
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available - SoMuchToGrok
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/tell-congress-its-time-move-fastr
======
ThePhysicist
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.

~~~
NotOscarWilde
There 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.

~~~
chias
> Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus
> would probably suffice.

Simply _paying_ for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a
scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-
access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I
think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be
paying that myself.

Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.

~~~
infogulch
How much is the department paying for those journal subscriptions?

Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the
open-access submission fee.

~~~
cowsandmilk
How budgets generally work:

University pays for journal subscriptions.

Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.

These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds
to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have
open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research
articles will be distributed by the university as open access.

This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab
that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay
their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand
dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive
lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for
a graduate student.

[1] [http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale...](http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_SalesChart.pdf) [2]
[http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-
fees](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees)

------
tma-1
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?

~~~
ashitlerferad
Bioinformatics is close.

~~~
liviu-
Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?

~~~
dalke
It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when modern "bioinformatics" started. Some
notable times are 1979 when the Los Alamos Sequence Database started, 1982
when that became GenBank, and certainly by 1990 when the Human Genome Project
started.

GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available
nucleotide sequences and their protein translations"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank)
). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before
publication.

I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on
Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase)
). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I
think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl,
OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5.
(I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler,
consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics"
[http://www.peppler.org/resume.html](http://www.peppler.org/resume.html) .)

Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4
library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational
biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by
Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher.

This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the
technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself
tends towards open resources.

("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of
[https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-
bi...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-
bioinformatics-software/) .)

------
c3534l
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.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
>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
I 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".

~~~
Lawtonfogle
If he has used up the USDA money and switched to private sector, where is the
problem? If he wants to do work for Large Company with USDA money, then that
is a problem and I see no reason to not ban it.

~~~
Fomite
Again, the post was addressing the absurd proposal that "If your university
takes _any federal money_ , _all_ research has to be open."

~~~
Lawtonfogle
All research the university does is different than all research the professor
does.

As long as they are at a university being funded by the public, the public has
a claim to the research. If they want to do private research, they can switch
to the private.

If a person is being paid by the public, why should they be able to spend
their time and resources working in private? Think of it like a general IP
ownership agreement at work. Anything you create at work, using the tools your
work provides, belongs to the one paying you. Now claims like any similar work
you do even after you leave, or work you do on your own equipment on your own
time are unreasonable, but I see nothing wrong with that requirement while
being paid by the public and using equipment paid for by the public.

~~~
Fomite
The thing is how academics are actually paid doesn't work like that.

"The university" is not funded by the public. It's funded by Federal money,
and State money, and tuition, and commercial grants and donations. Just
claiming that's "being funded by the public" is claiming 100% of the output,
while not providing 100% of the input.

Similarly, I'm not paid from a single source. I'm paid through a mix of state
money, federal money, and yes, some commercial grants. If a commercial entity
wants to pay for a portion of my lab's expenses and salary, why should "the
public" be entitled to the proceeds?

 _That 's_ the problem being argued against - not that public money should
mean public access, but that "some public money" (no matter how small)
suddenly entitles the public to everything.

------
seeing
_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?

~~~
ikeboy
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf)

"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
If 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
You 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.

~~~
kilotaras
> You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does...

But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.

~~~
ikeboy
See [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18625/do-
spring...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18625/do-springer-
ieee-elsevier-charge-a-fee-for-non-open-access-journals) and
[http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/We...](http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/Wellcome-survey-of-colour-and-page-charges-v-02.pdf)

------
dbcooper
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](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.

------
lhnz
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.

~~~
bduerst
You could probably just search it on google scholar and post the free version
link.

------
tombert
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.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Shout 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.

~~~
cowsandmilk
That isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government)

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.

~~~
TallGuyShort
I suspected the all-government-employees thing but wasn't aware of the journal
copyright aspect. Thanks for clarifying with sources!

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

~~~
afarrell
60-70% public money

How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs
that don't get approved?

~~~
StreamBright
You can read here about the process in the US more:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/)

I guess this is different country by country.

~~~
cowsandmilk
Nothing in that link says pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money.

------
lugus35
"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though
they have not funded it ?

~~~
coldtea
Yeah, 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
The 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
Well, 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.

------
acomjean
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](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/)

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

~~~
rimunroe
I'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
I 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.

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

~~~
michaelhoffman
If 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.

~~~
guy_c
This 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)

~~~
csperkins
The major UK research funding councils have an open access policy for the next
REF -
[http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/](http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/)

~~~
guy_c
Nice, that is good to see.

------
deadgrey19
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.

------
peter303
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.

~~~
BorisVSchmid
Somehow, 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 :-).

------
gravypod
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.

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

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

~~~
damurdock
FASTR 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

------
grondilu
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.

------
libeclipse
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.

~~~
rwbhn
Run for office. Your competence, speed and intelligence should make you a
shoo-in and you can help fix things.

