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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

by SoMuchToGrok on 3/29/16, 11:04 AM with 131 comments

• by ThePhysicist on 3/29/16, 11:53 AM

  Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting to see if the publishing industry would dare to sue them in that case, as this could easily tip the public opinion against them.

  In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.

• by tma-1 on 3/29/16, 11:44 AM

  I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?

• by c3534l on 3/29/16, 5:02 PM

  The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consider rapidly dropping funding for our public universities.

  But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.

  Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.

  You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.

  If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.

• by seeing on 3/29/16, 12:14 PM

  published research be available to the public no later than 12 months after publication

  Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately?

  Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?

• by dbcooper on 3/29/16, 12:57 PM

  Journal articles from NIH funded research are already required to be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.

  http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

  >The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009). The law states:

  >The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

• by lhnz on 3/29/16, 2:08 PM

  Would it be legal to write a Twitter bot that detects mentions of pay-walled academic papers and responds with a SciHub link?

  This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.

• by tombert on 3/29/16, 1:35 PM

  I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it.

  I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

• by StreamBright on 3/29/16, 12:17 PM

  Funny that some of the pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money yet the results are IPd by the company.

• by lugus35 on 3/29/16, 11:35 AM

  "Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?

• by acomjean on 3/29/16, 3:21 PM

  NIH has a Public Access Policy already[1], so anything NIH funded is public. Lots of stuff is already available (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). Other agencies have public data to AHRQ, CDC, FDA, HHMI, NIST, VA (see link for acronym clarification)[2]

  This FASTR proposal shouldn't be a big deal, since a lot of funding sources already have that requirement. I'm not sure why some funding gets not to be public.

  (part of my job is uploading data to pubchem)

  [1]http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/

• by Joof on 3/29/16, 11:46 AM

  I sent a letter. I really want to know how effective these mass stock-email campaigns are.

• by roadnottaken on 3/29/16, 12:40 PM

  If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.

• by deadgrey19 on 3/29/16, 5:37 PM

  FWIW, all research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the major funding body behind STEM research in the UK) is required to be Open Access, including data collected. In the next REF (the process through which UK universities including Oxford and Cambridge receive funding) only papers that are open access will be assessed. This puts immense pressure on both academics and UK universities to ensure their works are open access.

• by peter303 on 3/29/16, 2:32 PM

  Journals act as the Yahoo of scientific papers. That is they are an index of certain topical relevance and editorial quality. (The original idea of Yahoo was a vetted directory to web pages) I am not sure if papers scattered around random university servers would be easily found.

  A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.

• by gravypod on 3/29/16, 5:43 PM

  I don't understand how research can possibly be published and properly evaluated without everyone who can contribute to it not having access.

  For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.

• by peppaz on 3/29/16, 2:59 PM

  Aaron Schwartz would agree, from the grave where fighting this fight put him.

• by randyrand on 3/29/16, 9:25 PM

  If this was the case WWII would have looked much different. We need exceptions.

• by grondilu on 3/29/16, 12:52 PM

  It's not so simple. Knowledge is power so you don't want to disseminate it blindly. Military weapons (including highly dangerous ones) for instance were designed with publicly funded research and yet everybody would agree that it'd be a bad idea to just publish the plans.

• by libeclipse on 3/29/16, 11:34 AM

  This world is so surreal it's actually amazing. How the people running our countries can be this incompetent, slow, and unintelligent is beyond me.