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Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
- elefanten 4y agoSeems like a good thing. Any downsides to this? Any low hanging fruit it misses in making research more open access?
- wolfi1 4y agothe publication fees (paid by the authors) seem to be considerably higher
- nequo 4y agoElsevier pockets a 30+ percent profit margin.[1] Nothing besides market power forces them to push this to the authors. [1] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2021-annual-report.pdf https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... (page 23)
- FabHK 4y agoI hope this (White House Office of Science and Technology Policy guidance) is another nail in Elsevier's coffin.
- Fomite 4y agoMy lab's gotten hit by some hefty publication fees this year - it's painful for early career researchers, but in aggregate, this is a good thing.
- hikingsimulator 4y agoI don't see any to be honest. Public money, public access.
- Fomite 4y agoSome society-level journals that are used to help support their respective societies are likely going to struggle a bit. That doesn't mean this isn't worth doing (it is), but it's going to be a thing.
- commandlinefan 4y agoDefinitely agree it's a good thing - my libertarian core can't help but wonder if the white house has (or ought to have) the power to unilaterally declare this, though. Would much prefer this had been voted on by congress.
- twblalock 4y agoIt's policy guidance issued by the executive branch to the Federal agencies, which is well within the President's authority. Of course, that also means that another president could reverse this policy just as easily. If Congress passed a law it would be harder to reverse.
- pdonis 4y ago> that also means that another president could reverse this policy just as easily Which, since the deadline for full implementation is December 2025, is not at all a farfetched possibility.
- dimator 4y agoi wonder why this is not a law already? at first i assumed lobbying, but i can't imagine the journal racket to be that lucrative to influence the required number of legislators to block the law, unlike oil or insurance. this seems like such a no-brainer issue, but i would love to hear the spin.
- pksebben 4y agoI'm sure there's a ton of special interests who wouldn't want all the research made public. the oil industry immediately comes to mind. so does tobacco, gambling, pharma, and farming.
- porcoda 4y agoFor consumers of the information and those paying for it, it’s all upside to me. My only prediction for downside will be increased author fees for open access publications. Some venues have ridiculously high fees for open access authors, which is a barrier for some (not every author is funded by a research grant or in a department with a budget that can cover such fees). I expect they’ll go even higher, and the available exceptions or discounts will be more stringent. To me, the upsides vastly outweigh that downside though, so I’m very happy to see this move.
- krull10 4y agoIt is not just a barrier for researchers without lots of grant funding, but also diverts public funds from funding more research and research personnel to paying significant publication fees. This really needed a complementary cap on what would be allowed in paying such fees via grants to bring the costs down.
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoScihub's servers breathed a sigh of relief.
- mataug 4y agoI'm honestly surprised this wasn't done before, but its better late than never
- ajankelo 4y agoHugely important. Great win for all.
- guerby 4y agoIn France since 2018: https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/fr/le-plan-national-pour-la-science-ouverte-les-resultats-de-la-recherche-scientifique-ouverts-tous-49241 https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/fr/le-plan-nat... Approximate translation: The national plan for open science announced by Frédérique Vidal on July 4th 2018 makes open access mandatory for articles and data from state funded projects.
- Vinnl 4y agoIn most of the EU and several other countries: https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://www.coalition-s.org/ (Edit: actually, I think the Horizon 2020 program already mandated Open Access for most research, although enforcement back then was lacking (and still isn't perfect). Coalition S's plan also attempts to ensure that they don't indirectly fund journals that aren't fully Open Access.)
- dcroley 4y agoAbout damn time.
- KyleLewis 4y agoReally happy this is happening! There's no reason we shouldn't be able to freely read research funded by NIH, NSF, etc., and there's a ton of high impact work there.
- asdff 4y agoNIH research at least already had a public access requirement
- chrisamiller 4y agoBut that was after an embargo period of 12 months, during which a journal could paywall it. This forces immediate availability, which is a good thing.
- Animats 4y ago"All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025." Why does this need a 3 year transition period? Six months would be plenty.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoMaybe it's less about the agencies technical ability and more about making it long enough that the current beneficiaries of this don't oppose it as strongly as they would if it disrupted their biz in the next 2-4 quarters so that it can actually get done.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago[flagged]
- nwiswell 4y agoWell, if nothing else, it produces profits... and profits pay for lobbyists. At least in the Washington understanding, an "industry" is any profit-seeking entity or association which has lobbyists representing its interests. (What would you say are the "products" of the hedge-fund "industry"?) I suppose you could call this a special-interest group instead, but it's a little pedantic.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoYes, it produces profits which indeed can pay for advocacy and also has jobs and where there are jobs there are congresspeople with people who might lose jobs in their district and therefore a potential wrench in any policy change. Edit for data to paint a clearer picture: The co I know best in this space is Elsevier which according to their Wikipedia has more than 8,000 employees. I don't know where they're distributed (it's a Dutch co) but if you represent a certain district or consituency and all of a sudden your area might lose thousands of jobs, you listen, even if you don't particularly like that industry.
- anm89 4y agoIt's funny how the political class understands the things like this that need to be done, they just don't care at all until they are heading into an election cycle they are about to lose. Then suddenly the political will is suddenly found.
- thfuran 4y agoYou think this is a big populist vote grab?
- d23 4y agoI'd love to live in a country where moves like this are considered populist pandering.
- notacop31337 4y agoThanks, I just realised I'm a gigantic fucking nerd. I unironically thought this is something many people would care about.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoSomehow this doesn't seem like an issue a politician is going to campaign on.. I mean you can talk about women's rights/abortion, gun violence, student debt, the economy, Ukraine, or... access to federally funded research? There are only so many press hits, tv ad dollars, and speech time politicians have to get their message out. I doubt this makes anyone's list.
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- verdverm 4y ago> Eliminating the optional 12-month publication embargo for federally funded peer-reviewed research articles. I hope this means that Fed Funded research publications will always be free to access from day 0 to day ∞
- wikitopian 4y agoI've been relying on making stuff up and then linking to paywalled articles to win my internet arguments, so this is a big setback for me.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoMaybe try Forbes or Business Insider? The former definitely seems like it is happy with a pay to play model
- anigbrowl 4y agoJust rebrand yourself as a data scientist and tell them to read it on your medium page and then immediately blocking them on social media. Do an occasional freebie piece about how you're the victim of an ugly new trend and watch your follower count soar.
- lofatdairy 4y agoA song on the world's smallest violin for publishing companies executives. The fact that this asinine situation has reached this point to begin with is an embarrassment, and that it didn't end when we lost Aaron Swartz is a tragedy.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoThe loss of Aaron Swartz has always been the date when the timeline went dark for me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bglazer 4y agoThis is good news. Academic publishers are parasites and anything that reduces their stranglehold on academic knowledge is good. That said, parasites are, if nothing else, resilient. So, there's a few issues that I'm concerned about. First, it's not clear to me that university libraries will be able to drop their subscriptions to these journals based on this decision. The vast majority of research receives some federal funding, but there will still be some subset of articles that are funded through private research grants and will still sit behind a paywall. Journal subscriptions are a huge drag on library budgets, so freeing that money up would be immensely beneficial. Second, I can see the journals reacting to this by going full open access, but charging massive "fees" to publish. Right now Nature charges >$10k to publish open access, and I'd expect them to ratchet that up as it becomes their primary vector to siphon tax payer money into their own pockets. This seems to be the playbook based on the European "Plan S" push for open access.
- expensive_news 4y agoMaybe I’m missing something, but if Nature charges that much to publish why does anyone publish in Nature? Why don’t academics just create their own ‘ethically priced’ journal? It’s my understanding that most of Nature’s labor is voluntary and unpaid anyway.
- ModernMech 4y agoYou can create your own ethically priced journal any day of the week, but if no one reads it, no one will publish to it. And if no one publishes to it, no one will read it. Offering cheap or free publishing doesn’t solve this chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately. Quite the opposite; it signals that the researchers who publish there are only doing so because they can’t afford the publishing fees of larger journals, presumably because their research isn’t interesting or noteworthy enough to attract enough money to do so. Honestly, $10k is a drop in the bucket when grants are in the millions.
- krull10 4y agoGrants are only in the millions in certain fields. But more than that, $10K per paper, budgeted for 2-3 papers a year in a 3-5 year grant across all the NIH grants, is a lot of taxpayer money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs, and researchers.
- nojito 4y agoAwesome! Now do patents.
- jhallenworld 4y agoGreat! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?
- loeg 4y agoAs college expenses go, textbooks were less than 1% of my costs attending a public university as a state resident. The industry may be just as parasitic but I don't think it would appreciably help reduce college expenses.
- jhallenworld 4y ago6% in 2014 according to this.. https://thecrite.com/home/2014/04/29/the-hidden-cost-of-education-textbook-inflation-poses-financial-burden-for-students/ https://thecrite.com/home/2014/04/29/the-hidden-cost-of-educ... But even if it's low, it's also low hanging fruit for a big problem.
- guelo 4y agoThe problem is the professors are the parasites in many cases.
- m463 4y agoI think there needs to be good textbooks, but there could be some GOOD rules for conflicts of interest with respect to who chooses/requires which textbooks.
- ejb999 4y agoyou mean like my kid's class a few years back, where the 'textbook' was about $75, and was written by the person getting paid to teach the class, and was just about 150 pages of plain white paper stapled together with no binding? Get paid to teach the class, and then also make 100 or more students pay for some photocopies, the money which goes directly into the professors pocket - oh yea, and then change a few paragraphs each year and tell next year's class they can't rely on previous years books - i.e. no resale market for the 'book' you just bought.
- Test0129 4y agoHaving done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
- koheripbal 4y agoI assume military R&D would be a big exception?
- logisticseh 4y agoIt's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness. The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license. You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything. But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B. The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoThere's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.
- songeater 4y agoIsn't this a big deal? Anyone have stats on how many research papers (esp in fields like healthcare etc) have some federal funding? Would funding received from a university/college (most of whom receive federal funding in turn) also qualify?
- sytse 4y agoGreat to see this. Expect scientific publishers to start increasing their open access fees.
- joshe 4y ago
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI really wish they would have called him Darth Brandon :( . Big opportunity missed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y agoAcademia and especially the humanities is probably the least cooperative and worst at coordination problems I have asked a lot of academics why they don't work across departmental/institutional lines to strategize against administrators/regents. You'd think sociologists, economists, and lawyers would be able to take on the rather glaring market failures in academia, but those who don't already have tenure and a fiefdom all seem to be teetering on the edge of economic insecurity and can't risk the career destruction. It might just be that there are too many credentialed people chasing too few research and teaching positions, but it's a sad state of affairs however you look at it.
- ml_basics 4y agoAs someone in the ML community where arxiv rules supreme, I really do not understand why other communities do not also have something similar. I get that there are some perverse incentives around, but there is a relatively straightforward solution to all of the problems with journals - just publish your work on the internet first so that it's out in the open, then send it to some journal who can make money from your hard work without adding any value, if you still want to.
- Vinnl 4y agoThe journal —which you'll want to publish in if you want to make career progress— will then say they won't publish your work because it's not "novel". So yes, perverse incentives all around.
- Undercouves 4y agoI have a friend in economy, which is also a very clossed field with respect to publishing research, and he said that doing so might result in legal action taken against you, or pressure at the least. That said, I'm in physics and everybody publishes on the ArXiv, either before or after submiting to the journal. From what I see (thanks to SciHub) the information on either of them is the same, except when there is an update it usually is only submited to the ArXiv.
- derbOac 4y agoThere are similar things in other fields, but I think formal peer review still supercedes them, at least as it's perceived. Things are changing though. I do think unless there are some significant changes to the system there will be some tipping point where journals will start being ignored but I'm not sure how that will occur.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
- causi 4y agoTaxpayer-funded research should automatically enter the public domain, period. Anything less is theft.
- jimcavel888 4y ago
- hammock 4y agoDoes this apply to the Pfizer studies that were going to take 55 years to release? https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/fda-requests-55-years-to-complete-foia-request-pfizer-s-covid-19-vaccine https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/fda-requests-55-years-to...
- aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago
- gigatexal 4y agoI 100% support this. This should happen. Tax payers paid it. Let me have it all. F the middle men companies making a killing being gatekeepers. Screw ‘em
- krull10 4y agoThis is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs and researchers). This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work, which would have benefited all researchers.
- dwheeler 4y agoYou're right it doesn't fully address the issue, but it does provide some pressure. If an article is available for free immediately, there's no need to spend $6K to make it available at all. Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.
- krull10 4y agoI don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics. Their promotion, earnings, ability to change universities, and recognition depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals they can. In contrast, the government could easily fix this by simply not providing the money currently required by such journals, which would force them to come up with models that can work with lower fees. I hope you are right though!
- Vinnl 4y ago> I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics. Well, not by most of them, but promotion boards usually contain academics. Part of the solution would be the slow one-funeral-at-the-time one of waiting.
- geoalchimista 4y ago
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago100% agree with this. Paywalls for publicly funded research is bs and always has been. This should also be true for all state-funded or even municipally funded research (if there is any). Also should be true for non-profits who fund research (the tax exempt status is a form of public funding). Also any paper published by someone employed at university that receives any form of public funding or tax breaks should also be included. So the only ones who should be allowed to publish research behind paywalls are private for-profit companies who completely self-funded their work. And even they should, for the best interest of everyone, also use open access.
- jimcavel888 4y ago
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoSo, we don't have to pay for the access, great. But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher. .....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike. There is no such thing as a free lunch, people.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoSci-Hub is still illegal. If they made a completely separate legal entity that respected copyright, sure, something like that could work. Until that happens, the choice will be "do everything manually" or "break the law", and I don't think a whole lot of universities or corporations will be condoning the latter.
- pksebben 4y agoperhaps the law needs to change. There's also more interests in the world than corporations and universities. an organizational Monopoly on ideas is dangerous - it stifles innovation and destroys competition.
- hedora 4y agoShh!!! if someone at Usenix finds out, the entire organization will disappear in a puff of logic!
- k099 4y agoUSG already publishes a ton of free data, like weather and maps. The ecosystem of repackaging and building improved services seems to be working fine because it opens up a broad range of competitive options, not a paid embargo to a few.
- dwheeler 4y agoWonderful!! This will save $billions in US universities (at least) and speed research around the world.
- hedora 4y agoThey somehow manage to avoid using the words "copyright" and "patent" anywhere in the press release or the memorandum. I assume they mean for this to apply only to copyrights over the actual text of the published paper and supporting data, but it's strange that they are so vague.
- librarianscott 4y agoNo, the author(s) of the journal article still retain their copyright in most cases. This is about access to the articles without having to pay a charge to read it.
- franciscojgo 4y agoAt last. I genuinely believe there should be classes in high school teaching how to read papers as well. Around COVID, I'm sure +90% of the population relied on online news sources giving their click-bait-y interpretation of studies. (if at all read, perhaps just the abstract)
- notacop31337 4y agoI love this idea, maybe we can put it alongside the taxation class along with all the other shit that should be taught to create sensible, well adjusted humans.
- TeeMassive 4y agoI wonder if it applies to overseas labs?
- jschveibinz 4y agoThere is a tiny caveat in here that has yet to be discussed: freely available to US taxpayers. How will this be implemented? Will there be controlled access by SSN? Restrictions against public release? A world-wide license agreement? What about SBIR work? It will be interesting to see how this plays out legally.
- biomcgary 4y agoI was granted an SBIR grant for a small biotech that I previously worked for. We were very careful about what we funded on the grant, because even under the current rules that government can use the research, if they choose (although I think this is rare).
- digitalmaster 4y agoAaron Swartz
- efitz 4y agoI hope this will include research at universities where government grants are involved. On the topic of openness, we also need to ensure open access to government records even when involved parties are trying to use NDAs (StingRay) or copyright (many municipal building codes) to hide government records.
- andrewon 4y agoThey should do the same for patent. I see companies and now universities freely take tax payer money to develop their own products. It just becomes an additional source of funding with little string attached. It's fine to use tax dollar if there's potential for public good, but the tech developed should be released to the public domain right away. I have seen a selfless act from an academic group making decision not to patent a technology because they felt its an important one that many other things can be built on. Now tens of companies were started based on that tech and counting. I hope our gov understand how much value can be unlocked by public domain technology.
- xor99 4y agoOpen source and replicable studies means going back to the fundamentals of the scientific method so this is a good step. I would love to see more peer-to-peer peer review technologies and websites developed though. There really is no reason to have publishing intermediaries in most cases. For example, many conferences and proceedings are essentially run by associations and societies etc.
- docmechanic 4y agoWoot!
- zaptheimpaler 4y agoNot sure how connected this is to sci-hub and the academic momentum against journals and Elsevier in particular. But as a rough guess, Elseviers parent company had 1.7 billion USD net profit in 2021 [1]. In theory, that money should now start going to universities/research and partially passed along as savings to students.. [1] https://www.relx.com/investors/key-financial-data https://www.relx.com/investors/key-financial-data
- jacksonkmarley 4y agoMaking scientific publications open access (at least for those chasing 'respected' publications) is usually achieved by paying a large amount of money up-front to publishers. Is the implementation of this policy just to make researchers/institutions pay this extra money when they publish?
- golem14 4y agoNote: goes into effect in 2026. Much can happen until then. A new administration might be able to undo this relatively easily. I imagine there are lots of lobbyist dollars available. That said, looks great!
- jlarocco 4y agoI wonder why something like this takes 4 years to roll out? Is there a legitimate reason? Or is it lobbyist dollars at work already, buying time?
- okennedy 4y agoFor the NSF at least, most grants are awarded for 3-5 years. When the last policy shift happened (all grant-supported publications need to be publicly released into the NSF's publication archive), it applied to newly awarded grants. 4 years should give most existing grants a chance to cycle out.
- apaprocki 4y agoRead the memorandum and you'll see -- every agency has a lot of work to do. It's layered upon the work already done since the changes in 2013. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-202...
- tus666 4y agoThis doesn't seem right. Instead, the author should be forced to send a copy to the whitehouse when they send it to the journal, and the whithouse should make it available for free as a government output.
- quantified 4y agoThis is being downvoted for some reason, but there's no reason that some govt branch couldn't require a copy that they would publish as part of the grant.
- apaprocki 4y agohttps://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-202... > Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications4 authored or co- authored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication. "publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories" -- so figuratively "sending a copy to the White House", but also literally "govt branch requiring a copy that they would publish". In addition, by publishing an "agency-designated repository", presumably it would be vacuumed up by NARA as the government equivalent of the "wayback" machine, so that the published record could not be altered without an audit trail.
- behnamoh 4y agoToo much bureaucracy. This is better.
- ncmncm 4y agoSend it to Sci-hub.
- nulbyte 4y agoCurrent grant agreements already include a provision for licensing to the government; however, they also offer a 12-month embargo before being made public. This seems to be the "paywall" they are speaking of. The policy change is to eliminate the embargo period, so it can be made public immediately. https://www.engadget.com/white-house-says-federally-funded-research-must-be-made-available-publicly-right-away-191506413.html https://www.engadget.com/white-house-says-federally-funded-r...
- aurelius83 4y agoI’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand this is great for transparency and progress but this is also paid for by US taxpayers so why should scientist/people outside of the US benefit?
- joe_guy 4y agoWhy should they not?
- aurelius83 4y agoBecause they are not paying for the research with their taxes and their governments are not reciprocating the openness.
- cosmiccatnap 4y agoWhat do you think the first step toward that is, if not this. The benefits outweigh the cost several times over.
- jazzkingrt 4y agoThere is no such thing as a published scientific journal available to only one country. Nobody is saying that the government can't fund private research (as it surely does in the context of security, defense, etc). But that if research is _published_, it ought to be open access rather than behind a paywall.
- gautamdivgi 4y agoPublished research is accessible today by paying subscriptions to journals. The journals are privately owned. The end result is that today your tax $$ are going to enrich publishing companies many of which are not US companies either. This way everyone benefits. There is no way of keeping the access embargoed to US citizens or tax payers. But that wasn't happening in the current model anyway.
- nl 4y agoMost international research is published in the same places as US research in part because prestige is aggregated by everyone doing the same. Classified research inside the US remains classified of course.
- liketochill 4y agoPublishers such as elsevier must be upset. Once the majority of research is not behind their paywall they lose their position as first place to look for papers and all of the network effects. Eyeballs will be going elsewhere
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- notch656a 4y agoUsed to be that was the job of a certain Kazakh citizen.
- kstrauser 4y agoAaron Swartz would be thrilled.
- borski 4y agoIt’s just sad that it took this long and he isn’t around to see it.
- ncmncm 4y agoGives them until 2025. Why not retroactive?
- nulbyte 4y agoCurrent policy is public after 12 months. This is just changing that to 0 for future grants.
- ncmncm 4y agoBut there is still no reason to enforce it only after 2025. Enforce it immediately, retroactive to everything published last year, besides. Researchers dumb enough to have assigned copyright to a journal (which was and is never necessary) would be powerless to claw it back without an act of Congress, but there is no reason for any ever to do it anymore.
- faitswulff 4y ago2026. By then a new administration could come in and nix this rule.
- funride1 4y agoDoes the same apply to all the people and their work that did with the education loan that is being forgiven?
- pm90 4y agoUS Federal grants are involved in almost all research done in the US, so this likely means that the vast majority of research papers will become open access. Open Access will mean that top quality research will no longer require membership of a University; anyone will be able to access research.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agobut..... What will happen to the poor owners and shareholders of elsevier? oh shoot. we don't want them to die like the horse cart industry died off or like the caligraphers industry died after the gutenberg... and suddenly, "nothing of value was lost".... good riddance
- api 4y agoThis is the first thing I've seen that could count as a signature achievement for this administration. This is actually pretty big and will have very positive follow-on consequences in terms of future innovation.
- standardUser 4y agoThe infrastructure, chip and energy bills aren't too shabby either in terms of fueling innovation.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI expect this will be less noted and well-remembered than several other things they've done or are doing. This matters a lot to academics and science nerds, but won't be as big a deal to the general public as even something like the student loan forgiveness effort.
- tomschlick 4y agoThey should go one step further and require all (non-classified) government software to be developed in the open.
- mupuff1234 4y agoIf the US government is anything like the military almost everything is marked as classified, it's basically the default state.
- mindcrime 4y agoThere's quite a bit of software that comes out as Open Source, from some of the National Research Laboratories[1][2][3], the DOE[5], NASA, etc.. But... not everything is Open Source, and I think there is still room for improvement there. I mean, yeah, it's great that NASA has a Github org[5] and that they release a lot of stuff. But last time I looked, there was still at least a modest amount of NASA code that isn't Open Source that I would probably argue should be. The same can probably be said for the national labs, DOE, etc. [1]: https://software.llnl.gov/ https://software.llnl.gov/ [2]: https://github.com/ORNL https://github.com/ORNL [3]: https://www.ameslab.gov/cmi/cmi-open-source https://www.ameslab.gov/cmi/cmi-open-source [3]: https://energyplus.net/ https://energyplus.net/ [4]: https://github.com/nasa https://github.com/nasa
- Jtsummers 4y agoIt's a common thing, but is also a great example of over classification which is supposed to be avoided (for legal and other reasons, but a primary motivator of of over classification is just laziness, failure to evaluate what is being produced). There have been efforts to properly qualify software as unclassified (maybe FOUO, or now CUI) and only data as classified (secret or above), but then you have a large contingent of classifiers who still think security through obscurity works. But it's being worked on, maybe one day more will be open source.
- JKolios 4y agoGreat news. The current situation is basically a stealth transfer of tax money to certain publishers who abuse their position in an artificial oligopoly. Glad to see it slowly ending.
- t-writescode 4y agoRest in Peace, Aaron Swartz.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoYeah, literally he was simply right but what he did was "illegal" under unethical laws. And now he's dead.
- ironmagma 4y agoAnd the Reddit community has disowned him. I'm glad HN still remembers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- olegious 4y agoLet's not forget who was responsible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
- pagodinho 4y agoOh that is so sad. Imagina you getting funding from the government to do research and you can't even profit from it...
- andruby 4y agoIs that sarcasm? If not: you can still profit from it, you just need to publish your research.
- waynesonfire 4y agowow, publishers may have to actually start adding value. how scary for them.
- raybb 4y ago> the free material could also include work funded by the national endowments for the arts and humanities. I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls? Do museum admissions charges count as paywalls?
- pagodinho 4y agoHmm seems like there are no significant ongoing costs for hosting a file, unlike a museum?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago> I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls? They do a lot of preservation work, so maybe they fund preservation-related research.
- Turing_Machine 4y agoProbably a fair amount of historical research and such, too.
- higgins 4y agorelated, shout out Dat project! https://dat-ecosystem.org/ https://dat-ecosystem.org/
- anonu 4y agoCan you elaborate on how this link is related? I spent 30 seconds on the site and couldn't make the connection...
- higgins 4y agoI remember hearing (though can't find it on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dat_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dat_(software)) or elsewhere) that the project was born out of wanting to give some fault tolerance to datasets from publicly funded research
- kbuchanan 4y agoThis sounds wonderful; I'm super supportive. But, is there anyone who can articulate the trade-offs without the snark? Are there research groups that benefited from the revenue who will now have to raise even more funds? What's made it take so long? (Beyond just "entrenched interests...")
- martin_a 4y agoI think there might be conflicts where research was not only funded by the government but also companies, side by side. These "partnerships" will lose exclusivity/first mover advantage for the companies, so why should they get into that if they can just sit it out and get the results just as early as the non-paying competitors?
- _Wintermute 4y agoThis only relates to papers, which would have been published anyway (just behind a paywall), so the companies aren't losing anything here.
- dr_orpheus 4y agoI don't know that this has an effect on mixed funding items from the government. In the acquisition structure from the government there is a delineation between what will be unlimited rights (funded fully by government), government purpose rights (GPR, mixed funding), and limited rights (company maintains proprietary information). For GPR items they can only be shared with an NDA to the recipient of that information so I don't those would be applicable to making them public access. I think it is more addressing that the unlimited rights items will be by default public instead of being kept behind a publication or distributed "as needed".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sigy 4y agoFinally, something to give scientific discoveries back to the people that bought them. The devaluing of teachers, public education and critical thinking has gone hand in hand with companies using these discoveries as publicly funded subsidies, turning their profits against those who made them possible in the first place.
- yuan43 4y agoThose commenting here how this sticks it to publishers, it doesn't. The publishers have merely switched payer from reader to author. The same amount of money is changing hands, and possibly more. What this does do is make it much more difficult for those groups without the means to pay $1000-$5000 in article publication charges from publishing. Don't worry, though the federal government is on the case. Researchers will be able to request funds specifically to pay publishers to publish their articles. The publishers are going to keep making money for doing basically nothing.
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- bigtex 4y agoDoes this mean the researchers also have to provide the data as well so others can try to reproduce the results?
- bergenty 4y agoThe Biden administration is really getting some major wins over the last month or two.
- pelagicAustral 4y agoOMG yes! Awesome news!! Too bad this didn’t happened while I was doing my degree, it would’ve saved me some money and the sci-hub chrome extension.
- carabiner 4y agoI basically support Dark Brandon at this point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 4y agonice, long overdue hope to see it in other countries, too
- blazespin 4y agoSadly this was not done by legislation. But maybe that's the point, I dunno
- sgent 4y agoI'm concerned that this will do nothing but result in fewer government awards and make non-governmental research more difficult to access. This directive still allows journals to charge open access publishing fees, which often exceed 12,000k, and allow grantees to add this to their grants, resulting in fewer grants. In addition, there will be no upper limit on open access fees, so privately funded research will essentially be required to opt for closed access publishing so they can avoid the fees. This means it will save nothing for most users of these journals (academics) since now they will have to pay to publish and subscribe.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoso you're saying this doesn't change anything with regards to fees, how will it then lead to a decrease in grants?
- sgent 4y agoCurrently government funded research is either open access (and pays the fee) or is closed access for 1 year then becomes open (and is not subject to fees). Now all government research will have to pay open access fees, and the new guidance allows them to request additional funding for open access fees. Currently the government ranks all grant applications, and funds everyone until it runs out of money. Under the new system it will run out of money sooner -- especially for smaller grant programs for early career grad students and undergrads.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoah, gotcha, you're saying that the fees that publishers charge will eat into the funding for the science itself that makes sense, they should charge less, or none, and we should fund more
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- itcrowd 4y agoJust to clarify some things: - this is similar to how it works in the EU now - depositing the final accepted author version (without journal editors' final typesetting / grammar corrections) into a publicly accessible repository seems to be within these guidelines - open access publishing is typically much more expensive than the closed model for the researchers. Open access fees can be between several hundred and several thousand dollars, depending on the journal - these costs, ostensibly to offset the subscription model, are now most likely to fall on the researchers (i.e., the government) - libraries might still want the subscription to the back-catalog which would still be hugely expensive All in all, I'm in favor of this regardless of the finances (up to a point).
- de6u99er 4y agoSo what? Publishing will be paid through grant money. Researchers just need to plan for that.
- dementik 4y agoThank you, Aaron.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago“ a memorandum that directs federal agencies to ensure peer-reviewed articles stemming from research they fund are freely available upon publication.” Note the peer-reviewed. I wonder how you force volunteers to review for free.