congress for six of those eight years, and notoriously did whatever the President wanted. This does not bolster your counter-argument.
Re:How to handle the corruption of John Conyers. (Score:3, Informative)
Note that they are not going to care unless you are in his district.
Of course if you DO happen to live in his district, this means even MORE so that you should call.
Re:Since you seem to know how this works... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to handle the corruption of John Conyers. (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. A relevant quote from DownsizeDC:
I hear it all the time: "Sending messages to Congress won't work." My first reaction is, "compared to what?"
In truth, "public pressure" has a fine track record . . .
* How did segregation end? It ended because of public pressure.
* Why did the Soviet Union collapse? In the end, it was because of public pressure.
* Why did China move toward a free market economy? It was because of public pressure.
More to the point, Congress has voted the way we wanted 17 times since DownsizeDC.org was founded.
Sending messages online is good. Mail is better. Phone calls are best because they are timely and, if there are enough people calling, they can swamp the system, making it seem to those in the office that EVERYONE is against whatever measure they're calling in to rant about.
Participation is necessary for representation.
Re:Since you seem to know how this works... (Score:5, Informative)
Let me elaborate on some of the replies you've received. I think there's a social component that needs to be understood. For background: I was an editor for a few years, have been an associate editor (responsibilities of this position can be significant or minimal, depending on the journal), and referee a reasonable number of papers.
The best academics view themselves as part of a community to which they can contribute and which in turn makes it possible for them to do the work they want to do (by funding their research, for example). One measure of the value of an academic is the number of others who cite their work. Everyone thinks about citation counts. Authors want to publish in journals that are heavily cited and journals want to publish papers that will be heavily cited. It's not just that top journals publish the best papers, it's also that the best academics send their papers first to the top journals. This creates tremendous inertia in the pecking order of journals with the result that it's *very* hard to raise the perception of a journal's quality. Journal quality is a consideration when publications are evaluated by tenure committees, because journal quality is a rough screen for the quality of the paper. It is not a perfect screen, but it is informative.
In many cases editors and referees are paid nothing or minimally, and they view themselves as contributing to this community. The best editors are generally highly-regarded academics who think that it is important to publish high-quality papers that others will find useful, i.e. papers that will contribute to the community. In deciding what to publish they use their judgment and they also rely heavily on reviewers. The reviewers in turn try to do a good job because the editors recognize the higher-quality reviewers --- they may ask them to serve on editorial boards, they will write them positive letters at a tenure review, they may take treat their papers more carefully when deciding what to publish.
There are lots of ways this process can fail: entrenched editors play favorites, referees suck up to editors and authors whose papers they review (even if the process is anonymous, reviewers sometimes reveal themselves informally), there is a "good old boy" network with favoritism, and sometimes outright mistakes get made. But by and large the process works astonishingly well, with the majority of players trying to do the "right" thing. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but OSS shouldn't work as well as it does either.
The publishers provide continuity in this process. You want to make sure, for example, that a paper published today will be available in 20 years; that if the editor gets hit by a bus, there is institutional backing to keep things going; that the journal has a quality web presence, etc.
Some publishers are leeches and I am appalled that the NIH access policy might be changed. But I think it will be a while before academia moves to a more open model. There will continue to be a need for a process to certify quality, and there will be a need for long-term access. Commercial journals, with all their flaws, do fill those needs.
Re:Republicans cost FAR more. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Since you seem to know how this works... (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps you don't know about TECH-Net (Score:2, Informative)
http://web.sba.gov/tech-net/docrootpages/index2.cfm
You can search for over 85,000 awards there, covering the entire range of SBIR and STTR, from 1983 to 2007. The agencies aren't required to report 2008 awards until next month, but I see from a search just now that DoD has already entered over 500 of their 2008 awards. DoD comprises about half of all SBIR/STTR awards at the rate of around 3000 a year, out of around 6000 a year total.
Random observations: The keyword search doesn't seem to be working right now. The State Summary is sortable on the browser. You can get the search results in mail-merge format for copy and paste into Excel or your own database. When you drill down to an individual award, you initially get a composite, where phase 2 overrides phase 1, but you can drill down even further and view either phase individually (see how the title or abstract changed between phases, for example).
Re:Why are they so easyly bought or manipulated (Score:3, Informative)
That wouldn't work. It would disconect a good portion of the people. Suppose your a convicted felon and your state took away your voting rights. It doesn't matter what the felony might be, it could be something resulting from teenage drug experimentation or perhaps something resulting from a drunken night of foolishness and you have learned your lessons now. Anyways, you still live in the area and you are still going to be effected by the policies of anyone who goes into office. You should have a right of speech to donate money to the guy you think will best serve your interest and the interest of the community.
Now lets take businesses. Suppose you own half of a company in another state, you can't vote in that state but you provide jobs and a tax base for it. Why shouldn't you be allowed to donate to candidates who will directly effect your operations in the area? All a company is BTW, is a collection of people doing business. So corporate donations are little more then people makeing donations in the name of their business. If I owned a company in another state and they attempted to stop me from participating in any political process that effects me, I would fight it tooth and nail and possibly remove that company from that state.
We recently (within the last 10 years) has a privately owned company that went bankrupt after losing a lawsuit and it closed it's doors displacing 5000 workers directly plus contractors and so on. The city lost something around the lines of 1.25 million in tax revenue immediately and then when the new owner of the site condemned all the buildings and tore them down, the property value dropped so much that they lost quite a bit more in revenue. Now that's just the city, the county and the state was effected too. Sales tax from purchased made by displaced employees dropped, the state had to pay in unemployment, retraining, many of the employees had to move to find jobs, some lost their homes, and so on. The loss of this company just shows how important businesses are to a community and they shouldn't be bared from supporting certain candidates or promoting ideas that could effect them.