8 ms·
Starting July 1, academic publishers can't paywall NIH-funded research
- ratatoskrt 2y agoJust to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.
- StableAlkyne 2y agoThat it survived two administrations in the current climate is a miracle to be thankful for
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymaths 2y agoyou'd be surprised at how many policies survived two administrations. the real big one (unless I'm missing something or there have been CIA covert ops) is "not invading any new countries" (yemen conflict started under obama)
- indoordin0saur 2y agoSeems like it'll stick around too. It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.
- StableAlkyne 2y agoThe difference is that while indirect costs are critical to research in most cases, journals are the poster child when it comes to skimming research funding. They provide little to no real value beyond a CV trophy and only carry out the bare minimum to coordinate peer review. Their largest impact is siphoning tens of thousands of dollars from labs, and millions from cash-strapped university libraries. Even if the current administration wasn't attacking university funding, the publishing system is in desperate need of reform.
- magicalist 2y ago> It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions. Though arguably orthogonal with their goal of financially starving the research institutions, too.
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025. Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.
- MithrilTuxedo 2y agoConsider that a lot of NIH research funding has already been cut. They effectively ended research they didn't want to release, wasting funding already provided, while counting it as wasteful spending.
- caycep 2y agoThis - Open Access has been around for a while. Battarchya is claiming he's removing the 1 year delay but I've def seen things published and openaccessed ASAP before so I'm not super familiar on the specifics.
- Georgelemental 2y agoThe change is that now all NIH-funded research must be open access.
- caycep 2y agoThat was true before this memorandum, if I remember correctly and also at least if I'm reading the 2013 and 2022 memorandi correctly. The 12 month embargo was also scheduled to be eliminated at the end of this year, JB is just moving it up 6 months.
- bananapub 2y agoI guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?
- ziofill 2y ago[flagged]
- burkaman 2y agoYes, this same guy is helping "to cut more than 40% from NIH’s 2026 budget and pare its 27 institutes and centers down to just eight." - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-defends-grant-cuts-part-shift-support-maha-vision https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-def... He has already fired over a thousand NIH employees and frozen or cancelled billions in grants in his first couple months on the job. While we're talking about NIH, here's a fun game: try going to https://www.nih.gov/ https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box. Play around and see how many Forbidden Words you can discover!
- codehalo 2y agoTyping "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.
- burkaman 2y agoYes you can also just put "gender" in quotes and it works. Or you can spell it wrong - transgender is blocked, but you can do transgendr and it will correct your spelling and return results. Of course, some of the pages it returns have been deleted. Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.
- opello 2y agoIt's entertaining to see the early 2000s name "disemvoweling" return with a new purpose!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- StableAlkyne 2y agoIf your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results. I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost. They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
- nickff 2y ago>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results." This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
- frainfreeze 2y agoWhat goes to government should benefit the people, not the mythical entity
- mont_tag 2y agoThis makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition. Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
- f1shy 2y agoSpecially the ones with force of law
- Someone1234 2y agoI agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model. Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies). I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.
- nradov 2y agoThat's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.
- cogman10 2y ago> The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies). The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for? The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems. It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.
- pelagicAustral 2y agoAs someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...
- StableAlkyne 2y agoSci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century. And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
- pdfernhout 2y agoSomething I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations." Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
- sadiq 2y agoThis is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable. I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
- spookie 2y agoDo you know of any ready to use alternatives to title and abstract screening? Wondering about it since I'm in the weeds of doing so.
- tough 2y agowhat do you mean exactly? I was suprised how with grobid many of at least the arXiv papers are easily converted to xml for better processing than PDF. Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess. https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid
- ck2 2y agoHow about NIH funded drugs, can they be "paywall-ed" ?
- zdragnar 2y agoNIH doesn't do mass production. It may not even do the research necessary to get synthesizing at scale working. Until the NIH becomes a drug production company, the drugs themselves are, by necessity, "paywalled".
- jeffrallen 2y ago...if there's any left: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/859/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/859/transcript
- Simulacra 2y agoThis is an absolute win. Publicly funded research should never be behind a pay wall.
- riskassessment 2y agoMy reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.
- zeckalpha 2y agoPeer review need not be synchronous.
- dbcooper 2y agoPeer review is not supported by publishers. Many editors are unpaid too.
- riskassessment 2y agoI specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.
- dbcooper 2y agoThe "infrastructure" is terrible software called Editorial Manager. It doesn't have any document annotation or collaboration features. It merely allows documents to be uploaded and downloaded, and is a pain to work with. The peer review process is almost entirely coordinated by unpaid associate editors. They make initial manuscript assessments, solicit reviewers, and moderate the review and response process. "journal staff moving papers through the peer review system" may happen at a small number of prestige journals such as Advanced Materials, but for most Q1 journals it is all volunteer work. That is the business model that makes companies like Elsevier billions.
- a_bonobo 2y agoAt the same time, NIH just announced that all grants involving foreign researcher are shut. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-104.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1... >Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity. No more collaborations for US researchers.
- gitroom 2y agoyeah this is finally the way it should be. always wondered why stuff paid for by taxes got stashed behind paywalls for so long. feels like common sense, even if it took forever
- irrational 2y ago[flagged]
- joemulvey 2y agoHave the new generations forgotten how to praise an accomplishment even when it was realized by their enemy. “Give the devil his due”. Partisan myopia has reached an intellectually crippling height in the US. As a scientist who has worked in academia for decades, there is no equivocation in me about praising this move. So many times has my progress in research be speed-bumped by a paywall. Rejoice in the purple between red and blue.
- croemer 2y agoThis was already in the works pre-Trump, they just sped up the timeline by half a year: > The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.