9 ms·

Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

402 points by jacoblyles 14y ago

thorum 14y ago
The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a Death Star by 2016". https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
- kencausey 14y ago
  Have you ever heard of prioritization? One of the factors of prioritizing is the 'time of completion'.
- tzs 14y ago
  The Death Star one was simple, so it is easy to respond to. The research one is complicated. To move from the current system to one where were everything is available at no cost, without compromising peer review and without making it much harder for working scientists to follow the important developments in their field, is a hard problem.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
short_circut 14y ago
This would be nice but how is this going to be payed for? Research budgets are already being squeezed pretty tight given how much the sponsoring organization takes(universities ...), research costs, and congressional attempts to cut funding I just don't see it happening anytime soon. It already costs quite a bit to publish. edit: Just to give an idea of the costs> http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  PLoS and arxiv seem to have figured it out. Require federally funded research to be posted on a similar platform.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - af3 14y ago
    arxiv is not peer-reviewed.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      PLoS is.
      - streptomycin 14y ago
        And it costs thousands of dollars to publish a paper there.
        jlgreco 14y ago
        Yes, and? The price to publish with PLoS is not meant to be a barrier; they will wave the fee if you cannot afford it.
        streptomycin 14y ago
        Not many people waive the fee currently. If a lot of people did, it would be a huge problem for publishers like PLoS and they would have to change their practices. Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.
riprock 14y ago
This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports. The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California [0] http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ [1]
- Centigonal 14y ago
  Does this mean that you have to pay someone if want to make absolutely sure that you're not breaking the law for some given action in California?
  - pi18n 14y ago
    You would have to hire a lawyer in any state due to the sheer number of laws; this seems to say in CA that lawyer also has to buy public domain papers from a private entity.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.
  - riprock 14y ago
    Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm which provides a link to the LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present. The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, use." From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing something from LexisNexis.
chimeracoder 14y ago
I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old, already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of signatures? And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
- pdonis 14y ago
  I signed this when it was open; IIRC I found out about back then via a link here on HN. Not sure of the reason for re-posting it now.
  - femto 14y ago
    To quote [1] "After a user creates a petition, he or she will receive a direct link to that petition that may be sent to friends, posted on social networks, or otherwise shared in order to gain signatures for the petition. If the petition meets a pre-set signature threshold within a designated time period, the petition will become visible to individuals browsing or searching the White House website. If enough users sign the petition to reach a second pre-set signature threshold within that time period, the White House commits to respond to the petition in a timely fashion. The White House may also elect to respond to any petition before it reaches the first or second threshold. Once the White House responds to a petition, it is closed to additional signatures." That last sentence implies that a petition will continue accepting signatures, irrespective of any thresholds or deadlines, right up to the point where a response is posted. Surely that means that there is great value in continuing to promote and sign this original petition? A steady stream of signatures over time would attract attention in the system and demonstrate ongoing support. Eventually it might grow to the point where it is impossible to ignore. [1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy ---- Addition: Indeed, the signature count is still ticking over (gone from 53136 to 53149 in the last 15 minutes). Listing "popular" petitions [2] shows that the petition is significant, currently ranking #8 in terms of number of signatures collected. [2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0 https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0
    - 14y ago
RichardPrice 14y ago
Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold. The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.
- pmorici 14y ago
  Then how do you explain them having time for this; https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
  - RichardPrice 14y ago
    In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders. The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs. The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic. The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
    - SkyMarshal 14y ago
      >The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience. Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?
- mayneack 14y ago
  Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the logistics of sharing it. Now those things are still around through organizational inertia. The companies that existed to fill the (necessary) service of printing and shipping all these things don't want to become obsolete. It's not a good reason to keep it around, but it's why you need more than zero effort to change.
  - icelancer 14y ago
    I agree. It's not an unreasonable thing to have to bring to the government's attention considering how quickly technology allowed for these advancements to occur. It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.
    - csense 14y ago
      > they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built. There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star. The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest politicians that money can buy.
- rayiner 14y ago
somid3 14y ago
just signed the petition, I get the feeling that if this gets pushed to every @mit.edu email address one could easily get more signatures.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition? Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
accountswu 14y ago
I signed this petition when it surfaced originally. It's amazing that the public has to pay for it all initially and then it's handed over to corporations and the same public has to pay ridiculous prices again just to see the findings they originally funded. The same principle applies to all other walks of life whether it's roads or communications infrastructure. Of course if the banks fails we all get to fund the deficit and if they earn huge profits it's "free market capitalism."
linuxfault 14y ago
53,790 signed so far!
graywh 14y ago
The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  Pubmed is great.
pm24601 14y ago
Ask that the US Attorney Carmen Ortiz be removed: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat... Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.

402 points by jacoblyles 14y ago

The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a Death Star by 2016". https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...

kencausey 14y ago
Have you ever heard of prioritization? One of the factors of prioritizing is the 'time of completion'.
tzs 14y ago
The Death Star one was simple, so it is easy to respond to. The research one is complicated. To move from the current system to one where were everything is available at no cost, without compromising peer review and without making it much harder for working scientists to follow the important developments in their field, is a hard problem.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

short_circut 14y ago

This would be nice but how is this going to be payed for? Research budgets are already being squeezed pretty tight given how much the sponsoring organization takes(universities ...), research costs, and congressional attempts to cut funding I just don't see it happening anytime soon. It already costs quite a bit to publish. edit: Just to give an idea of the costs> http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...

jacoblyles 14y ago
PLoS and arxiv seem to have figured it out. Require federally funded research to be posted on a similar platform.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- af3 14y ago
  arxiv is not peer-reviewed.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    PLoS is.
    - streptomycin 14y ago
      And it costs thousands of dollars to publish a paper there.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Yes, and? The price to publish with PLoS is not meant to be a barrier; they will wave the fee if you cannot afford it.
        streptomycin 14y ago
        Not many people waive the fee currently. If a lot of people did, it would be a huge problem for publishers like PLoS and they would have to change their practices. Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.

riprock 14y ago

This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports. The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California [0] http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ [1]

Centigonal 14y ago
Does this mean that you have to pay someone if want to make absolutely sure that you're not breaking the law for some given action in California?
- pi18n 14y ago
  You would have to hire a lawyer in any state due to the sheer number of laws; this seems to say in CA that lawyer also has to buy public domain papers from a private entity.
anigbrowl 14y ago
Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.
- riprock 14y ago
  Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm which provides a link to the LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present. The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, use." From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing something from LexisNexis.

chimeracoder 14y ago

I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old, already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of signatures? And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?

pdonis 14y ago
I signed this when it was open; IIRC I found out about back then via a link here on HN. Not sure of the reason for re-posting it now.
- femto 14y ago
  To quote [1] "After a user creates a petition, he or she will receive a direct link to that petition that may be sent to friends, posted on social networks, or otherwise shared in order to gain signatures for the petition. If the petition meets a pre-set signature threshold within a designated time period, the petition will become visible to individuals browsing or searching the White House website. If enough users sign the petition to reach a second pre-set signature threshold within that time period, the White House commits to respond to the petition in a timely fashion. The White House may also elect to respond to any petition before it reaches the first or second threshold. Once the White House responds to a petition, it is closed to additional signatures." That last sentence implies that a petition will continue accepting signatures, irrespective of any thresholds or deadlines, right up to the point where a response is posted. Surely that means that there is great value in continuing to promote and sign this original petition? A steady stream of signatures over time would attract attention in the system and demonstrate ongoing support. Eventually it might grow to the point where it is impossible to ignore. [1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy ---- Addition: Indeed, the signature count is still ticking over (gone from 53136 to 53149 in the last 15 minutes). Listing "popular" petitions [2] shows that the petition is significant, currently ranking #8 in terms of number of signatures collected. [2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0 https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0
  - 14y ago

RichardPrice 14y ago

Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold. The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.

pmorici 14y ago
Then how do you explain them having time for this; https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
- RichardPrice 14y ago
  In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders. The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs. The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic. The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    >The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience. Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?

mayneack 14y ago
Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the logistics of sharing it. Now those things are still around through organizational inertia. The companies that existed to fill the (necessary) service of printing and shipping all these things don't want to become obsolete. It's not a good reason to keep it around, but it's why you need more than zero effort to change.
- icelancer 14y ago
  I agree. It's not an unreasonable thing to have to bring to the government's attention considering how quickly technology allowed for these advancements to occur. It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.
  - csense 14y ago
    > they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built. There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star. The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest politicians that money can buy.
rayiner 14y ago

somid3 14y ago

just signed the petition, I get the feeling that if this gets pushed to every @mit.edu email address one could easily get more signatures.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition? Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.

accountswu 14y ago

I signed this petition when it surfaced originally. It's amazing that the public has to pay for it all initially and then it's handed over to corporations and the same public has to pay ridiculous prices again just to see the findings they originally funded. The same principle applies to all other walks of life whether it's roads or communications infrastructure. Of course if the banks fails we all get to fund the deficit and if they earn huge profits it's "free market capitalism."

linuxfault 14y ago

53,790 signed so far!

graywh 14y ago

The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.

jacoblyles 14y ago
Pubmed is great.

pm24601 14y ago

Ask that the US Attorney Carmen Ortiz be removed: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat... Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.