Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it.
Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
I agree. All that data should be publically available for reproduction of the work as well as open season. No one should be able to patent it either, or should only be able to file a patent to make it "publically available into perpetuity" to protect it. If tax dollars funded it, we own it as a society. If companies foot the bill then maybe something more complicated needs to exist, but if it is 100% public funded, universities should not be able to sell it off to corps.
That's the system we had in the 1970s (government owned the patent to government-funded research). And what happened is that the government didn't know what to do with the patents, and the inventors, who were best positioned to commercialize their invention, could not justify spending time and money to commercialize something that they didn't own. So the Bayh Dole act of 1980 allowed universities to commercialize their federally funded inventions. The result was an explosion of startups, especially in the biotech industry.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
The research results should not be patentable. If someone wants to then productize the research, they can patent any methods they can independently come up with, as long as they didn't use public money for that as well.
That is plenty of latitude for seeding start-ups and commercializing technology. There is no need to lock up the actual research so that only the researcher and their university can commercialize it, protected from competition. It does a disservice to the people who's money paid for the research behind it.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
I'm pretty sure the US doesn't need a revolution in the federal government subsidizing private business ventures. We've got more than enough of that already. The idea of federal funding being verboten in the corporate world is more akin to an ideal state, rather than one to be avoided.
The DoE didn’t free that tech to the public, the US government’s using licensing to actively prevent American companies from competing with the Chinese one they allowed a sublicense to be granted to (from your link):
> Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling."
Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.
I meant with regard to the ability for anyone to use it without, say, violating patents. Plenty of drugs discovered and developed with NIH money go on to be patented by private companies.
I take your point, but OTOH it's difficult to envision a world where drugs actually get brought to market without patent protection. The amount of money and risk involved is just astronomical.
I'd be happy funding drug development, clinical trials, etc with public funds, as well. I also believe there are opportunities for companies to profit without being given exclusive manufacturing rights via patents.
It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness.
The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.
You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.
But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.
The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.
Most of what the big contractors like Booz do is custom software. Every single cloud provider has an entire GovCloud division. Even Office has special Government licensing that behaves differently on the backend.
I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers.
Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.
1. There isn't as much of a difference here as you think. Contractors do turn around and use components developed in public contracts for other consulting projects. Most commonly with other sovereigns, especially when the original contract was with a city or state, but sometimes at the national level as well.
2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics.
(To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)
Thanks for the well informed response! I had not yet heard of Bayh-Dole and you gave me some good googlin'.
In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?
1. replace the current academic funding model with pure fellowships. Each individual, from most junior to most senior, gets their own N year funding.
2. Each has a legal entity under which their IP lives and in which the government takes a small, fair, non-voting share.
3. Completely divorce this funding infrastructure from universities -- if someone wants to use part of their grant to pay for PhD courses/advising, great, but make it so that funding science is not contingent on that institutional apparatus.
The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.
I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.
DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me).
The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast.
A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.
I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.
> I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers
Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.
"public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"
we do through the international patent system. We should get money back for our tax dollars, simple as that. We could work it into international patents. I know some countries ignore those, but we can make them pay in other ways like tariffs and treaties.
Not to be that guy, but other countries don't pay tarrifs, Americans do. The tarrif is levied on the importer, who then passes that cost on to the consumer.
The tarrif is not paid by the exporter.
The goal of a tariff is to _increase_ the customer price for some good locally, and thus make a local (more expensive) good more compeditive.
A foreign country may experience lower demand for their product, but its not like they "pay any money".
Yes, lower demand may lead to a lower price, or it may mean they export to other countries instead.
I was thinking nationally but honestly there's nothing constitutionally that would prevent a non-citizen from accessing the research. I guess, aside from military/encryption research of course.
I see no problem with publicly funded stuff being available world-wide. But given the choice between nothing or taxpayer only, the taxpayer should get first dibs.
Although I am generally supportive of research products (data, papers, reagents) being broadly open, I think there is the possibility of a perverse incentive to free-ride on the scientific funding of other nations. As the velocity of information (i.e., faster spread) and international mobility of academics increases, the perverse incentive goes up.
That's not a perverse incentive. It's the entire purpose of academic research. The results of the research are supposed to benefit the entire humanity, not just the entity that happened to fund it. Funders in turn have a range of motives. Some are idealistic and fund research because it's morally the right thing to do. Others are more utilitarian and believe that there are indirect benefits from having academic researchers in the society.
We should be able to use the international patent system for that. Make it publically open to any single "citizen" any international corp seizing on it should have to pay patent fees to the general fund of the US treasury or something set up to feed it back into our government sponsored R&D programs.
Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves...
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
> The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here.
> It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doing so.
> If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
For sure. Of course, real world charges for roads/parking is a little more complicated than that.
> Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
Yeah, the most obvious reason to do this for street parking is because you actively want to manage demand of a highly demanded, finite resource. You don't really need the money, but charging gets you other changes you want. Ditto for congestion charges.
There's no legitimate downside to doing so. There is a very real illegitimate downside for copyright racketeers such as Elsevier, in that they would be much less able to engage in said racketeering.
I see no reason why the answer shouldn't be "yes" to each of those bullets. I don't think the logic falls apart. Public goods and services should be public goods and services, full stop.
One reason to put tolls on roads is to make the people who use the infrastructure also the people who pay for it's maintenance and improvements. Public goods are provided by public money, and in some cases it might be fairer to get some/most/all of that public money from the portion of the public that are using the thing.
Also as a disincentive to use something. Like we want people to drive less in the urban core to reduce congestion and also the air pollution that's killing thousands of people every year. So we're going to put a charge on using those roads.
It depends on the specific scenario. For parking, for example, not charging for it when it's in high demand is generally a bad idea, because you get "overconsumption": people who barely even need it end up using it anyway (hey, it's free!) while people who really need it have a hard time finding any available. So you'll have, say, people who are just storing their occasionally-used car for weeks between uses on the street, while people who are just parking to unload something right now can't get their stuff done.
Then you also end up with people spending a lot of time circling around downtown looking for elusive free parking, which is bad for both traffic and the environment. In contrast, charging a "market rate" that usually leaves 10-15% of parking spots open means that scenario is now transparent and fast: you know you can usually quickly find parking, you know how much it's gonna cost, you can make the calculation ahead of time and execute fast.
We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society. So, in that vain, I agree with another poster who said this should all be free. Perhaps with some changes.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Free parking is actually bad, particularly in cities, though it's bad for reasons largely specific to cars.
> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.
> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.
Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?
I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.
> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).
I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.
> We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society.
Yes, but nevertheless money works better than not doing anything for stuff like street parking. It's simple and effective. Perhaps another system would work better on paper for allocating street parking, but I'm guessing most other suggestions would be a lot more complicated and brittle in practice.
US Federal grants are involved in almost all research done in the US, so this likely means that the vast majority of research papers will become open access.
Open Access will mean that top quality research will no longer require membership of a University; anyone will be able to access research.
As someone in the ML community where arxiv rules supreme, I really do not understand why other communities do not also have something similar.
I get that there are some perverse incentives around, but there is a relatively straightforward solution to all of the problems with journals - just publish your work on the internet first so that it's out in the open, then send it to some journal who can make money from your hard work without adding any value, if you still want to.
Publishing is the trivial part of academic publishing. Preprints already solved the problem of disseminating research results cost-effectively to everyone interested decades ago. The hard part is assigning merit.
Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If they already know the person they are evaluating by reputation, they evaluate the reputation. Otherwise they use things like publication venues, citation counts, academic pedigrees, and earlier grants and prizes as proxies. Anything that tries to replace prestigious for-profit journals needs to provide non-expert evaluators a way of determining which published papers are likely to be of higher quality than the average.
ML, and other preprint-heavy fields like TCS, mathematics, and physics, all have prestigious venues coexisting with preprint servers. Sometimes these venues are even ArXiV overlays. I don’t see the correlation between open access and merit assignment.
I think you're missing the part where academics still submit to these journals and conferences just like everyone else. They just also put it on ArXiV or theri own website at the same time or sometimes before publishing in the bigger journals.
The majority of journal copyright agreements allow authors to post the article publicly if they choose.
I have a friend in economy, which is also a very clossed field with respect to publishing research, and he said that doing so might result in legal action taken against you, or pressure at the least.
That said, I'm in physics and everybody publishes on the ArXiv, either before or after submiting to the journal. From what I see (thanks to SciHub) the information on either of them is the same, except when there is an update it usually is only submited to the ArXiv.
There are similar things in other fields, but I think formal peer review still supercedes them, at least as it's perceived. Things are changing though.
I do think unless there are some significant changes to the system there will be some tipping point where journals will start being ignored but I'm not sure how that will occur.
The national plan for open science announced by Frédérique Vidal on July 4th 2018 makes open access mandatory for articles and data from state funded projects.
(Edit: actually, I think the Horizon 2020 program already mandated Open Access for most research, although enforcement back then was lacking (and still isn't perfect). Coalition S's plan also attempts to ensure that they don't indirectly fund journals that aren't fully Open Access.)
They should do the same for patent. I see companies and now universities freely take tax payer money to develop their own products. It just becomes an additional source of funding with little string attached.
It's fine to use tax dollar if there's potential for public good, but the tech developed should be released to the public domain right away. I have seen a selfless act from an academic group making decision not to patent a technology because they felt its an important one that many other things can be built on. Now tens of companies were started based on that tech and counting. I hope our gov understand how much value can be unlocked by public domain technology.
Great news. The current situation is basically a stealth transfer of tax money to certain publishers who abuse their position in an artificial oligopoly. Glad to see it slowly ending.
This doesn't seem right. Instead, the author should be forced to send a copy to the whitehouse when they send it to the journal, and the whithouse should make it available for free as a government output.
This is being downvoted for some reason, but there's no reason that some govt branch couldn't require a copy that they would publish as part of the grant.
> Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications4 authored or co- authored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.
"publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories" -- so figuratively "sending a copy to the White House", but also literally "govt branch requiring a copy that they would publish".
In addition, by publishing an "agency-designated repository", presumably it would be vacuumed up by NARA as the government equivalent of the "wayback" machine, so that the published record could not be altered without an audit trail.
Current grant agreements already include a provision for licensing to the government; however, they also offer a 12-month embargo before being made public. This seems to be the "paywall" they are speaking of. The policy change is to eliminate the embargo period, so it can be made public immediately.
Really happy this is happening! There's no reason we shouldn't be able to freely read research funded by NIH, NSF, etc., and there's a ton of high impact work there.
Finally, something to give scientific discoveries back to the people that bought them.
The devaluing of teachers, public education and critical thinking has gone hand in hand with companies using these discoveries as publicly funded subsidies, turning their profits against those who made them possible in the first place.
This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs and researchers). This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work, which would have benefited all researchers.
You're right it doesn't fully address the issue, but it does provide some pressure.
If an article is available for free immediately, there's no need to spend $6K to make it available at all.
Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.
> Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.
You are assuming researchers are saintly figures dwelling in a vacuum who don't need to constantly prove to their department head or promotion evaluation committee of their worth. That is not the case. The walled gardens are desirable for some because their social functions are not easily replaceable.
One way to decouple the evaluation of scientific output from the walled garden is simply to stop using them as a gate-keeper in making hiring and research grant distribution decisions. But apart from the constant lip service, there is no momentum in doing anything concrete about this in academia.
I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics. Their promotion, earnings, ability to change universities, and recognition depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals they can.
In contrast, the government could easily fix this by simply not providing the money currently required by such journals, which would force them to come up with models that can work with lower fees.
> I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics.
Well, not by most of them, but promotion boards usually contain academics. Part of the solution would be the slow one-funeral-at-the-time one of waiting.
It will force publishers to either add real value or be swept away by new models of publishing that aren't simply rent-seeking. It will take time to change, but this is another hole in the dike. It'll probably be messy for a couple of years, but I welcome the opportunity to shake things up.
I fully agree. The US's academic system provides a lot of insulation to researchers because generally this publishing cost will be paid for by your employing company, by your university, or by a grant. So researchers are not incentivized to spend a ton of time worrying about it. At the same time, I believe the large majority of researchers don't realize how little (or negative, arguably) value they receive from paying for publication vs doing so for free (such as on arxiv).
Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.
As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.
This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work
It'd be nice if there were just a different model. I do a lot of research in a niche field and would like to publish some of it. But the enormous submission fees are unaffordable as a non-academic with no connection to grant infrastructure. I had thought that rigor and reproducibility would be the main hurdles, but it's pretty discouraging to have or be close to publication-quality datasets and discover how steep the financial wall is. I was aware of submission fees for papers, but until recently had been under the impression that they were an order of magnitude lower.
Serious question: What do journals actually do ? Do they check the article ? Why is it important for it to be in a journal ?
I don't know much about academic research, fyi.
I think it's also a midway proposal for other reasons. The proposal merely suggests open access but barely specifies anything. I don't want to give the government personal information and enable endless tracking to them just because I want to download a paper.
The find one or more well-credentialed and cited experts in the field to anonymously review the paper and point out shortcomings in the research or drafting - this is the 'peer' part of peer review. Then they either accept for publication, suggest revisions, or reject it outright.
Just go on academic twitter and ask, you will get a torrent of sob stories. Everyone hates the journal industry but nobody knows how to overturn it. Every so often a group in some field bands together and gets a new open-access journal going (good) but then that has to run for several years and feature heavyweight papers before it can compete with the incumbent, and it's a lot of work while making much less money.
That's pretty much entirely in the hands of the universities and professors. To a large degree this is really a US-specific problem, US textbooks are easily 2-3 times as expensive as elsewhere. And the cause is likely that US universities require specific textbooks for courses, which is not how it works e.g. in Germany where I studied. I had a single course that required a specific textbook, which cost like ~50 EUR at regular price. Every other textbook I bought I selected myself, and they almost all were really worth their price.
Requiring specific textbooks in specific editions removes all market forces and direct competition. It also kills the second-hand market and makes it much more difficult for libraries. When students are free to choose which textbooks to buy or rent from a library you get a much healthier market.
As college expenses go, textbooks were less than 1% of my costs attending a public university as a state resident. The industry may be just as parasitic but I don't think it would appreciably help reduce college expenses.
My department seriously discussed making our own textbooks for at least one class. The idea never got off the ground, although I think it was a good idea. Part of the reason really is that there were no incentives for doing so, no real teaching or research credit, no grant dollars brought it, etc. The other end of it too was that there was a lot of pressure to turn it into a profit-making venture. Rather than it be open-source, for example, to keep the money in-house with the idea that it would lower costs for students and keep the money in the department instead of a publisher.
So, good idea but too much pressure on departments to be bringing in indirect grant funds, and not enough incentive to release it openly. I think some people in some places can get away with it, but not everywhere.
Your story makes it pretty clear what the solution is:
Change college accreditation / federal financial support rules so that the cost of textbooks is rolled up in the university's tuition fee, and standardize tuitions across departments within each university.
I think there needs to be good textbooks, but there could be some GOOD rules for conflicts of interest with respect to who chooses/requires which textbooks.
you mean like my kid's class a few years back, where the 'textbook' was about $75, and was written by the person getting paid to teach the class, and was just about 150 pages of plain white paper stapled together with no binding?
Get paid to teach the class, and then also make 100 or more students pay for some photocopies, the money which goes directly into the professors pocket - oh yea, and then change a few paragraphs each year and tell next year's class they can't rely on previous years books - i.e. no resale market for the 'book' you just bought.
There are ways for students to side-step the problem (textbook resale, piracy, libraries), unfortunately lazier professors are using the textbook company homework websites as part of their grading metric.
Note: goes into effect in 2026. Much can happen until then. A new administration might be able to undo this relatively easily. I imagine there are lots of lobbyist dollars available.
For the NSF at least, most grants are awarded for 3-5 years. When the last policy shift happened (all grant-supported publications need to be publicly released into the NSF's publication archive), it applied to newly awarded grants. 4 years should give most existing grants a chance to cycle out.
There's quite a bit of software that comes out as Open Source, from some of the National Research Laboratories[1][2][3], the DOE[5], NASA, etc.. But... not everything is Open Source, and I think there is still room for improvement there.
I mean, yeah, it's great that NASA has a Github org[5] and that they release a lot of stuff. But last time I looked, there was still at least a modest amount of NASA code that isn't Open Source that I would probably argue should be. The same can probably be said for the national labs, DOE, etc.
It's a common thing, but is also a great example of over classification which is supposed to be avoided (for legal and other reasons, but a primary motivator of of over classification is just laziness, failure to evaluate what is being produced). There have been efforts to properly qualify software as unclassified (maybe FOUO, or now CUI) and only data as classified (secret or above), but then you have a large contingent of classifiers who still think security through obscurity works.
But it's being worked on, maybe one day more will be open source.
For consumers of the information and those paying for it, it’s all upside to me. My only prediction for downside will be increased author fees for open access publications. Some venues have ridiculously high fees for open access authors, which is a barrier for some (not every author is funded by a research grant or in a department with a budget that can cover such fees). I expect they’ll go even higher, and the available exceptions or discounts will be more stringent. To me, the upsides vastly outweigh that downside though, so I’m very happy to see this move.
It is not just a barrier for researchers without lots of grant funding, but also diverts public funds from funding more research and research personnel to paying significant publication fees. This really needed a complementary cap on what would be allowed in paying such fees via grants to bring the costs down.
Definitely agree it's a good thing - my libertarian core can't help but wonder if the white house has (or ought to have) the power to unilaterally declare this, though. Would much prefer this had been voted on by congress.
i wonder why this is not a law already? at first i assumed lobbying, but i can't imagine the journal racket to be that lucrative to influence the required number of legislators to block the law, unlike oil or insurance. this seems like such a no-brainer issue, but i would love to hear the spin.
I'm sure there's a ton of special interests who wouldn't want all the research made public. the oil industry immediately comes to mind. so does tobacco, gambling, pharma, and farming.
At last. I genuinely believe there should be classes in high school teaching how to read papers as well.
Around COVID, I'm sure +90% of the population relied on online news sources giving their click-bait-y interpretation of studies. (if at all read, perhaps just the abstract)
I love this idea, maybe we can put it alongside the taxation class along with all the other shit that should be taught to create sensible, well adjusted humans.
Isn't this a big deal? Anyone have stats on how many research papers (esp in fields like healthcare etc) have some federal funding? Would funding received from a university/college (most of whom receive federal funding in turn) also qualify?
I'm concerned that this will do nothing but result in fewer government awards and make non-governmental research more difficult to access. This directive still allows journals to charge open access publishing fees, which often exceed 12,000k, and allow grantees to add this to their grants, resulting in fewer grants.
In addition, there will be no upper limit on open access fees, so privately funded
research will essentially be required to opt for closed access publishing so they can avoid the fees. This means it will save nothing for most users of these journals (academics) since now they will have to pay to publish and subscribe.
Currently government funded research is either open access (and pays the fee) or is closed access for 1 year then becomes open (and is not subject to fees). Now all government research will have to pay open access fees, and the new guidance allows them to request additional funding for open access fees.
Currently the government ranks all grant applications, and funds everyone until it runs out of money. Under the new system it will run out of money sooner -- especially for smaller grant programs for early career grad students and undergrads.
The shortest distance that I stopped the Carrier while going at 34 knots (top speed) was 1.2 nautical miles (NM). This takes several minutes and involves Backing Bells (reversing the spin of propellers), which is hard on the engines. The command is “All Engines, Back Full, Emergency, Indicate 000 (or 999 as necessary)”[1]
However this was the only quote I found that said this though.
You don't understand what is being discussed here. The guidance was given to federal agencies to figure out how to make their research available publicly. There was no guidance given to publishers, they don't have to do anything. Read the memo. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-202...
Yes the agencies will have to survey all the ways that their spending goes into research. Some of these will be obvious like NSF grants. Others will be more gray area like R&D contracts. They will have to modify the rules for each of these processes, and train employees on the new rules. There may be existing contracts that will have to be renegotiated. Some of the agencies may have legally mandated processes they have to follow when making changes to rules, which may include public comment periods. Many agencies will be able to make the change within a year, but some will have legitimate reasons for taking longer. Three years is generous, but not ridiculous.
Give them an afternoon and then charge them a $2500 a day fine for any federally funded research not made available. They'll fix it that afternoon. I'm sure Jake can remote in from Lake Winnipesaukee.
Apolegetics for bad, unethical, and world damaging polices, be it corporate or otherwise, are unacceptable.
This is guidance to federal agencies to update their policies to require free access for results they funded going forward.
So, the issue is not to flip a switch on a server to disable a paywall. The issue is to change official policy at many agencies, which will then trickle down. You can't just retroactively change the terms on existing grants.
I believe the federally funded research rules are about prohibiting future ongoing publication at venues that are not in compliance with the policy, rather than the government directly compelling private businesses to take down the paywalls.
Woah boy. You drastically overestimate the alacrity of the U.S. federal government. Also, keep in mind that existing contracts may not permit the updated policies to be "fully" implemented, and premature "termination for convenience" is a great way to screw the American taxpayer.
It seems like the language of the XO could simply specify "six months, or the soonest time which would be allowed without penalty by the relevant contracts, but in no case longer than three years."
Maybe it's less about the agencies technical ability and more about making it long enough that the current beneficiaries of this don't oppose it as strongly as they would if it disrupted their biz in the next 2-4 quarters so that it can actually get done.
Well, if nothing else, it produces profits... and profits pay for lobbyists.
At least in the Washington understanding, an "industry" is any profit-seeking entity or association which has lobbyists representing its interests. (What would you say are the "products" of the hedge-fund "industry"?)
I suppose you could call this a special-interest group instead, but it's a little pedantic.
Yes, it produces profits which indeed can pay for advocacy and also has jobs and where there are jobs there are congresspeople with people who might lose jobs in their district and therefore a potential wrench in any policy change.
Edit for data to paint a clearer picture: The co I know best in this space is Elsevier which according to their Wikipedia has more than 8,000 employees. I don't know where they're distributed (it's a Dutch co) but if you represent a certain district or consituency and all of a sudden your area might lose thousands of jobs, you listen, even if you don't particularly like that industry.
It has something to do with money and budgeting, at least.
Academics must still publish in the same prestige journals as before to earn merits for jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. Those journals are largely published by for-profit publishers that want their money one way or another. If their subscription revenues will be lower, they will want more money from open access fees. While subscriptions were usually paid by university libraries that receive their funding from various sources, open access fees are often the responsibility of the individual PI.
Some universities have agreements with some publishers that the library will pay open access fees for their researchers. Others will try to negotiate them, but negotiations take time. When there are no such agreements, the PI must pay the open access fees from their grants. That means grant agencies must establish policies on how much funding to include for that in their grants, and the money has to come from somewhere. The agencies must decide whether to reduce the number of grants or the amount of money available for other purposes. They may also request more funding from the Congress, but that takes a lot of time and the outcome is uncertain.
Many of these things, dates of the start (or end) of laws + rules + EOs, are regularly set with a timeframe years away and right after the next President sits in office. There is a real pattern of this.
This is good news. Academic publishers are parasites and anything that reduces their stranglehold on academic knowledge is good. That said, parasites are, if nothing else, resilient.
So, there's a few issues that I'm concerned about. First, it's not clear to me that university libraries will be able to drop their subscriptions to these journals based on this decision. The vast majority of research receives some federal funding, but there will still be some subset of articles that are funded through private research grants and will still sit behind a paywall. Journal subscriptions are a huge drag on library budgets, so freeing that money up would be immensely beneficial. Second, I can see the journals reacting to this by going full open access, but charging massive "fees" to publish. Right now Nature charges >$10k to publish open access, and I'd expect them to ratchet that up as it becomes their primary vector to siphon tax payer money into their own pockets. This seems to be the playbook based on the European "Plan S" push for open access.
This certainly would seem to be the next logical move for the prestige journals. However, in the long term I think this decision to provide open access to the research allows new journals to compete on a more even footing, especially with the emergence of publishing and peer review services like Scholastica. Over time, a thoughtfully curated journal with advantages in speed, cost, editorial focus, peer review process, etc. may be able to overcome the journals whose advantage lie primarily in prestige & gate-keeping.
Maybe I’m missing something, but if Nature charges that much to publish why does anyone publish in Nature? Why don’t academics just create their own ‘ethically priced’ journal? It’s my understanding that most of Nature’s labor is voluntary and unpaid anyway.
You can create your own ethically priced journal any day of the week, but if no one reads it, no one will publish to it. And if no one publishes to it, no one will read it. Offering cheap or free publishing doesn’t solve this chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately. Quite the opposite; it signals that the researchers who publish there are only doing so because they can’t afford the publishing fees of larger journals, presumably because their research isn’t interesting or noteworthy enough to attract enough money to do so. Honestly, $10k is a drop in the bucket when grants are in the millions.
Grants are only in the millions in certain fields. But more than that, $10K per paper, budgeted for 2-3 papers a year in a 3-5 year grant across all the NIH grants, is a lot of taxpayer money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs, and researchers.
Open source and replicable studies means going back to the fundamentals of the scientific method so this is a good step. I would love to see more peer-to-peer peer review technologies and websites developed though. There really is no reason to have publishing intermediaries in most cases. For example, many conferences and proceedings are essentially run by associations and societies etc.
This sounds wonderful; I'm super supportive. But, is there anyone who can articulate the trade-offs without the snark? Are there research groups that benefited from the revenue who will now have to raise even more funds?
What's made it take so long? (Beyond just "entrenched interests...")
I think there might be conflicts where research was not only funded by the government but also companies, side by side. These "partnerships" will lose exclusivity/first mover advantage for the companies, so why should they get into that if they can just sit it out and get the results just as early as the non-paying competitors?
I don't know that this has an effect on mixed funding items from the government. In the acquisition structure from the government there is a delineation between what will be unlimited rights (funded fully by government), government purpose rights (GPR, mixed funding), and limited rights (company maintains proprietary information).
For GPR items they can only be shared with an NDA to the recipient of that information so I don't those would be applicable to making them public access. I think it is more addressing that the unlimited rights items will be by default public instead of being kept behind a publication or distributed "as needed".
- depositing the final accepted author version (without journal editors' final typesetting / grammar corrections) into a publicly accessible repository seems to be within these guidelines
- open access publishing is typically much more expensive than the closed model for the researchers. Open access fees can be between several hundred and several thousand dollars, depending on the journal
- these costs, ostensibly to offset the subscription model, are now most likely to fall on the researchers (i.e., the government)
- libraries might still want the subscription to the back-catalog which would still be hugely expensive
All in all, I'm in favor of this regardless of the finances (up to a point).
Not sure how connected this is to sci-hub and the academic momentum against journals and Elsevier in particular. But as a rough guess, Elseviers parent company had 1.7 billion USD net profit in 2021 [1]. In theory, that money should now start going to universities/research and partially passed along as savings to students..
I 100% support this. This should happen. Tax payers paid it. Let me have it all. F the middle men companies making a killing being gatekeepers. Screw ‘em
Just rebrand yourself as a data scientist and tell them to read it on your medium page and then immediately blocking them on social media. Do an occasional freebie piece about how you're the victim of an ugly new trend and watch your follower count soar.
Making scientific publications open access (at least for those chasing 'respected' publications) is usually achieved by paying a large amount of money up-front to publishers. Is the implementation of this policy just to make researchers/institutions pay this extra money when they publish?
I hope this will include research at universities where government grants are involved.
On the topic of openness, we also need to ensure open access to government records even when involved parties are trying to use NDAs (StingRay) or copyright (many municipal building codes) to hide government records.
but..... What will happen to the poor owners and shareholders of elsevier? oh shoot. we don't want them to die like the horse cart industry died off or like the caligraphers industry died after the gutenberg... and suddenly, "nothing of value was lost"....
I was granted an SBIR grant for a small biotech that I previously worked for. We were very careful about what we funded on the grant, because even under the current rules that government can use the research, if they choose (although I think this is rare).
This is the first thing I've seen that could count as a signature achievement for this administration. This is actually pretty big and will have very positive follow-on consequences in terms of future innovation.
I expect this will be less noted and well-remembered than several other things they've done or are doing. This matters a lot to academics and science nerds, but won't be as big a deal to the general public as even something like the student loan forgiveness effort.
100% agree with this. Paywalls for publicly funded research is bs and always has been. This should also be true for all state-funded or even municipally funded research (if there is any). Also should be true for non-profits who fund research (the tax exempt status is a form of public funding). Also any paper published by someone employed at university that receives any form of public funding or tax breaks should also be included. So the only ones who should be allowed to publish research behind paywalls are private for-profit companies who completely self-funded their work. And even they should, for the best interest of everyone, also use open access.
But there is still no reason to enforce it only after 2025. Enforce it immediately, retroactive to everything published last year, besides.
Researchers dumb enough to have assigned copyright to a journal (which was and is never necessary) would be powerless to claw it back without an act of Congress, but there is no reason for any ever to do it anymore.
They somehow manage to avoid using the words "copyright" and "patent" anywhere in the press release or the memorandum.
I assume they mean for this to apply only to copyrights over the actual text of the published paper and supporting data, but it's strange that they are so vague.
No, the author(s) of the journal article still retain their copyright in most cases. This is about access to the articles without having to pay a charge to read it.
> the free material could also include work funded by the national endowments for the arts and humanities.
I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls? Do museum admissions charges count as paywalls?
Publishers such as elsevier must be upset. Once the majority of research is not behind their paywall they lose their position as first place to look for papers and all of the network effects. Eyeballs will be going elsewhere
A song on the world's smallest violin for publishing companies executives. The fact that this asinine situation has reached this point to begin with is an embarrassment, and that it didn't end when we lost Aaron Swartz is a tragedy.
Those commenting here how this sticks it to publishers, it doesn't.
The publishers have merely switched payer from reader to author. The same amount of money is changing hands, and possibly more.
What this does do is make it much more difficult for those groups without the means to pay $1000-$5000 in article publication charges from publishing.
Don't worry, though the federal government is on the case. Researchers will be able to request funds specifically to pay publishers to publish their articles.
The publishers are going to keep making money for doing basically nothing.
Academia and especially the humanities is probably the least cooperative and worst at coordination problems
I have asked a lot of academics why they don't work across departmental/institutional lines to strategize against administrators/regents. You'd think sociologists, economists, and lawyers would be able to take on the rather glaring market failures in academia, but those who don't already have tenure and a fiefdom all seem to be teetering on the edge of economic insecurity and can't risk the career destruction.
It might just be that there are too many credentialed people chasing too few research and teaching positions, but it's a sad state of affairs however you look at it.
I remember hearing (though can't find it on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dat_(software)) or elsewhere) that the project was born out of wanting to give some fault tolerance to datasets from publicly funded research
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand this is great for transparency and progress but this is also paid for by US taxpayers so why should scientist/people outside of the US benefit?
What is access like now, anyone can pay to access regardless of citizenship? If so, then it would seem most US citizens are paying twice to access the research anyways - the same deal as foreign countries. If this makes it free for everyone it's not really changing (most) anyone's relative cost - assuming I'm correct on the first point.
It’s not like the taxpayer was getting any monetary benefit from publishing with Elsevier. A private company was making money, not the scientist or government.
Published research is accessible today by paying subscriptions to journals. The journals are privately owned. The end result is that today your tax $$ are going to enrich publishing companies many of which are not US companies either.
This way everyone benefits. There is no way of keeping the access embargoed to US citizens or tax payers. But that wasn't happening in the current model anyway.
There is no such thing as a published scientific journal available to only one country.
Nobody is saying that the government can't fund private research (as it surely does in the context of security, defense, etc). But that if research is _published_, it ought to be open access rather than behind a paywall.
But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher.
.....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike.
USG already publishes a ton of free data, like weather and maps. The ecosystem of repackaging and building improved services seems to be working fine because it opens up a broad range of competitive options, not a paid embargo to a few.
Sci-Hub is still illegal. If they made a completely separate legal entity that respected copyright, sure, something like that could work. Until that happens, the choice will be "do everything manually" or "break the law", and I don't think a whole lot of universities or corporations will be condoning the latter.
There's also more interests in the world than corporations and universities. an organizational Monopoly on ideas is dangerous - it stifles innovation and destroys competition.
Right now every journal is a monopoly that can charge whatever it wants for as terrible service as it wants. With the change they need to compete with every bored college student who knows beautiful soup.
It's funny how the political class understands the things like this that need to be done, they just don't care at all until they are heading into an election cycle they are about to lose. Then suddenly the political will is suddenly found.
Somehow this doesn't seem like an issue a politician is going to campaign on.. I mean you can talk about women's rights/abortion, gun violence, student debt, the economy, Ukraine, or... access to federally funded research? There are only so many press hits, tv ad dollars, and speech time politicians have to get their message out. I doubt this makes anyone's list.
Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.