Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/tell-congress-its-time-move-fastr

by SoMuchToGrok • 10 years ago

1106 131 10 years ago

libeclipse• 10 years ago

This world is so surreal it's actually amazing. How the people running our countries can be this incompetent, slow, and unintelligent is beyond me.

rwbhn• 10 years ago

Run for office. Your competence, speed and intelligence should make you a shoo-in and you can help fix things.

lugus35• 10 years ago

"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?

mtgx• 10 years ago

Don't worry. The Chinese probably have it 12 months before it's even made publicly available.

makapuf• 10 years ago

Just searching for 0DAY-WAREZ[PDFRIP][3l-H4X0R]QUANTUMG4viT4TI0N-S02E04[torrents4TW].doc.pdf would greatly increase interest in basic science for teenagers !

dhimes• 10 years ago

I'm ok with that. I would think of it as a charitable contribution to humankind.

dineshp2• 10 years ago

Likely.

The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.

coldtea2• 10 years ago

Yeah, why not?

Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?

randyrand2• 10 years ago

The usual reason is that then there is an incentive to not spend your own money on research and to just wait for someone else to do it for you.

Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.

bithush2• 10 years ago

In an ideal system sure. Country A funds research into Subject A. Country B funds research into Subject B. Then everyone has access to everything and can work better towards Subject A+B or whatever.

I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.

rimunroe2• 10 years ago

Why not? Aside from the obvious altruistic reasons, the cost of restricting it is probably more than the cost of not bothering to do so.

TallGuyShort4• 10 years ago

I think that's appropriate for taxes. Some people pay virtually no tax, are we going to demand to see their W2's before we give them access if they want to read? If you want it to be fair we can't pretend the current system is a free market, because it's not. I don't think the public should fund things that benefit a single company - the whole point of forcing people to pay it through taxes is because it's supposed to benefit society as a whole. If that's not true, I want to stop funding it.

matwood• 10 years ago

Sharing research is a benefit to everyone. On a pure cost basis, the US gives out billions in the form of cash all over the world. Including access to US funded research in what the US gives away would likely do more to help the US in the long term than much of the money.

I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

I asked a similar question a few weeks earlier.

The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide.

In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide.

it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.

tma-1• 10 years ago

I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?

bithush2• 10 years ago

I have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0].

FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.

I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.

[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)

mkane848• 10 years ago

My Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you.

Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.

chopin• 10 years ago

Kind of: Take DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for example which sets standards used in hardware (like normed screws or normed metal alloys). Albeit not free (as in free beer) it guarantees that I can buy eg. screws with guaranteed minimal properties from different vendors. I would see this at least somehow equivalent to open source software, which can be copied at minimal marginal cost and thus is easy to provide for free (as in free beer).

ashitlerferad• 10 years ago

Bioinformatics is close.

liviu-• 10 years ago

Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?

astazangasta• 10 years ago

A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.

iskander• 10 years ago

I moved from Computer Science into bioinformatics / computational immunology.

Bioinformatics is fatally infected by the associated culture of biology. Tools get squirreled away until published in a non-open venue, then eventually dumped online in some difficult to install manner.

return0• 10 years ago

Close by a few light years? no, they are terrible

Joof• 10 years ago

I sent a letter. I really want to know how effective these mass stock-email campaigns are.

rimunroe2• 10 years ago

I've heard from a few people who work in politics in state and national congresses that (non-form) physical letters and phone calls from concerned constituents can have a surprising amount of weight on the decisions of congresspeople. I imagine it's less true for form emails like this, but still probably worth a go.

afarrell2• 10 years ago

I think the basic way to judge this is "Is this a signal that the person who sent it is motivated to pay attention and vote based on this?"

Congresscritters care most about votes. They'll take campaign donations if thats all they can get, but they then need to figure out how to turn those campaign donations into votes.

ThePhysicist• 10 years ago

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting to see if the publishing industry would dare to sue them in that case, as this could easily tip the public opinion against them.

In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.

NotOscarWilde3• 10 years ago

There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued:

* Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent.

* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.

* Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.

* Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus.

[1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.

tdaltonc• 10 years ago

a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.

Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.

chias• 10 years ago

Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.

Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.

Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.

ac4• 10 years ago

* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.

Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.

But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.

Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.

mhurron• 10 years ago

civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns

Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.

nxzero• 10 years ago

"Feeling" like you've helped more often then not does more harm than good unless it leads to action; signing petition unless there's an expressed count required for action that's enforceable is often meaningless.

tomjen32• 10 years ago

Honestly given that sci hub exist and is so simple to use, why not just have the universitites promote the shit out of it?

bo1024• 10 years ago

Harvard has an open-access policy[1] and it may be that other institutions do as well. When submitting to a journal with a copyright agreement, authors attach a modification to the agreement, giving the university rights to distribute the research for non-commercial purposes. I do not know how universally-used this is across the institution or if there are journals refusing to accept this modification or not.

[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/

amelius• 10 years ago

This sounds a lot like the civil disobedience of Google when they started Google Books.

coliveira2• 10 years ago

When a corporation does it, it's not called civil disobedience. It is called corporate theft.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons.

The University of California has already done this.*

Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*

* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...

seeing• 10 years ago

published research be available to the public no later than 12 months after publication

Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately?

Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?

ikeboy3• 10 years ago

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...

"The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available."

Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312

paulclinger• 10 years ago

If these are valuable services, then customers will pay for them; no need to have a monopoly on access to published research.

(as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)

michaelhoffman2• 10 years ago

It's because publishers are concerned that if research is available to the public immediately, institutions will stop paying extortionate fees for journal subscriptions. They have considerable lobbying efforts and several Congressmen willing to change legislation to their benefit.

Rent-seekers gonna seek rent.

StreamBright3• 10 years ago

Funny that some of the pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money yet the results are IPd by the company.

atom-morgan5• 10 years ago

I find it funny that people blame this on greed/capitalism/profit instead of IP laws.

ThomPete8• 10 years ago

The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.

basch• 10 years ago

which is why I dont understand the "let's just buy them from canada" mentality

buying drugs abroad just skirts ip price fixing. we can skirt price fixing here by making drugs and not paying the ransom costs.

should the government be able to pull eminent domain on lifesaving drugs?

should all drugs purchased with public funds (ex medicare) be exempt from any cost/margin past manufacturing?

it feels to me like importing from canada is having cake and eating it too. we either agree that full drug prices are legitimate or we agree they are unethical. you cant pretend both are compatible worldviews.

afarrell2• 10 years ago

60-70% public money

How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs that don't get approved?

StreamBright3• 10 years ago

According to somebody who works in this industry it is the standard contribution. Does not matter if the drug does not get approved, the money is for the research, as far as I know.

StreamBright3• 10 years ago

You can read here about the process in the US more:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/

I guess this is different country by country.

roadnottaken• 10 years ago

If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.

michaelhoffman2• 10 years ago

If employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.

drjesusphd• 10 years ago

And if experts would stop reviewing articles for free...

tomjen32• 10 years ago

That sounds doable, actually. Have the NSF only base their grants on publications in open access journals.

guy_c2• 10 years ago

This is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework

jcranmer• 10 years ago

You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.

Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.

[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."

bachmeier• 10 years ago

You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.

This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.

xufi• 10 years ago

Even worse private journals which have higher super insane rates just to get access to the database with the journal. Look at JsTor

grondilu• 10 years ago

It's not so simple. Knowledge is power so you don't want to disseminate it blindly. Military weapons (including highly dangerous ones) for instance were designed with publicly funded research and yet everybody would agree that it'd be a bad idea to just publish the plans.

dbcooper• 10 years ago

Journal articles from NIH funded research are already required to be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009). The law states:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

tombert3• 10 years ago

I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it.

I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

TallGuyShort4• 10 years ago

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

tombert3• 10 years ago

Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up...

It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.

cowsandmilk3• 10 years ago

That isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.

http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html

The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.

zmb_• 10 years ago

I don't think that's a winning argument. Your tax dollars pay for space rockets and fighter planes too, but you don't get to ride them. There are many such things that you pay for, and that you get some indirect benefits from, including the pay-walled research. And in many fields the researchers take big pay cuts compared to what they'd make in the industry, meaning they are effectively paying a large chunk of the cost of creating the research themselves.

I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.

The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.

tombert3• 10 years ago

Sure, I'll agree we can't have a completely open-door policy for everything because that would be chaos, but for stuff that's easy to make copies of I think we should.

So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.

lhnz• 10 years ago

Would it be legal to write a Twitter bot that detects mentions of pay-walled academic papers and responds with a SciHub link?

This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.

bduerst• 10 years ago

You could probably just search it on google scholar and post the free version link.

peter303• 10 years ago

Journals act as the Yahoo of scientific papers. That is they are an index of certain topical relevance and editorial quality. (The original idea of Yahoo was a vetted directory to web pages) I am not sure if papers scattered around random university servers would be easily found.

A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.

BorisVSchmid• 10 years ago

Somehow, physics does not appear to need such extensive vetting - to me (as an outsider) it seems like physicists can find what they need on arxiv.org

Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar:

* do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar).

In addition, I also read papers :-).

peppaz• 10 years ago

Aaron Schwartz would agree, from the grave where fighting this fight put him.

acomjean• 10 years ago

NIH has a Public Access Policy already[1], so anything NIH funded is public. Lots of stuff is already available (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). Other agencies have public data to AHRQ, CDC, FDA, HHMI, NIST, VA (see link for acronym clarification)[2]

This FASTR proposal shouldn't be a big deal, since a lot of funding sources already have that requirement. I'm not sure why some funding gets not to be public.

(part of my job is uploading data to pubchem)

[1]http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/

c3534l• 10 years ago

The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consider rapidly dropping funding for our public universities.

But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.

Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.

You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.

If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.

Lawtonfogle3• 10 years ago

Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.

You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.

Fomite3• 10 years ago

I think the suggestion here is more "Because Joe over in Agriculture took USDA money, I suddenly can't do contract work for Large Company because they want to keep it proprietary".

coliveira2• 10 years ago

Exactly, it is funny that I never see these advocates for free information fighting to expand our library system. Libraries are the best way to promote access to information because they are by nature distributed, there is no central servers or web-based organization to control how they share information.

deadgrey19• 10 years ago

FWIW, all research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the major funding body behind STEM research in the UK) is required to be Open Access, including data collected. In the next REF (the process through which UK universities including Oxford and Cambridge receive funding) only papers that are open access will be assessed. This puts immense pressure on both academics and UK universities to ensure their works are open access.

gravypod• 10 years ago

I don't understand how research can possibly be published and properly evaluated without everyone who can contribute to it not having access.

For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.

randyrand2• 10 years ago

If this was the case WWII would have looked much different. We need exceptions.

damurdock• 10 years ago

FASTR specifically applies to research being published in peer-reviewed journals and specifically excludes:

classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent

Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

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