Tear down the research pay-wall
Taxpayers fund a lot of research. They shouldn’t have to pay again to see the results.
A researcher at Virginia Tech pours over the results of his experiments today. He analyzes and organizes his data. Soon, he will submit a paper for peer review and publication. Science marches on.
If he is like many researchers, the federal government funded a good part of his work. Taxpayers invest billions on research hoping not just to expand humanity’s understanding of the universe but also to find new technologies, new industries and new jobs.
May 30, 2012 - 6:12 AM
While I appreciated your editorial on taxpayers paying to access research that they have already paid for, you actually missed a couple of steps in the publishing scam.
As difficult as it may be to believe, publishers do not actually pay peer reviewers, nor do they pay the editors of the journals. These services are provided for free by academics (whose salaries we are paying).
Additionally, while it may seem obvious that citizens should not have to pay for access to research that they have already paid for, as recently as last December some members of congress put forward the Research Works Act which would have prohibited federal agencies from requiring that the research they fund be made publicly available. This would have effectively killed existing open access initiatives. No guesses as to who has made campaign contributions to those members of congress.
It is fundamentally wrong that so much important academic work is locked away from the people who have paid for it and should be benefiting from it. Researchers who currently publish in expensive, restricted access journals should be given incentives to publish elsewhere. One important step that our legislature and institutions of higher education could do to encourage the move towards open access journals and making research more available to citizens is to include the accessibility of published materials as a component in tenure evaluation.
When you consider that there are enterprises (mainly on the internet) built entirely on taking things out of context, exploiting the most innocuous of comments for political or financial gain, I think we can see clearly that research has a right to be protected and since it is disseminated to the people who need to know, I am not sure that there is always a benefit to the public being able to ‘read it all’.
I see both sides of this one and I think I understand both sides as well. If there is total public access will you get the unbiased, unguarded answers you seek? Look how people hide in anonymity on the blogs and the www now. It is not easy to open everything for public consumption when the public is so easily led and misled to judgment. Maybe there should be a national “clearinghouse”? I don’t think it is as simple and cut and dried as some claim though.
@2 Sandi, this bill is not about giving the public the right to “read it all.” It would only apply to published work. Proprietary data and correspondence are would remain proprietary. If a researchers is willing to put his name on it and publish it, why shouldn’t the people who paid for it get to read it without paying again?
#2 Wow. Now that’s liberal! Tell me some more about the market place of ideas & the Constitution.
Hope this comment passes muster with your “national clearinghouse”.
So the public cannot read “published work”? I need to read this again obviously.
When we have to pay to read news articles I don’t think you are going to win that argument. Just sayin’
OK Jim Lucas, do tell us what I meant by national “clearinghouse”?
@Sandi News articles are not funded by the public.
Are the publications this is published in funded by the public? That is my question. If so, then absolutely the public should be able to read for free.
If taxpayers provided research funds that resulted in published papers, then those papers ought to be made available to taxpayers for free, regardless of where they were published. Refereed journals, conference proceedings, trade magazines, wherever.
I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year looking for technical papers discussing a particular safety aspect of electrical equipment. It was deeply frustrating to pay $20+ just to be able to read a paper, only to then discover that it didn’t really cover my particular area of concern. It’s happened to me more than once.
David Carter-Tod is correct in #1: “It is fundamentally wrong that so much important academic work is locked away from the people who have paid for it and should be benefiting from it.“
Upon further review…I think I agree with you somewhat. I guess my “national clearing house” was not so far off the mark and six months seems fair as some research is stale by then anyway for all intents and purposes. I am however still wondering why something as important as “vetting submissions and conducting peer reviews has come down to pay or perish? Do people from places who do not pay, still get vetted and peer reviewed? Is there a true independence in anything? If this is so important why not just pay for the vetting and peer review instead of making the reader pay? I am still full of questions.
I also stand by my point that it will only be used more widely by those in opposition to the research, scientist, conclusion or premise though, so it might well be a net loss as I feared.
Having tried to wade through such research, it is not for the average www surfer fer sure!
To #10 (Sandi): Right now, probably less than 0.01% of published research has active political opposition. The vast majority of it relates to technical and medical stuff that is utterly and completely non-controversial. Why impair the distribution of this other 99.99% because of hypothetical worries about “opposition”?
And even in those few subjects where there is controversy, hiding the papers behind a pay-wall makes it more difficult for outside people to develop informed opinions about the subject. How can they, if they cannot read the papers?
In my opinion, the only government-funded research for which results should not be made publicly available is weapons research. Everything else is fair game.
So Brian, do you have no opinion on any of my other questions or just felt that was the only one you wanted to address?
To #12 (Sandi): It was mainly the only one I wanted to address, as I believe that hiding information to avoid controversy is a terrible practice.
As for your other questions… To be honest, I’m not sure how the current practice of submitting papers to a refereed journal (typically accessible only through a paid subscription or through a paid firewall) became the norm for the “publish or perish” world of academia. Given the ease with which one can self-publish on the web these days, the only advantage of going through the journal is to obtain the peer-review “stamp of approval”.
Is this clumsiness the result of organization inertia, perhaps? Plus a bit of credentials inflation in the form of “you must have X-number of papers accepted by a refereed journal before getting tenure”? I don’t know.
As for who pays what and where the money flows… I don’t know any details. We’d need to hear an opinion from somebody actually involved in publishing a journal.
Thanks Brian, having accessed them, I thought you might know more about them. If you pay for a subscription can you get access to such information? Do they have an “about” page for instance? I am going to do my own research, it just seems pretty mysterious for something that has clout.
To #14 (Sandi): There are hundreds (thousands?) of journals out there. I mostly read articles from IEEE journals (for electrical engineering stuff) and ASME journals (for mechanical engineering stuff). Both organizations have dozens of journals and hundreds of thousands of individual papers:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp?reload=true
http://www.asme.org/kb/journals
I get partial access to these large libraries of journals through a corporate subscription at work, but we sometimes still have to pay piecemeal for individual papers. You can also join IEEE or ASME as an individual, which again gets you partial access to the libraries.
http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subscriptions/prod/mdl/ieeexplore_access.html
http://www.asme.org/kb/journals/subscriptions
There are undoubtedly many similar collections in the worlds of medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, environmental science, computer science, and other such fields. Some journals serve primarily academia, while others (like ASME and IEEE) serve a mix of academia and industry.
Wow, this fellow is sure not a fan of this system:
“peer-reviewed journals actively prevent the best scientific results from being disseminated, siphoning off time and money that would be better spent doing other things. The funny thing is, somehow we’ve been convinced that this parasite is doing us a favor, and that we can’t survive any other way. It’s not, and we can.”
http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/07/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php
If even half of what he accuses is true, this is a big and serious problem IMO. Maybe even holding research back?