Monday, January 30th, 2012
- Interesting question: Should federally-funded research at private organizations be available to the public for free? I’m inclined to say yes. But I’d be interested to hear if there’s an argument for no.
- Photos from London during the 1939 blackout.
- Nice story about actress Sonja Sohn’s volunteer work in Baltimore after The Wire.
- George Will on Obama’s penchant for martial rhetoric.
- Woman injured during Ogden puppycide on a pit bull.
- Your “Newt Gingrich is a hypocritical phony” story of the day.
- Related: Seven million dead Ukrainians call facile comparisons of petty election-year politics to the crimes of murderous authoritarian dictators “Palin-Esque.”
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TheAgitator.com
“In 2008, the National Institutes of Health required that all federally funded research publications be made openly available. PubMedCentral (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
The publishers of the journals weren’t so happy with this new arrangement—they were afraid no one would pay for their publications if the research results were immediately accessible. So the government agreed to give them a full year of journal sales before their research papers had to be posted on PMC, which lets them keep their subscriber base. Journal subscriptions to educational and medical institutions are expensive—and they’re big business.”
Most universities spring for Elsevier or Wiley publications.
Who’s gonna pay $10 per article? I’d be spending $100/day.
If it’s funded by NIH it should accessible to anyone at any college
or med school. On a quirky side note when we do publish bio research
it’s most often considered an “advertisement” and we have to pay the
publisher.
Argument against: the federal gov’t should be able to expect a cash return on their investment.
Arugment for: there’s is no ROI for a grant.
If it’s not publicly available, they at least shouldn’t be able to get patents/monopolies on publicly funded work.
As Yizmo notes: academic publishers get it all ways: You often pay to have your article published. Other people pay to read it. And the only real work involved – the peer reviewing – is done for free.
With today’s technology, all academic journals should be online, and either free or extremely inexpensive. The only people who do not want this are the traditional publishers.
Yet another case of an antiquated and unsustainable business model being propped up by lobbying.
If tax money is spent on projects such as medical research, I am inclined to suggest that the research be open to the public. If a private company wants to use the research to develop a product, that is fine in my opinion. But the data itself was funded by our tax dollars, which, I might remind some, involved the use of force to extract said dollars; therefore, we should be allowed immediately and open access to the data.
Sorry, I just don’t believe in corporate welfare.
And we have a winner. Keep in mind that the traditional/antiquated system also has an additional cost not covered…by keeping prices everywhere high it limits the spread of information. Lack of information results in economic inefficiencies…in this case medical and biology research that could be extremely beneficial is not shared as widely as possible and people are made worse off….all for some companies to keep their monopoly profits.
Monopolies are always a bad thing. The idea behind granting temporary monopolies to those who create intellectual property is to promote such production and thereby obtain longer term benefits for short term costs. Problem is we have been moving more and more towards making these monopolies permanent. So no more longer term benefits and instead both short and long term costs.
Sonny Bono…you deserved to die the way you did. I hope you suffered you son of a bitch.
Should federally-funded research at private organizations be available to the public for free?
Yes. Yes. Yes.* If you are a researcher with a hardon for closed-access publishing then, take private money. (this is not an issue, researchers want their stuff read).
I think the question is fairly straightforward; the government can attach any (constitutional) requirements it wants to its grants of money. Institutions can choose to tell the government to urinate up a rope and stand under it while it dries. The government can then examine its goals, decide if it needs to alter its stance to achieve them, and go forward.
At some point a balance will be achieved between government funding and private funding.
Of course, if the government would restrict itself to those powers granted it by the constitution (yes, that would be a new thing under the sun), then the question wouldn’t even arise.
Radley: The only reason not to require free dissemination is to allow the journals to make money. But the journals are basically parasites feeding from the academic community, and there is no need to rescue them. You are used to publishing as a free-lancer in ordinary magazines. Let me explain how radically different the academic situation is.
In an ordinary magazine you write an article, possibly solicited by the editor. The magazine then (1) pays you for your article. Next, the magainze (2) pays for fact-checking (if this is their style) and for (3) copy-editing. Finally, the magazine physically creates the article (either in print or on-line) and disseminates it to subscribers, who pay the magazine. The basic transaction is as follows: the author (who writes for a living) provides the reader (who is not a writer) with an article they would like to read; in return the reader pays the author. The magazine serves as an intermediary and also provides editing services. Note the asymmetry between the author and reader.
In an academic journal the author does the research. He would then like to communicate the results to the rest of his community. The author submits the article to the journal without being paid (or, sometimes, paying for the cost of publication (!)) . An editor running the journal (also a researcher, and getting paid but only a little) then asks for others researchers to volunteer to review the paper (to see if the results are correct, appropriate for the journal, good enough for publication etc). The reviewers are not paid. Then the journal does minimal copy-editing (that’s mostly done by the authors), and produces the physical article. Finally, the publisher charges university libraries a hefty subscription fee for the journal.
Why is this different? Because (1) most of the value to the reader is contained in work done by volunteers (the authors volunteer their work; the reviewers volunteer their expertise; the editors get paid much less than what their work is worth). (2) The “reader” and “author” are actually the same kind of people — they are both researchers — sometimes researcher A publishes a paper reviewed by researcher B and read by researcher C, but probably at the same time researcher C has submitted a paper to the same journal that will be reviewed by A and later read by B. So the authorship and readership is all inside the same community; the journal is a parasite to this community.
Now who is paying for this parasite? Well, the government gives the researchers grant that they use to both create the research (leading to the articles freely given to the journal) and read the research (by subscribing to the journal). Since the public has paid for the results, the public should be able to read the results. Protecting the profits of a parasite is not a justification not to do this.
I should say that the journals do provide considerable value. It’s just that this value is mainly the value that they aggregate from volunteers and not value they create themselves. Therefore there’s no reason to protect their profits (Elsevier’s profit magin last year was 36%).
Should be public be able to read the results immediately? That’s less clear. I wouldn’t mind if the grant condition was only that the free version be available, say, a year after the journal publication. In particular, note that many university libraries allow anyone to walk in and read the journals they subscribe to (and even use computers to access on-line journals they subscribe to). This means that a member of the public who wishes to read a journal article right away will be able to do so even if there’s a one-year embargo period.
A short version of my long comment: because the public paid for the research, the public deserves to freely read the results. But journals do more than simply post research results; they provide value (refereeing, copy-editing, article selection, typesetting). The public has not necessarily paid for those too, so it’s not obvious that they deserve the journal product for free. In fact, they public also pays for most of the value “added by the journal” (by paying for the refereeing), so the argument is stronger.
I don’t want to try to open Huffpo on my blackberry, so I’ll ask the commentariat: did Palin really just throw away the little credibility she had earned through her crony-capitalism rants on hyperbolically defending Newt Gingrich?
As long as the government pays for terrible new ways to kill people, this’ll never happen 100%.
“Should” it? Sure.
The new statute provisions conflict with the Freedom of Information Act provisions… All of this research *should* be available through FOI as it is government-funded. On a quick read-through there seems to be no recognition of this.
I am reminded ot Mark Twain’s words: ‘Take you average village idiot. Take you average congressman, But I repeat myself.’
Yes. He who has the gold, makes the rules. If they want to lock up their research, they need private revenues.
Palinesque = media whore?
I’m a college professor and work with our campus library. Academic publishers are extortionists, charging libraries thousands of dollars for subscriptions and not paying contributors a dime. They also render a huge amount of research inaccessible to laypeople who can’t go through a university library or professional database. Anything that destroys their business model is progress.
It takes real gall to accuse to Gingrich’s detractors of flirting with communism when Gingrich attacks Romney for being a capitalist (let alone claim to oppose the “GOP establishment” while supporting a man who epitomizes it). It’s no wonder the Tea Party movement is mocked.
Uh, oh, here comes Elliot whine about how we’re all picking on poor Newt.
I take it no one actually read the bill. There is a link from the article. In fact, they still have to post the progress reports and raw data outputs for free, as they are exempted from the bill’s definition of “private sector research work”. The journal articles are not funded as a part of the research grants, but rather done at the expense of the author and publisher.
If you are asking for a contrarian argument, I would add this; if you force them to publish these works for free, they just won’t write them. They will still do the research, and give the results to the NIH, but that will be the bare minimum. Why would they do any further scholarly writing if there is no funding?
The issue of public funding seems to be somewhat on a scale here. Shouldn’t the government have the option to bargain shop here? Suppose researching a new product is a $1 Billion dollar investment. If the government spends $1 Billion dollars no question in my mind they own it and it should be free US Public.
However what if the Government has the opportunity to recoup that $1B investment by selling that research to the Chinese? Or what if the Gov finds a deal where a private company is willing to take on $500M of that research in exchange for some rights to the results?
I’m not sure the issue is completely black and white here.
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Then the USG is competing with my business of selling that research to the Chinese…and using money they take from me to do it.
I run into this more than I wish. A company in MA got over $1million from the state to compete with my business. Same thing happened in Texas. Fuck.
I understand your point (and I hope you understand mine). And, this isn’t just an issue of sharing with US citizens. The USG will have to share with every person on the planet (except NK).
The fundamental idea of publicly-funded research being made freely available seems sensible, but I am concerned about the timing of that availability.
On the back end, when it is time to publish the results of useful research, publishing in open-access journals rather than subscription-only journals would be fine. It would be a great improvement over the existing system and create better ways of communicating research with the public.
Someone using a FOIA request to gain access to research notes or data is much more worrying. I already turned down a job paying twice as much and sold my soul to the university (as in they own any intellectual property that I create) in order to have a research career. These are choices I do not regret but I find it troublesome if open access means that any research can be accessed at any time, whether or not it is complete or fit for publication.
The physics community over here has shifted to a largely open-access, pay-to-publish format. With that model, researchers pay around $1.5-3k to get their research articles published, which supports the journals’ infrastructure. The slave labor of editors and reviewers hasn’t disappeared but the goal of open access to readers has been achieved. These costs have to be embedded into research grants, but at least the payment only happens once.
Not necessarily. Remember they were paid to do the research. The publishers might not publish them, but BFD, much of the work these days could be done without the publishers and relying on the same system already described with volunteer reviewers and editors and then “publishing” online or via some other electronic medium–i.e. e-mail, a CD, DVD, etc.
I disagree. The data should be also made available so that people can, if they wish, double check the results, or apply different methods, etc. I can understand privacy issues, but that can be handled using an identifier variable that other researchers could use and only the original researcher or research team would be able to link back to actual people (if actual people is where the data came from).
Also, keep in mind that doing research and disseminating research with the rest of your field is how you make a name for yourself…how you can get ahead. If you come up with a good result, but don’t publish it could take awhile for credit to be attached to your name. Having a nice long publication history is one way to advance if you are a scientist/researcher.
If you needed proof that Homeland Security (which sounds better in the original German) monitors social media, look no further.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/British-tourists-arrested-America-terror-charges-Twitter-jokes.html
I certainly don’t disagree Boyd, and as a engineer working in MA myself, you might even be in the same business. I was more answering the hypothetical should it always be made public.
That’s a strange argument when you consider that the primary funding of many academics is federal grant money. Therefore if they don’t write a respectable work, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that they won’t get any more work. You can argue that it might reduce the reward sufficiently to make some people less interested in that line of work, but it seems strange to argue they will not do something that they need to do to make money because they won’t be making money by doing it.
William E Kruse:
Most academics have strong incentives to publish in peer reviewed journals and conferences, with the highest impact factor possible. Among other things, at the beginning of a scientist’s career, this is what determines whether he will even *have* much of a career–if you get through a PhD and postdoc without publishing much, you’re very unlikely to get a tenure-track position anywhere decent. Later, when you have tenure, you also probably have students, who also need publications so they can have a career. So outside of anything involving research grants, you would still see academics with a strong incentive to publish.
Alongside that, publications are a big part of how you establish yourself as a scientist. The human desire for prestige would drive publications, even if they weren’t critical to a lot of peoples’ careers.
Your argument only has any weight if you conflate the publishers and the writers — once you pick that apart, there’s no argument remaining here. The publishers are the ones whose profits will be affected, and they don’t actually write anything. At best, they perform some copy-editing and typesetting (in some fields, like mathematics, they don’t even typeset — the authors do that as well, though the cost savings is not reflected in subscription prices). Almost all of the cost of writing journal articles is borne by the authors. And as several upthread commenters have noted, researcher-authors are never directly paid for their articles — their benefits come in the form of enhanced reputation, which leads to better opportunities for future research funding.
@ woman injured:
I have a criticism of the media generally, and the pitbull shooting story is a good example of exactly the kind of story I have a problem with. The criticism is this: the “journalist” who wrote the story apparently didn’t even attempt to find the woman who was possibly shot.
This is ludicrous. Even (and espeially IF) they could not track her down then the whole story (and I mean the whole story should have been “woman apparently accidentally shot by police has gone missing — here is her description, here is a number she can call if she wants to talk to us — let it be lear and plain that we would love to talk to her because we find her story newsworthy.”
There was even a worse version of this with Ogden police shooting victim Matthew Stewart. Police were keeping him “under guard,” but not arrested. That means journalist can visit him in his hospital room. Now Matthew may not want visitors from the press, but that is for him to specify. The hospital might even forbid visitors (although they can be sued if they abuse that policy). However, I am pretty sure that is not what happened (because it probably would have been reported had it happened that way). So what did happen? The police made it known to the press that they should not try to visit Stewart because then the police would have to arrest Stewart and would at that point in time, and only starting at that point in time, have the power to keep the intrepid reporter from Stewart. The reason the police want to do this is so that they can: (i) effectively arrest Stewart; and (ii) not pay for his medical care while he is effectively arrested. Legal? maybe. Ethical? Heck no! So, if your newspaper is any good at journalism, the strategy should be clear: send a reporter down to force the issue: either I talk to Stewart, or you arrest Stewart, or Stewart’s physician intervenes (and creates a written record which can be used against him later if she is in cahoots with the police) or Stewart himself declines to talk. All of these are better outcomes than what is happening now and they are the kind of outcomes that a free and competitive press should ensure.
“The reason the police want to do this”
– The reason the police want to arrest, but not “arrest,” Stewart is–
(Newt Gingrich might be both a hypocritical phony and the lesser evil.)
The allegations in your link may be valid, but IMO the primary source, Gail Sheehy, is a dubious one.
Gingrich apparently suffering from some sort of projective disorder again… unable to accept his own utter lack of the bourgeois virtues, he instead finds the people as a whole lacking in them.
http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2012/01/david-brooks-deals-with-profound-issue.html
Off topic, but here is David Brooks explaining an issue fair enough, then he totally blows the proper response? Why not recognize society economically through subsidy rewards bad behavior and stop doing so?
As for Newt, well I learned not to trust Newt from his womanizing: with Dede Scozzafava and Nancy Pelosi.