7 ms·

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

by jonknee 12y ago

eli 12y ago
Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ? "The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
- comex 12y ago
  The detail link elaborates: > to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
  - DaveWalk 12y ago
    Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away. Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
    - acveilleux 12y ago
      With open access on publication dates, there's no incentive for university to pay the extortionate subscription fees. All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 12y ago
  That's a step, but that's just NIH and isn't instant access. I'd like to see instant access for all government funded research (which would count NSF, DOE, NASA all public universities, etc etc). The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
- michael_nielsen 12y ago
  The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce... Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade. The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods. Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move. Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
- shortsightedsid 12y ago
  Slightly offtopic, but isn't it a bit ironic that NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NIH (Not Invented Here) both make perfect sense in this thread! The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users? You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable. The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law? To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."
- rhino369 12y ago
  No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles. Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics. The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright. Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access. I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
  - sp332 12y ago
netcan 12y ago
This is a good development. I'm a little nervous about forceful approaches though. There are outcomes that come from a culture of compliance, and there are outcomes that come from more organic dynamics. I think the latter will usually produce better results. IE, I would prefer that the scientific community just take publications less seriously if the underlying data in not available similarly to how they would treat publications that are not peer reviewed. The goal is to improve science. But if the actual publications and researchers are motivated by Gates-compliance or Government-compliance, that could get derailed.
zmb_ 12y ago
Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers. This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits. However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead. A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.
- jonknee 12y ago
  > Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. We're not talking about classified material here, it's research literally done so that others can learn. > Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers. Sure they would because it would allow more people who can get value out of them to do so, thus increasing the amount of knowledge for us all.
tim333 12y ago
If there was an agreement between some major funding agencies to insist on that, not just US Govt but UK and Europe too then it would probably be enough to switch everything over. It'd get my vote.

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

by jonknee 12y ago

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

eli 12y ago

Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ? "The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."

comex 12y ago
The detail link elaborates: > to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
- DaveWalk 12y ago
  Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away. Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
  - acveilleux 12y ago
    With open access on publication dates, there's no incentive for university to pay the extortionate subscription fees. All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jonknee 12y ago
That's a step, but that's just NIH and isn't instant access. I'd like to see instant access for all government funded research (which would count NSF, DOE, NASA all public universities, etc etc). The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
michael_nielsen 12y ago
The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce... Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade. The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods. Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move. Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
shortsightedsid 12y ago
Slightly offtopic, but isn't it a bit ironic that NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NIH (Not Invented Here) both make perfect sense in this thread! The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users? You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable. The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law? To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."

rhino369 12y ago
No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles. Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics. The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright. Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access. I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
- sp332 12y ago

netcan 12y ago

This is a good development. I'm a little nervous about forceful approaches though. There are outcomes that come from a culture of compliance, and there are outcomes that come from more organic dynamics. I think the latter will usually produce better results. IE, I would prefer that the scientific community just take publications less seriously if the underlying data in not available similarly to how they would treat publications that are not peer reviewed. The goal is to improve science. But if the actual publications and researchers are motivated by Gates-compliance or Government-compliance, that could get derailed.

zmb_ 12y ago

Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers. This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits. However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead. A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.

jonknee 12y ago
> Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. We're not talking about classified material here, it's research literally done so that others can learn. > Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers. Sure they would because it would allow more people who can get value out of them to do so, thus increasing the amount of knowledge for us all.

tim333 12y ago

If there was an agreement between some major funding agencies to insist on that, not just US Govt but UK and Europe too then it would probably be enough to switch everything over. It'd get my vote.