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.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
And non taxpayers should not get it at all.
https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research...
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).
Freedom of information is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence.
I see no problem with publicly funded stuff being available world-wide. But given the choice between nothing or taxpayer only, the taxpayer should get first dibs.
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Open Access will mean that top quality research will no longer require membership of a University; anyone will be able to access research.
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.
Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If they already know the person they are evaluating by reputation, they evaluate the reputation. Otherwise they use things like publication venues, citation counts, academic pedigrees, and earlier grants and prizes as proxies. Anything that tries to replace prestigious for-profit journals needs to provide non-expert evaluators a way of determining which published papers are likely to be of higher quality than the average.
The majority of journal copyright agreements allow authors to post the article publicly if they choose.
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.
The theory seems to be that the thesis doesn't count as a publication so you must keep it secret while they turn it into papers/book??
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.
So yes, perverse incentives all around.
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.
(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.)
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.
> 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.
https://www.engadget.com/white-house-says-federally-funded-r...
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.
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.
You are assuming researchers are saintly figures dwelling in a vacuum who don't need to constantly prove to their department head or promotion evaluation committee of their worth. That is not the case. The walled gardens are desirable for some because their social functions are not easily replaceable.
One way to decouple the evaluation of scientific output from the walled garden is simply to stop using them as a gate-keeper in making hiring and research grant distribution decisions. But apart from the constant lip service, there is no momentum in doing anything concrete about this in academia.
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!
Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.
As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.
It'd be nice if there were just a different model. I do a lot of research in a niche field and would like to publish some of it. But the enormous submission fees are unaffordable as a non-academic with no connection to grant infrastructure. I had thought that rigor and reproducibility would be the main hurdles, but it's pretty discouraging to have or be close to publication-quality datasets and discover how steep the financial wall is. I was aware of submission fees for papers, but until recently had been under the impression that they were an order of magnitude lower.
I don't know much about academic research, fyi.
I think it's also a midway proposal for other reasons. The proposal merely suggests open access but barely specifies anything. I don't want to give the government personal information and enable endless tracking to them just because I want to download a paper.
Requiring specific textbooks in specific editions removes all market forces and direct competition. It also kills the second-hand market and makes it much more difficult for libraries. When students are free to choose which textbooks to buy or rent from a library you get a much healthier market.
Seems like the only way that’s work is if the teacher provided all necessary info and books were only supplemental.
I'm shocked at how reasonable a policy this is.
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.
So, good idea but too much pressure on departments to be bringing in indirect grant funds, and not enough incentive to release it openly. I think some people in some places can get away with it, but not everywhere.
Change college accreditation / federal financial support rules so that the cost of textbooks is rolled up in the university's tuition fee, and standardize tuitions across departments within each university.
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.
That said, looks great!
Is there a legitimate reason? Or is it lobbyist dollars at work already, buying time?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-202...
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/fda-requests-55-years-to...
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/
But it's being worked on, maybe one day more will be open source.
That doesn't mean this isn't worth doing (it is), but it's going to be a thing.
[1] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... (page 23)
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.
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)
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.
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.
Why does this need a 3 year transition period? Six months would be plenty.
For the same reason aircraft carriers need five miles to stop - it’s a really big ship and there’s an extraordinary amount of inertia to be overcome.
The shortest distance that I stopped the Carrier while going at 34 knots (top speed) was 1.2 nautical miles (NM). This takes several minutes and involves Backing Bells (reversing the spin of propellers), which is hard on the engines. The command is “All Engines, Back Full, Emergency, Indicate 000 (or 999 as necessary)”[1]
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-it-to-stop-an-aircraf...
Academics must still publish in the same prestige journals as before to earn merits for jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. Those journals are largely published by for-profit publishers that want their money one way or another. If their subscription revenues will be lower, they will want more money from open access fees. While subscriptions were usually paid by university libraries that receive their funding from various sources, open access fees are often the responsibility of the individual PI.
Some universities have agreements with some publishers that the library will pay open access fees for their researchers. Others will try to negotiate them, but negotiations take time. When there are no such agreements, the PI must pay the open access fees from their grants. That means grant agencies must establish policies on how much funding to include for that in their grants, and the money has to come from somewhere. The agencies must decide whether to reduce the number of grants or the amount of money available for other purposes. They may also request more funding from the Congress, but that takes a lot of time and the outcome is uncertain.
Imagine doing all that work for nothing, as there was societal collapse just around the corner!
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.
What's made it take so long? (Beyond just "entrenched interests...")
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".
- 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).
Note the peer-reviewed. I wonder how you force volunteers to review for free.
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.
good riddance
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.
I hope this means that Fed Funded research publications will always be free to access from day 0 to day ∞
If not: you can still profit from it, you just need to publish your research.
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.
hope to see it in other countries, too
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.
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?
They do a lot of preservation work, so maybe they fund preservation-related research.
Now do patents.
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.
Moral high ground?
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.