Congress May Kill NIH Open Access Research Rules 105
Savuka writes "A policy that mandates public, open access to all National Institutes of Health research is in danger. The House of Representatives is considering legislation that would change the open access policy to make it more publisher-friendly, under the false pretense of protecting copyrights. The Ars author paints the new legislation as somewhat reflective of a turf battle in Congress: 'The Intellectual Property Subcommittee clearly felt that it had been ignored during the original passage of the bill that compelled the NIH's open access policy...' The article concludes: 'Currently, the disruptions wrought by the Internet and expectations of open access are too new for a viable alternative to traditional publishing to have emerged. But it doesn't appear that the NIH policy is making a significant contribution to that disruption, and the benefits of the policy appear likely to be significant. If Congress rolls back that policy in response to disagreements with other countries over film piracy, then it could really be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.'"
Open Access (to research) backstory (Score:5, Insightful)
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. They charge huge amounts so that Universities (or anyone else) can have access to their journals. why do Universities (and others) pay these huge amounts? Because they need the journals. Why because of the CONTENT, i.e. the academic research papers. Who pays for researchers and academics to carry out the research to write up those papers? Universities, funding councils, tax payers. So how much do Universities get from publishers for this valuable content. NOTHING!
We (universities, the tax paying public) are paying huge amount to publishers to access content which we (universities, tax payers) have given them for free.
The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK).
The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), they are unpaid (with a few exceptions).
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a page template (actually a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars/UKpounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and edited (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
Their are also open access REPOSITORIES. These are either subject based (pubmed, arXiv.org, etc) or institution based, ie based at a university. An academic publishes in to a traditional (high cost) journal, for the peer review and kudos, and then puts their article in to their institutional (or pubmed/arXiv.org) so that it is freely available to everyone. Even though publishers put huge restrictions on this, such as embargos and which copy can be used (normally the academics original copy, not the publisher's version) they unsurprisingly don't like this. Think about it, though the academic/university paid for and created the research, the publisher still tells them when they can upload their own version of the article (i.e. not before a year after publication).
For this story see:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1 [sciencemag.org]
For more information, google for "open access"
Chris
Re:Open Access (to research) backstory (Score:5, Informative)
You've left out another important factor. Publishers often charge the researchers that are providing the content "page charges" to defray publication costs. Researchers are willing to pay this fee (often hundreds of dollars for a single article) because success in their field is judged in part by the reputation of the journals in which they have published.
Part of the problem... (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a scientist, part of the problem is that the system is admittedly broken but extremely entrenched.
In my field (Cognitive Psychology / Neuroscience) publishers do NOT typically charge page costs for printing, and so researchers did not request that the cost be covered by their grants (standard practice in fields that do require these page costs). Now, NIH says that research must be open access, but to defray the incredible costs in lost subscriptions for doing so, large publication houses are deciding that the best way to do so is by charging researchers page costs.
Would this be a problem if the legislation was written in such a way as to be progressive? No. But, as it currently stands, Journals want to charge researchers for publication - even if they don't have the money to pay for it. For example, suppose you researched the interaction of some protein and some drug as a post-doc while on an NIH funded grant that has subsequently expired - how do you afford to publish that research if you are currently funded by another institution or lab?
In theory, open-access research is great. You'll notice that it's not scientists who want closed access research - most of them have the majority of their work up on websites (flagrantly violating copyright, which they no longer own to their own work) because the journal would never dare attack a scientist (it would be terrible karma and invite a huge backlash). Scientists are incredibly pro-access. But, the business model is so broken that there's really no alternative unless the legislation carefully reworks the industry rather than simply changing the rules overnight, putting it into a blender, and hoping that what comes out is what you intended.
The other major problem, as a scientist, is that the large majority of work is really published for the scientific community and not for the layperson. It is simply a tragic fact that since the majority of Americans do not believe in Evolution, they do not need access to journals about Evolutionary Biology, nor would they understand the research if it was published there. Before people get up in arms - I know that there are plenty of good examples of places where people DO need access or could make use of access to publicly funded research and that it ought to be available (e.g., private radiology practices should have access to the best and newest in radiological findings, but these journal costs are so prohibitive that only the best libraries can afford them).
So, the business model is broken, the solutions to the business model are broken, and the rationale for fixing it is really just as broken. It's really a bad set of circumstances all around.
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I feel really stupid, I dont get why its so complicated.
It just seem so simple to me (but I'm probably just a very simple person...)
If the scientist and universities were so incredibly pro open-access, why dont they just start their own open-access friendly, not for profit, publishing platform ?
I can understand that there is a credibility issue, but one would think that if some big scientist organization and university were backing this publishing platform, I'm pretty sure that credibility would not be a pr
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A few reasons.
First, there actually are such organizations.
For example:
Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews
http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/ [queensu.ca]
a journal that is free, open web access, and still peer-reviewed by experts in the field.
But, there is still a large credibility gap. For example, if you put down on your resume that you were a senior writer for CNN, that has more weight when you go to find your next job than if you were a senior writer for a local newspaper. Also, large journals have a much broader re
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A few reasons.
First, there actually are such organizations.
For example:
Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews
http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/ [queensu.ca]
a journal that is free, open web access, and still peer-reviewed by experts in the field.
I cannot find any such journal in physics or biophysics. I can either submit to a print journal where it will not be open (for at least some period of time) for free or an open access journal for a lot of money.
At my university, I can get away with going with a low profile publication but I know most people do not have that luxury.
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Page charges are not evil. Open access journals work on exactly this model: they fund themselves by page charges rather than subscription charges. This is on the face of it entirely reasonable. The real killer is that universities pay journal subscription costs out of overhead, so re
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"So, the business model is broken, the solutions to the business model are broken, and the rationale for fixing it is really just as broken. It's really a bad set of circumstances all around."
You can only fix this by providing a mechanism for free, verifiable, respectable peer review. Why are journals important? For computer science, ACM IEEE and all the other conferences and journals are simply a matter of recognition. Scientific today is a begging game. Scientists unfortunately have to "prove" themselves
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The thing that frustrates me with all kinds of publicly-funded research (whether via grants or directly from government institutions) is the lack of access to data.
Some lab will spend $10k generating a data point. Then they won't spend $1.95 to put that data somewhere on a website but instead will turn it over to some commercial entity who will charge $14.95 for every person who downloads one copy of that datapoint.
Now, if a government lab operates without taxpayer funding but instead charges use fees to t
Link to subcommittee hearing (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, if you want to view the subcommittee hearing, here's a link to it [house.gov].
Also, don't /. it, I want to be able to watch it later tonight!
Re:Open Access (to research) backstory (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, many nonprofit professional societies publish the best journals, such as the American Physical Society (APS) which publishes the Physical Review series of journals. It costs them money to do this, they charge basically university libraries money to buy it back, and really make no profit off it.
The other society I'm a member of, the biophysical society, actually just moved the printing of their journal (the Biophysical Journal) over to a for-profit company since it would be cheaper (according to t
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Hey, whoa, you left out a major thing the publishers do: they print and publish the actual journal! For all 10 subscribers who wait months for the print version rather than just getting it online. Do they put ads in the physical copy to subsidize the printing costs? Yes, but still, someone has to make the table of contents.
Another major cost of publishing: hiring lobbyists to keep it subscription based. They don't work for free, ya know.
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Writing as though you speak on behalf of higher education:
"Their are also open access REPOSITORIES."
Applause.
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But some journals expressly forbid you posting your article there.
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*whoosh*
"forbid you posting you're article their."
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I've been in the academic research field for a number of years and published a good number of papers, and from the lowest tier you've never heard or it anyway journal to the most highly rated immunology journal and every one of them lists published articles as advertisments because we have to pay them to publish it. Not only that but then they charge money to real advertisers and stuff the book with that as well. And as a reviewer for some of these journals I can say only the top most tier of journals hav
Re:Open Access (to research) backstory (Score:4, Interesting)
Its composed of 24 members, 13 Democrat, 11 Republican.
25% of the subcommittee is from California.
http://judiciary.house.gov/about/subcourts.html [house.gov]
Significance of California (Score:2)
25% of the [Intellectual Property Subcommittee] is from California.
For the few who may be unaware:
Hollywood is a district in the city of Los Angeles, California
(so sayeth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood [wikipedia.org])
That's of course why it's interesting to note the numerousity of Californians in that particular committee.
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Ummm (Score:5, Interesting)
Why isn't all government (i.e. taxpayer) funded research public?
Just wondering.
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Re:Ummm (Score:5, Informative)
I think because of history.
When journals where paper based, they had an obvious cost.
Academics would write up their research, lets say on a typewriter. They send it to a journal (owned by a publisher). The journal would need to copy this, send it out to be peer reviewed, collect corrections from the peer reviewers, send them to the academic, collection revised copy from academic, and then set the article (and diagrams/images) out to be sent to printers. It would then need to be sent to subscribers around the world by post.
You can see the costs, and the work which the publisher undertook.
Now? of course all online, and I'm sure all can imagine the web based systems that make nearly all of this automatic (apart from laying out the pages, though some expect academics to write straight in to their MS Word template). The valuable work is the researcher (who may have taken years), the peer reviewers (the stamp which shows this is good research) and the editor. All of whom do not get paid by the publisher.
Meanwhile publishers have been increasing their costs by 10% or so a year, ever year, what once cost $1,000 is now$ 10,000, while adding in clauses and strings attached (you can only subscribe to journal A if you subscribe to our new but useless journal B).
And perhaps part of the problem is that those who see the problem (such a librarians, who get the flack from academics when they have to cancel journals because the cost has gone up and their budget hasn't) aren't those who can really change it (academics - who give their research 'away' for free - and senior university administrators).
Chris
Government Employees CANNOT claim copyright... (Score:1)
A government employee is BARRED from initiating copyright on any document. They can patent up the whazzooo, but copyright does not exist for government employees. Now contracters are a complete different story... I was a Government employee for 5 years and all dozen+ of my academic papers published (including in journals that required a fee) were exempt from copyright (and we made them available for free on our website at the time, much to the annoyance of the journals, but there wasn't anything they cou
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I deal with this affliction regularly. I try to do a little amateur research, but not being a member of the academic guild, I am locked out of the access. nice if I could afford $40 a pop or so to read some 3-page article in a journal on JSTOR, but I can't. TANSTAAFL I guess.
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Re:Ummm (Score:4, Informative)
It depends on what you wanted access to, at least historically. Before the public access to publication initiative, NIH only really required that the data be made publicly available - i.e. if after reading a publication I wanted to look at the data from that publication for my own use, the lab I requested it from had to provide it (given that they had published it at that point). This is elaborated in NIH NOT-OD-03-032 [nih.gov] and the NIH grant policy statement [nih.gov]. Of course this all requires that I have access to the publication that talks about the data in the first place, so it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
So along came the initiative to make the publication itself open access (see the nih public access site [nih.gov] for more info). Publishers are worried they'll lose cash, and thus the shitstorm you see in front of you.
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Because we don't have public funding of elections.
Since politicians have to raise money to run for office, they are always beholden to big corporations who can swing huge contributions by "suggesting" that their employees all give the limit.
When it comes time to vote for things like public financing of anything (including research), every single politician has to fear upsetting the corporations and other wealthy patrons when they cast their vot
this is a key chance (Score:1)
When the IP people start to threaten other people's health, it's a great opportunity to show the harm they really do. When they attempted to kill people in Africa in order to over charge for AIDS drugs this really backfired. Try to make th
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Tag it Republicans too. They are two sides of the same coin. It doesn't matter who is in control of what, nothing significant changes.
Nothing big changed in the 90's when the Republicans were elected with their contract with america.
Nothing changed when the Democrats came into power in 2006. they gave bush just about everything he wanted.
The two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shift in policy."
Quote by Georgetown Professor, Carroll Quigley from his book "Tragedy and Hope." He was also a mentor of Bill Clinton.
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A Point well made; however:
Democrats are like cats (try herding fat cats.)
Republicans are like devoted dogs.
Same master / owner.
Their stark contrast in behavior conveniently fools the public.
NOTE:
This is a filibuster record setting Senate that requires veto override for anything worthwhile to get past chipboy. If they banned filibuster like the GOP threatened to do (when they saw next to none) they would never get enough veto over ride votes.
Re:TAG ARTICLE DEMOCRATS (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
The open access law that they are threatening to overturn wasn't enacted until December, 2007. [dltj.org]
It never would've had a shot at becoming law in the first place when the Republicans were in charge of Congress.
Now, it's absolutely true that we (the voters) must be vigilant to make sure that the reforms we won in the 2006 election aren't eroded. We must also be vigilant that they aren't simply ignored (presumably in exchange for sex) by the executives we elect.
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Reforms?! What reforms? We're still in Iraq. We still have the patriot act. The telcos got their immunity. And Bush is still in office. And the new guy, either of the two we left ourselves, won't change anything. If we were even half vigilant, the entire party, both sides, would be out in the streets, squeegeeing your windshields.
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Neither the democratic party nor the republican party actually represent the best interests of the majority of American citizens.
Both party agendas ultimately represent the best interests of an elite, wealthy, few.
They just use a lot of sophistry and marketing to convince the majority that they do, in fact, represent the best interests of the people, and that the political rivalry between the two parties is the most significant element of American progress.
In fact, it is political rivalry against both parti
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Good. Kill NIH access! (Score:1, Funny)
It wasn't invented here, anyway.
taxpayer funded (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like the results of any other endevaour funded by tax-payers, the results of the government-funded research should be accessible to the public unless there are compelling security reasons against it.
That's exactly what NIH did - mandate public access. I can only imagine the arcane arguments being conjured up by the lobbyist groups to explain why publishing companies should retain copyright to works that they neither funded, conducted nor authored. Given that one side of the argument is just common sense, and the other is backed by cash, I fully expect the congress to roll over in their usual manner.
The only consolation that I see is that the market will quickly render those publishing models obsolete. Since the margins of publishing works on the web are extremely low, the large publishing houses are faced with hard competition from the open-access journals. They'll either reform to provide some additional value (e.g. prompt reviews instead of several-month haggle) or die out.
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If the taxpayers fund small business loans, do the products sold by those businesses belong to me as well? How come I don't get free corn from all the farm subsidies my taxes go to fund?
As far as open-access publishing goes, recent studies show that high-volume journals with minimal editorial oversight are nicely profitable. The problem comes when you want either a specialized journal or a high-quality journal that rejects most of what's submitted (think Nature or Science). Since open access journals onl
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In that case, editorial groups can select papers they consider particularly interesting. Such groups may end up being similar to the current major journals, but they would not hinder access to scientific results
And how does that get paid for? Isn't that just pushing the same subscription money around a little differently? Sure, you could access the material for free, but there's so much of it that you can't make heads or tails of it. So you end up paying for editorial oversight, and we're right back where we started.
Also note that open archives without editorial oversight like arXiv are already being gamed [sspnet.org] for advantage.
If the taxpayers fund small business loans, (Score:2)
Government shouldn't providing loans to businesses. Instead it should reduce if not eliminate taxes and some regulations. Why should a law care business be required to be licensed when they do the same thing a do-it-yourself homeowner does? Are homeowners going to need a license as well? Big and established businesses like these regulations because it reduces their competition.
How come I don't get free corn from all the farm subsidies my taxes go to fund?
Farm subsidies, which the likes of Archer Daniels [wikipedia.org]
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We also fund a great deal of the oil exploration (most of which occurs on public land).
Yet, we don't see any of the profits from this oil (unless you're from Alaska).
Today, right now, the (Democratic-controlled) House of Representatives is voting on a bill to allow offshore drilling for oil. The bill allows for a certain portion of the royalties from this drilling to fund research into alternative forms of energy. The Republicans are opposin
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Specifically, they are opposing the part of the bill that funds alternative energy research.
can you provide a reference to a Republican source that states this? If only to strengthen your argument... an din doing so, please ensure that there is not some additional rider on the bill that wold necessitate killing it as well, rather that this is the specific reason and not something justifiable...
Forget publishing, what about patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is a highly insightful parent comment.
The reality is that those of us working for NIH (my prior job) and NIA (my current job) mostly have no problem with more reasonable (e.g. 17 year copyright and shorter patent periods) limitations, but that we were discussing the limitations on our publishing our research.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a conference on Alzheimers to prepare for, and Neuropathology data to make jump through a series of hoops ...
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If the results of research funded by the public do indeed belong to the public, why should universities and researchers be allowed to patent products coming from that same research.
They shouldn't be awarded patents. Sure they can start a business to make whatever it is. While others could do the same thing the inventor has the First-mover advantage [wikipedia.org] advantage.
I wonder how many scientists are willing to give up intellectual property rights from the fruits of their research?
If they don't want their research
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The answer is ZERO, unless you are going to just pay me more.
You can't just take away money out of a system. Allowing patents are just a way of hiding the true costs of doing research. Take patents away, and costs go up...duh. Patents end up being a user tax, which are wonderful, like gas taxes and tolls. Those that actually use the research, pay for some http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/16/208247&from=rss#of it.
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So by that reasoning, shouldn't we just consider the cost of subscribing to journals to be yet another user tax?
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The reason federal funding puts the IP rights into the hands of universities is a result of the Bayh Dole act [wikipedia.org]. Regardless, it only makes universities the bad guys rather than the government. Its worth noting, though: the NIH has taken steps so research tools (patents granted for processes that do not lead to commercialization) that are developed with federal funds must be made available to other scientists under reasonable terms. Not ideal, but its a step. Read NIH 64 FR 72090 [nih.gov] for the full details.
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I wonder how many scientists are willing to give up intellectual property rights from the fruits of their research?
I don't want a patent on anything I work on (I work at a University). Yet I am forced to run any publication past the patent lawyers who get to check for patentablity. Yep a lawyer decides if something is inventive, and I can't cancel the patent if they decide if they want to proceed. Thats the agreement for the funding. I do however get 20% and the department another 20-40% IIRC of the royalties. But am not allowed to set the royalties or have anything to do with "marketing" the patent.
I would gladly gi
whose copyright? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's certainly not to protect the originator of these ideas : the researcher. All of the high-tiered journals I've published in have required a copyright sign-over to the publisher -- for free. This is to protect the publisher and not the people that create these ideas/research. Copyright protection in this case certainly isn't promoting the production/producers of ideas.
This system is backwards and broken.
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under the false pretense of protecting copyrights
It's certainly not to protect the originator of these ideas : the researcher. All of the high-tiered journals I've published in have required a copyright sign-over to the publisher -- for free.
If you're allowed to sign over your copyright for free, you're in a relatively progressive discipline. I routinely pay $50-$250 per page, roughly $1000 per article, to get the publisher to accept those copyrights. To be fair, the terms of the license the publisher wants vary quite widely. Many of them now ask only for non-exclusive copyrights; most will allow the author to include the work in his own Ph.D. thesis (which is convenient); and even without the law, some allow you to submit your work to publi
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As a point of information, note that if you are employed directly by the Federal government, as I am, then copyrights cannot be assigned to the publisher. We are generally permitted to post our own version of the paper (i.e. not the journal's fancy typeset version which appears in print) to our website, and to distribute the paper freely. Once the embargo (typically one year) has expired we post the publisher's PDF version or link directly to their site.
Nice neutral summary there (Score:1)
"False Pretense"? How do we know that? Maybe they sincerely believe it. Not everything you don't agree with is fraudulent.
Brett
A little more nefarious than you may think... (Score:1, Troll)
This is your public service announcement.
Publishers are good but not perfect (Score:1)
In defense of the journals, (Score:2)
there is a nice feedback system where the journals for a field are tiered by impact factor (cited/submitted ratio) and important articles are found in and submitted to a few top level journals. It would be unfortunate to see this system break down.
And why is this tier system necessary? Other than for the profits of the publishers that is?
Falcon
Has anyone tried creating an open journal? (Score:2)
Has there been any effort to establish an open, reputation-based peer review system for papers? If not, are there big reasons it wouldn't work? (Apart from the vast effort required to screen out every nutjob with a "revolutionary new theory" that they will cling to no matter how much reality disagrees with them, that is.)
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To do an accepted journal, you need to have a peer review system. To have a peer review system, you need editor(s) who can recruit volunteers to do the peer review, who read (at least the abstract) of every paper submitted, assign the reviewers, collect the reviewers comments, send them back, get reply, second round of reviews, pass it on to web master who uploads etc. In the classic world, this is all done for free since every academic knows that's the way things work, a year
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Certainly, having a pile of unreviewed papers, or papers reviewed by people that don't know what the hell they're talking about, is mostly worthless.
Thanks for mentioning the "everybody does it for free because they want it on their resume" thing--I didn't know whether people that did reviews for journals were paid by the journal or not.
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check out plos.org :)
its not the end-all by any means, but a step in the right direction
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That might work with a slight modification of the /. system. If there were a hierarchy of reviewers, such as reputable journeymen could mod up or down from a default one; maybe assistant professors to a two; associates to a three; the graybeards to a four; reserving the final mod to the review committee. If each level meta-mods the level below, and can opt to meta-mod any lower level and look at any level they please, this could work rather quickly. Maybe if someone consistently gets their upgrades upgraded
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Here's an example from one of my domains:
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/ [biolinguistics.eu]
"PIAA" (Score:2)
Academics, too! (Score:3, Insightful)
This controversy concerns just the works created by NIH (government) employees. The policy of open access should extend equally to academics who receive NIH funding.
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This controversy concerns just the works created by NIH (government) employees. The policy of open access should extend equally to academics who receive NIH funding.
You are incorrect. As of this spring, all NIH funded research, not just work by NIH intramural researchers, is covered by NIH's open access policy.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [nih.gov]
About that saying (Score:1)
People say "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater"
but what if there's no baby?
What if there's NOTHING there?
What if it's a xenomorph? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)/ [wikipedia.org]
do something about it! (Score:3, Informative)
Write your representative [house.gov]
Let them know you're not happy about this mess.
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That is the right thing to do, if politicians see how important this issue is then maybe they will not be so inclined to support it.
Use the above link to contact your local representative, also it might not hurt to contact the sponsors of the bill:
Howard Berman
http://www.house.gov/berman/contact/ [house.gov]
John Conyers
http://www.house.gov/conyers/contact.shtml [house.gov]
or
http://www.johnconyers.com/contact [johnconyers.com]
I use PubMed Central. (Score:1)
PubMed and other NIH open access resources and they all protect copyright material already. They only put the title, authors, publisher, volume, date, pages,PMID, related articles and short abstract of the full article. There is a link to publisher which holds part of copyright so they can sell you the full article to you. There is no copyright infringement that I can see or any from infringement of intellectual property rights in what is giving out by PubMed Central. They only show you a short abstract of
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There is no copyright infringement that I can see or any from infringement of intellectual property rights in what is giving out by PubMed Central. They only show you a short abstract of your full article what is published and they link you to the full article to publisher.
I'm having difficulty parsing your words. The articles in Pubmed Central [nih.gov] are free.
All the articles in PMC are free (sometimes on a delayed basis). Some journals go beyond free, to Open Access.
PubMed Central is a small subset of PubMed, which also indexes non-free articles. For most of those, free access is limited to the abstract or, occasionally, the first 100 words or so.
The Intellectual Property Subcommittee (Score:2)
Require vs. Allow (Score:2)
Congress might reverse the decision to require open access, but it can't legislate the publishers to prevent them from individually choosing to participate. Many do so willingly and with less restriction than the present regulations require, as TFA notes. They will likely continue. If others revert to the previous stance, they will be signing their own death warrants, as the open access journals will get wider reference, and so become the journals of choice for publication.
In any case, I think it's an elect
Hey New Yorkers (Score:2)
Anthony Weiner is on the committee and even if you don't live in the 9th you know he's running for Mayor or Governor in the next couple of years. He's gonna want the science / internet vote.
Also, from what little I can tell, he's not an idiot.
Drop him an email [house.gov]
Freedom of Information...?? (Score:1)
Since the NIH is a government agency, why not just screw the publisher and demand the information under the Freedom of Information Act? (yes, USA only I know) I'm sure there would be a fee under the FOIA but it could be a whole lot less than paying a publisher, who would get squat out of the arrangement.
Maybe that's a bit far-fetched but even if everyone just did that for a while as a form of protest it might get the point across to the folks on Capitol Hill.
Suggested letter to Representative (Score:1)
Here is the letter I just sent my representative (Rick Larsen). You might consider doing the same.
Hello, Rick. I am a Democrat and an Associate Professor of Geology at Western WA University and I just found out about HR 6845, introduced by John Conyers. This is a bad bill, because it takes a dramatic step backwards on the issue of scientific publication. Please take a stand against it.
The current state of science publication is untenable. Every year, journal costs rise faster than library budgets a
It costs $3600 to post an article online. (Score:1)
People in other countries must be *so* jealous (Score:2)
What do we have to do to see the results? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)