8 ms·
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
- libeclipse 10y agoThis world is so surreal it's actually amazing. How the people running our countries can be this incompetent, slow, and unintelligent is beyond me.
- rwbhn 10y agoRun for office. Your competence, speed and intelligence should make you a shoo-in and you can help fix things.
- lugus35 10y ago"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?
- mtgx 10y agoDon't worry. The Chinese probably have it 12 months before it's even made publicly available.
- makapuf 10y agoJust searching for 0DAY-WAREZ[PDFRIP][3l-H4X0R]QUANTUMG4viT4TI0N-S02E04[torrents4TW].doc.pdf would greatly increase interest in basic science for teenagers !
- dhimes 10y agoI'm ok with that. I would think of it as a charitable contribution to humankind.
- dineshp2 10y agoLikely. The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.
- coldtea 10y agoYeah, why not? Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?
- randyrand 10y agoThe usual reason is that then there is an incentive to not spend your own money on research and to just wait for someone else to do it for you. Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.
- coldtea 10y agoWell, it worked well well all research was open back in the Newton, Leibniz, Kelvin, Maxwell, etc times. I don't see why it can't work now. Besides, those that actually do the research also get other benefits, like having people already familiar at a high level with it, getting to derive and manufacture/patent etc stuff based on the research sooner, etc.
- bithush 10y agoIn an ideal system sure. Country A funds research into Subject A. Country B funds research into Subject B. Then everyone has access to everything and can work better towards Subject A+B or whatever. I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.
- rimunroe 10y agoWhy not? Aside from the obvious altruistic reasons, the cost of restricting it is probably more than the cost of not bothering to do so.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoI think that's appropriate for taxes. Some people pay virtually no tax, are we going to demand to see their W2's before we give them access if they want to read? If you want it to be fair we can't pretend the current system is a free market, because it's not. I don't think the public should fund things that benefit a single company - the whole point of forcing people to pay it through taxes is because it's supposed to benefit society as a whole. If that's not true, I want to stop funding it.
- matwood 10y agoSharing research is a benefit to everyone. On a pure cost basis, the US gives out billions in the form of cash all over the world. Including access to US funded research in what the US gives away would likely do more to help the US in the long term than much of the money. I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.
- wodenokoto 10y agoI asked a similar question a few weeks earlier. The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide. In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide. it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.
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- tma-1 10y agoI 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?
- bithush 10y agoI have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0]. FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible. I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc. [0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
- mkane848 10y agoMy Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you. Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
- andrey_utkin 10y agoCS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.
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- Joof 10y agoI sent a letter. I really want to know how effective these mass stock-email campaigns are.
- rimunroe 10y agoI've heard from a few people who work in politics in state and national congresses that (non-form) physical letters and phone calls from concerned constituents can have a surprising amount of weight on the decisions of congresspeople. I imagine it's less true for form emails like this, but still probably worth a go.
- afarrell 10y agoI think the basic way to judge this is "Is this a signal that the person who sent it is motivated to pay attention and vote based on this?" Congresscritters care most about votes. They'll take campaign donations if thats all they can get, but they then need to figure out how to turn those campaign donations into votes.
- ThePhysicist 10y agoPersonally, 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.
- NotOscarWilde 10y agoThere are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice. * Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus. [1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.
- seeing 10y agopublished 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?
- ikeboy 10y agohttp://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost... "The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available." Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
- paulclinger 10y agoIf these are valuable services, then customers will pay for them; no need to have a monopoly on access to published research. (as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
- ikeboy 10y agoYou can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does, or charge the reader customer, which is what non open access does. Insisting that the reader customer not pay just increases the costs elsewhere. If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there will be less grants, it's just math. (Previously I was told that the cost is minuscule compared to the cost of the study itself in general, in which it won't have a large effect. But I haven't seen data.) If we decide we want the government to also pay the cost of publication, as opposed to having readers pay, great. But it might be expensive, again, data would be helpful. Blanket statements like "taxpayers paid for it, therefore it should be open" ignore the reality that publishers subsidize publication precisely because they charge for access.
- StreamBright 10y agoFunny that some of the pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money yet the results are IPd by the company.
- atom-morgan 10y agoI find it funny that people blame this on greed/capitalism/profit instead of IP laws.
- ThomPete 10y agoThe IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.
- atom-morgan 10y agoBut they only exist because the government has the power to create those laws. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- ThomPete 10y agoThey still exist because companies lobby to keep them alive. I don't hate the player I simply observe how the game is played.
- atom-morgan 10y agoTrue. Point is I think the government should be the focus here, not the players who take advantage of the rules they create.
- ThomPete 10y agoI think both should be at the focus as they are often two pieces of the same part.
- roadnottaken 10y agoIf researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.
- michaelhoffman 10y agoIf employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.
- drjesusphd 10y agoAnd if experts would stop reviewing articles for free...
- tomjen3 10y agoThat sounds doable, actually. Have the NSF only base their grants on publications in open access journals.
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoOr even just weight any open access journal more than any closed journal. That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.
- guy_c 10y agoThis is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework
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- grondilu 10y agoIt'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.
- damurdock 10y agoFASTR specifically applies to research being published in peer-reviewed journals and specifically excludes: >classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent
- dbcooper 10y agoJournal articles from NIH funded research are already required to be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm 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.
- tombert 10y agoI 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.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoShout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.
- tombert 10y agoIs that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up... It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.
- TallGuyShort 10y agohttp://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.
- cowsandmilk 10y agoThat isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th... This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals. http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.
- rspdelhi 10y agoPublic expenditures are for the public utilization. The form may change but the spirit remains the same.
- lhnz 10y agoWould 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.
- bduerst 10y agoYou could probably just search it on google scholar and post the free version link.
- peter303 10y agoJournals 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.
- BorisVSchmid 10y agoSomehow, physics does not appear to need such extensive vetting - to me (as an outsider) it seems like physicists can find what they need on arxiv.org Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar: * do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar). In addition, I also read papers :-).
- peppaz 10y agoAaron Schwartz would agree, from the grave where fighting this fight put him.
- acomjean 10y agoNIH 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 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/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
- c3534l 10y agoThe 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.
- Lawtonfogle 10y ago>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 do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.
- Fomite 10y agoI think the suggestion here is more "Because Joe over in Agriculture took USDA money, I suddenly can't do contract work for Large Company because they want to keep it proprietary".
- deadgrey19 10y agoFWIW, 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.
- gravypod 10y agoI 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.
- randyrand 10y agoIf this was the case WWII would have looked much different. We need exceptions.
- damurdock 10y agoFASTR specifically applies to research being published in peer-reviewed journals and specifically excludes: >classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent