
Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research - ig1
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research
======
xaa
As a scientist, it is so funny to read about the "valuable contributions that
the scientific publishing industry provides".

The scientific publishing industry does not write, review, or edit any of the
content it publishes -- volunteer scientists do that. It literally takes a
pre-formatted PDF or Word document and sticks it on a website, and maybe into
a print edition. It charges multi-thousand dollar fees to authors to publish
the articles, fees to institutions to access them, and still litters the
website/journal with ads. And their profit margin is in the 40% area.

This industry is an absolute scourge on human progress, and a 12-month embargo
does not go nearly far enough. 12 months is an eternity in science.

I will say that the publishing industry does do some very minor but useful
things, like linkification of references, management of submitting the
publication record to PubMed, etc. But the cost is exorbitant, and the
government could provide these services for a fraction of the cost.

Edit: Oh, and journal prices are rising much faster than the CPI. While at the
same time most have reduced or eliminated a print edition, and increasingly
require reformatting to be done by faculty. Hmm...

~~~
ig1
Have you ever looked at the budget of an academic journal to see where the
money goes ?

The average journal profit margin is 20-30% and that's roughly the same
whether you're talking about an open access journal like PLoS or a closed
access one. They also have roughly the same operational (staff, etc.) costs.
Most new journals tend to be run at a loss for a number of years being
subsidised by the more successful ones.

Marketing is another big cost, journals don't magically build reputations,
they have marketing budgets to achieve mindshare and to establish a
reputation.

There are good reasons for open access, but lets not pretend that journals are
cheaper to operate than they actually are.

~~~
xaa
I'd argue that the open-access model is not much better than the traditional
model, because as you point out, it incurs basically the same expenses, but
simply charges the author more to recoup the lost institutional subscription.

Now that systems like ArXiV exist, researchers and taxpayers should not be
paying for marketing and typography.

But the real reason journals persist is because readers and promotion/tenure
committees want a credibility filter. A really good technological solution to
this problem hasn't been found (AFAIK), but I don't see that it would be too
hard to build some algorithm to rank articles according to author prestige,
institution prestige, number of citations, reader interest, etc. If people
want a "hard" metric of article impact, they would be better off using number
of citations than journal impact factor anyway.

~~~
rayiner
> A really good technological solution to this problem hasn't been found
> (AFAIK), but I don't see that it would be too hard to build some algorithm
> to rank articles according to author prestige,

You're hand-waving away one the driving forces not only of the publishing
industry, but much of the whole economy. Signals, filters, and branding
account for the existence of everything from Louis Vuitton to hiring practices
based on school prestige to Asian parents that push their kids to get into
MIT. Signaling makes the world go around and you hand-wave it away by saying
it shouldn't be hard to replace the branding with "some algorithm."

~~~
xaa
Right now, "I published in Nature" is simply a proxy for "I published an
important paper." or "I am a productive faculty member." I certainly agree
that these are valuable messages to signal.

My entire point was that better and more objective ways are being developed
that can signal this same message, while cutting out the cost and
inconvenience of the journal middleman. The exact recipe for these better ways
is still an open question, but I do know several people who are working on it,
and I listed several specific examples.

Branding no doubt plays a role. But there is already a major trend towards
downplaying branding in favor of more objective metrics like impact factor and
the H-index. And I do hope that science can be held to a slightly higher
standard of objectivity than the general economy (maybe that's too
idealistic?).

~~~
nooneelse
> And I do hope that science can be held to a slightly higher standard of
> objectivity than the general economy (maybe that's too idealistic?).

Doesn't sound to idealistic to this science-oriented engineer. With the field
of scientometrics, the feedback loops look like they can be closed entirely
within the domain of science instead of needing to extend outside of it to be
closed.

There is no reason to think that actual experimental studies can't be brought
to bear on the matter of what ranking/organizing metrics of papers/research
best (for various definitions of 'best') help scientists do their work. Also
no a priori reason I can see why various fields would converge to the same
measures; or that those most used within science would be the ones that the
press, students, people external to the fields, and such would find most
helpful.

------
michael_nielsen
The key language notes that the Whitehouse has "issued a memorandum today
[...] to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in
research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of
federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months
after original publication."

This suggestion is similar to the NIH public access policy (adopted in 2008),
which requires the results of NIH-funded research to be made freely available
within 12 months of publication. The new memorandum gives agencies some
freedom in how they respond - they don't need to adopt exactly the NIH policy
- but it is clearly in the same spirit.

Here's an analysis from Peter Suber, a leading advocate of open access:
[https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJe...](https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJeVHJ)

Suber focuses on the connection to FASTR, a major piece of open access
legislation introduced into Congress a few days ago. Broadly, FASTR has a lot
of overlap with the White House directive. FASTR would require every Federal
agency with a budget over 100 million to adopt an open access policy. A
significant difference - and one that I expect is of interest to HN - is that
FASTR has provisions to enable text mining. That would potentially be of
interest to some startups. Much more info here:

[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_t...](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_to_Science_and_Technology_Research_Act)

If you'd like to support open access, take a few minutes to look at the
Alliance for Taxpayer Access's (ATA) call to action on FASTR:

[http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FASTR_calltoaction.shtm...](http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FASTR_calltoaction.shtml)

It is also of interest to follow the responses from John Wilbanks and Heather
Joseph, two of the authors of the petition (and long-time advocates for open
access):

<https://twitter.com/wilbanks>

<https://twitter.com/hjoseph>

Wilbanks notes that the memo covers research from "NSF, Ed, EPA, NASA, USDA,
HHS, Commerce, Interior, Defense, Energy, Trans, DHS, Ag, State, Smithsonian".
He also implies that while this memo is great progress, it falls short of a
full open access mandate enabling reuse and text-mining of content.

~~~
kanzure
This is a fantastic development. What are the chances of any of this applying
retroactively to papers that are already published?

~~~
michaelhoffman
The chances are zero. There is no way for the government to retroactively
change the terms and conditions of contracts and grants that were executed
long ago.

~~~
Alex3917
That's not accurate, they could grant themselves a license to the copyright
under eminent domain.

~~~
betterunix
Or just retroactively reduce the lengths of copyright terms. After all, they
retroactively increase the lengths of those terms all the time, so why can
they not reduce them as well? The constitution explicitly requires copyrights
to expire, but makes no specific mention of what the minimum or maximum terms
are.

------
InvisibleCities
>the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific
publishing industry provides are not lost.

Honestly, what value does the publishing industry provide? Search? Google,
Microsoft Bing, and any number of other search providers could do that at the
fraction of the cost. Peer review? No, that is performed by independent
scientists, who are either not paid, or paid a negligible fee. Editing? Nope.
Scientific journals are not edited for content or even proofread; I know a few
professors who found that out the hard way after discovering typos in their
own articles. Typesetting? OK. I'll give them that one. So, for the cost of
thousands of dollars to the original researchers, on top of the outrageously
high licensing fees paid by people who wish to read the articles, we get
papers that have been typeset. Hoo boy, what a great deal.

~~~
rayiner
> Honestly, what value does the publishing industry provide? Search? Google,
> Microsoft Bing, and any number of other search providers could do that at
> the fraction of the cost.

You can't compare the curation you get in a proper journal to the shitsplatter
of your typical search engine results.

A very good example of how crappy search technology is for this sort of thing
is to do legal research on Google Scholar versus Westlaw. The indexing, head
notes, directories, and topical summaries you get from Westlaw make Google
Scholar look like a toy. And why should we expect differently? We're comparing
the product of human labor to the results of extremely primitive AI technology
optimized not for research but for making sure that people can quickly find
the latest celebrity nip slip photos.

~~~
MBlume
The curation is done by scientists volunteering their time to the journals.
The publishers add nothing. They are parasites and deserve swift, merciless
death.

~~~
rayiner
Volunteer scientists do not do the curation. They do editing and peer review,
but they don't do the editorial work of deciding what articles are published,
how they are presented, what's featured, etc.

~~~
MBlume
Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much
harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way
there.

~~~
rayiner
It's not about whether it's hard or not, it's about supply and demand for
curation. Effective curation depends on the readers' faith in the organization
to back quality articles, and there is a limited supply of such organizations.

E.g. if I type "economics of deflation" into Google, I get: wikipedia, a
youtube video, "tutor2u.net", and investopedia among other things.
Businessweek and the Economist show up on the bottom half of the first page.
The first several pages of results are full of Austrian and Mises gibberish--
lot's of "counter conventional wisdom" sites. This is why I don't go to Google
to research economics. I don't trust it to pick quality research.

So where do I turn? "tutor2u.net?" No. I have no idea whether they can be
trusted or not. So I use signaling and proxies. I look for things that have
"Harvard" or "London School of Economics" domains. The folks at Harvard and
LSE long ago figured out that basic dynamic, and that's why they use their
names to publish journals. Is it a hard job other people couldn't do? No. But
the journals exist because we trust Harvard to do the job, and we don't trust
"tutor2u.net".

My wife actually hates the NIH open access policy for this reason. She argues
a lot on the internet about pediatrics/child birth. She gets crazies who
peddle crackpot theories by citing to sketchy papers that happen to be hosted
on an NIH domain. They assume that by hosting those papers, NIH vouches for
the content in those papers, but of course that's not the case.

~~~
adiM
If you are interested in academic articles, why not search on google scholar?
It provides much more relevant results.

~~~
rayiner
Google scholar indexes journal databases and so takes advantage of that
filtering that has already been done by the journals. Yes its more relevant,
but we're talking about alternatives to the journals.

------
return0
12 months is not enough. In many fast moving fields scientific research can be
old news within a year. Why not just require immediate open publication? That
would be a great boost to publishers like PLoS and Frontiers, and would
increase both the quality of the work published and of the peer reviewing
process of open access journals, since their impact factor would be impacted
in that case.

There is always the argument of keeping the editorial quality high and that
competition among publishers enables better scholarship. The truth is,
however, that science politics have long now invaded most high-impact
commercial journals and publishers to the point where this argument no longer
holds.

Most scientists don't really have strong feelings about open access, since for
academics access to journals is practically guaranteed through their workplace
subscriptions. But it is possible that most scientists are not aware of the
wonderful possibilities that open access enables, such as text mining and
other sorts of meta-analysis. Not to mention that everyone would be able to
read any study on their phone at any time/place.

------
ljd
I had to read that twice... did a petition actually work?

Regarding:

"Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research
and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of
federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months
after original publication"

I really hope they do something easy like a REST/JSON API.

~~~
ewillbefull
> did a petition actually work

No. Notice that this petition met its goal a year ago, and they never issued a
response until now. It's more likely they were designing a plan and waited
until they were done to respond to the petition.

~~~
chad_oliver
What's wrong with "designing a plan and [waiting] until they were done to
respond to the petition"? That sounds like a very logical thing to do. Better
to get a measured response that a populist response.

~~~
ewillbefull
There's nothing wrong with planning, just that likely the petition had nothing
to do with their internal discourse over open access reform. Obama's advisers
probably already had deliberations going on. "Hey, there's a petition for
this! Let's wait until we're done and respond to the petition."

I sure hope that this petition wasn't the only reason why they decided to
issue these orders.

------
revelation
_the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific
publishing industry provides are not lost_

Holy newspeak. These are companies, they don't make contributions out of the
good of their heart, _they extract value for their shareholders_, who are
neither the taxpayers nor the scientists. The ridiculous gross margins and
nonexistent competition suggests they do so in what can only be called rent-
seeking.

------
ig1
Why was the title changed ? - the new title removes the fact that this is the
official government response to the open access petition and not just a
discussion piece.

~~~
mmanfrin
Exceptionally strict moderation policy. There have been many threads pushing
back against objectively poor title edits, but the mods won't listen.

~~~
rikacomet
what is to mod, when it is 'actually' the official white house response!?

~~~
mmanfrin
The original title of this HN submission included 'Official Whitehouse
Response'; HN mods changed it to something much less informative.

~~~
rikacomet
yes, I had read it before it was changed. I know the need of modding, been a
mod myself elsewhere, but it has to have some grounds, unlike in this case.
Would someone please fix this?

------
JOnAgain
Wow wow wow. Slow down. Did this petition actually accomplish something? This
doesn't seem to be the typical "here's why we're not going to do anything"
response.

~~~
sinak
It was a reasonable ask and got a reasonable response. Hopefully the unlocking
petition gets the same treatment.

------
rikacomet
I applaud this step, and the timeline given for effective action is pretty
much justified as well.

Though I'm having some doubts(naturally!) about: \- the $100 million threshold
-the overall implementation (lets see on Jan 1/July 1 next year) \- the
effective length of which excuses are held valid, and which are not. I feel
the white house should take clear stand, and declare which research groups
were excused and why.

Then again, I must congratulate US govt on this. Something like this is ages
away in my country.

------
mmanfrin
I feel like they missed the point of this petition. The decision is to make
all federal agencies with $100mil+ research stipends publish findings, but
this does nothing to change the Journal-Paywall system.

~~~
rikacomet
care to explain please?

the Journal-Paywall system?

~~~
mmanfrin
Research by individuals granted public grants is generally only published in
scientific journals that cost thousands of dollars -- which means that normal
people have a very difficult time of accessing research that they contributed
(via taxes) to the funding of.

~~~
ig1
"make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of
charge within 12 months after original publication.""

Hence this research will have to be made available freely.

~~~
rikacomet
I don't get it, why limit the clause? why not make all research (not-related
to defense/military) funded by tax payers to THE taxpayers?

why put limits, like 100 million, federal/state, etc???

were no lessons learnt from Aaron's case?

~~~
michaelhoffman
The White House doesn't have control over research funded entirely by state
taxpayers.

------
merraksh
_... make the results of federally-funded research publically available free
of charge within 12 months after original publication._

Doesn't that shift the burden on agencies rather than publishers, allowing
them to publish on paid-for journals but then making them available after a
year by paying some open access fee to the publisher?

Also, if publicly funded research is to be publicly available, shouldn't it be
so right away?

I just feel that this measure is incomplete and tries to keep at least part of
the publishers' inflow of cash.

------
zapdrive
Action too late, too little. The publicly funded research should to be
available immediately to the public. The "scientific publishing industry" can
still continue making money by charging the researchers/authors to have their
studies published in their journals.

~~~
czr80
Interestingly, this is how it works today. All federally funded researchers
are required to provide detailed research reports, and these are freely
available.

------
EdwardTattsyrup
Twelve months after original publication?

They oughtta require that it's in the hands of the general public within
twelve freakin' microseconds of original publication.

Twelve months makes no sense.

------
phaus
The White House wants to find a solution that will be fair to all
stakeholders.

The only stakeholder that should be considered is the U.S. tax payer. We
funded the research, whether we wanted to or not, under penalty of
imprisonment or death, and in a manner that violates the intent of the
Constitution. Why then, are we prohibited from seeing the results of our
investment?

