

Require free access to scientific articles based on taxpayer-funded research. - tylerneylon
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

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law
I don't sign petitions, because that type of feel-good inaction is one of the
major problems in America today. Instead, I support the efforts of Carl
Malamud at public.resource.org and am trying to figure out a way to
crowdsource PACER. Admittedly, these efforts differ substantively from the
petition's goal of 'liberating' publicly-funded research from the shackles of
for-profit corporations, but many of the issues are analogous.

The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for
federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any
meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to
provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar
measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that
this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how
to implement such policies.

Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to
journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this
issue.

~~~
a3d6g2f7
I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?

Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing
as improper. I am just curious.

Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes,
wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the
law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of
some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to
"disrupt" the jury research industry?

Pardon my ignorance.

(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic
research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as
access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could
learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by
reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a
great deal.)

~~~
law
What I want to do with the data is largely irrelevant; I care more about being
free to analyze this data--data that belongs to the public.

But to answer your question more precisely, I'm interested in identifying
trends in the courts with respect to litigated issues. It'd be interesting to
determine whether certain pre-trial motions have a higher propensity to be
granted/denied in a particular court, before a particular judge, etc.
Additionally, I'm interested in tracking cases on which attorneys and law
firms typically rely when writing their briefs or other documents submitted to
the court.

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tylerneylon
To be clear, the 'require' part of this petition is not targeted at
researchers, but at publishers.

Publishers want to own their papers' copyrights, and have exclusive publishing
rights. The fairness of this is questionable when they aren't paying for the
core work done to produce the papers. They apply a lot of pressure to keep
research behind paywalls, often against the will of the funders and the
researchers. The idea of this petition is to give researchers and government
funding agencies some legal strength if they want their work to be freely
available.

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asdf333
This was on here before, but when I signed it, it had just barely broken 4k.
Great to see it already up to 15k!

I am loathe to sign political petitions b/c oftentimes its not very clear to
me whether the proposed change does not have any unforeseen negative
repercussions.

I can't see how this could be a bad thing. As taxpayers we are already paying
for the research. Why should we have to pay a private corporation yet again
(or fund the costs for our public universities to pay for them)?

~~~
rflrob
It's also worth noting that the NIH has had such a policy in effect since
around 2008. It's conceivable that making it universal for federally funded
research would so disrupt the business model of journals that they'd collapse,
but they're run by smart (if stodgy) people, and I'm sure during the phase-in
they'd figure out a new business model that would work.

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Alex3917
Even though not a single petition has been taken seriously so far, I think
this one actually has a decent shot. If Obama acts were to actually act on one
of them before the next election then this one probably has the best chance
because it's a relatively small change, and it probably wouldn't be
excessively controversial.

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merraksh
Previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002152>

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crumblan
Let's take it one step further: all products of any taxpayer-funded research
are public domain. This includes patents, articles, and datasets.

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warmfuzzykitten
I've signed in about 10 times but every time I go back to the petition page it
requires me to sign in again. :(

~~~
jnbiche
I had this same problem. Really makes me wonder about the White House web
development office, as they are clearly either nefarious or incompetent.

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
"Never attribute to X what can be explained by simple incompetence." :)

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pithon
Who pays the hosting fees?

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ryguytilidie
This is seriously the worry people have? Scribd hosts documents for free.
Academia.edu hosts documents for free and in fact ENCOURAGES academics to post
papers there. If a website is willing to host the papers for free versus
having a system where we spend millions on research so that journals can put
it behind their paywall I feel like the future has written itself already.

~~~
pithon
From the petition:

"Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on
the Internet"

I'm just pointing out that _requiring_ it to be posted on the internet
_requires_ someone to host it.

~~~
CamperBob2
(Shrug) Any research worth paying for is going to cost a million times more
than hosting the resulting documents. I don't follow you.

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Canuteson
Add to that a licensing fee payable to the treasury for commercial use of tax
payer funded research, e.g., prescription drug patents.

