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Government Makes NIH Research Open Access
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:07 PM
from the all-read dept.
from the all-read dept.
TaeKwonDood writes "Let's give some credit to the government when they do something right; in this case freeing $29 billion of taxpayer money in NIH research to actual taxpayers. Within one year after peer review, NIH-funded research has to be made freely available on PubMed.
A Democratic Congress passed it and a Republican president signed it. This is a tremendous asset to researchers who don't want to have to duplicate research or pay fees for every journal out there. Those media companies getting rich selling journals, like the ACS, don't like it, but everyone else will."
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No science open source or otherwise without funds (Score:5, Insightful)
Young scientists are absolutely struggling to launch their careers while senior scientists are worried about losing their funding and all of us are spending more time trying to look for money and apply for grants than we are spending time actually doing the science. All of this talk about open sourcing the science is great, but unless there is funding to actually do the science, it will all be for naught. The really scary thing is that I don't see any real fix in the near future. There has been so much damage done to the federal budget over the last six years or so that even if we started to fix the NIH budget tomorrow, it will likely take 5-10 years to rectify some of the problems and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:2, Funny)
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When I were a lad, NIH was Not Invented Here.
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:2)
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
I'm not pulling this all out of my ass, either. See here. [the-scientist.com]
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From my perspective, one conclusion is clear: If the current funding situation continues for much longer, either article quantity or article quality or both will significantly decline as researchers spend more and more of their time writing grant proposals instead of articles.
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Remember, the funding doubled during the period where grants became harder to get. There is no reason to expect doubling the funding again will change that situation. If the problem is that projects are getting more expensive, then they are clearly getting more expen
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Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
So do you really think that the number of articles published is any real indicator of the productivity of NIH funded research? If that's the case, we should just ask the researchers to write more articles. Maybe they can split their bigger articles into smaller pieces? If each researcher split their articles in half we could easily double productivity!
For $10,000 I could build a modest "super computer" (imagine a beowulf cluster) to study problems in Agent Based Simulation (and there are many such problems that are health-related). For $100,000, I could build an even better "super computer" and study more interesting problems or go deeper into my problems of interest. I really only have the capacity to produce 4 papers in a year. From which scenario do you think I'll have the opportunity to produce the most interesting papers and most useful research?
I guess we can always just earmark the money for war-fighting instead.
Parent
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No, the number of articles ALONE means nothing and that should be blatantly obvious. The problem is that the quantity of research funded did not seem to go up with the increased funding. In fact, scientists have experienced the opposite and are quite frustrated. However, like the original poster many of them seem to be under the impression that this is due to funding decreases, when in fact funding doubled. There are numer
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In any event the quality of the research has certainly not doubled (whatever that means) - it was already very, very good.
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the problem is that DARPA is no longer doing long term research and instead is focused on only things that will pay today. Sadly, like ALL of the W. choices, this will costs America in a big way. Combine with W's tax cut for oil companies and yeah, it will be a while before research gets built back up. I feel sorry for you and the young researchers, but I feel sorrier for America. Our medium-term path, let alone long-term, is looking real bad.
Parent
Government not the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the better arguments I've heard for funding science through means other than governments. Governments tend to do a bad job, are subject to bloat, corruption and influence peddling, and can't be fired. Plus, as you point out, their spending priorities are inconsistent over time. This makes staffing/careers wildly difficult, which is bad for science. Private charities and foundations would be a better source for funding science. I don't know how much exists currently to support this model, but it's worth pursuing.
Remember: Government != Society - those are two separate things, despite how much the US Government has tried to take over Society in the past century.
Plus, charity has a morally supportable philosophy if you're not in the "the ends justify the means" camp. I really want to find (or not find) the Higgs boson, but not if somebody's property has been confiscated under threat of violence for it.
Parent
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Please keep in mind, that the United States of America constituted it's government as a social contract amongst men to secure life, liberty, and property. Obviously, the US Govt doesn't always stick to this and I decry those problems as well. How did our government
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. However, if we are to maintain our position as a world leader, then we need to invest in research, education and development. The US got to where it is by investing big time in education (G.I. Bill and others) and science and research (NSF, NIH and others). Oh and by the way, you are sounding like one of those ignorant asses that tells a cop, "Hey, I pay your salary". Mind you that the cop and I pay our taxes as well and you are likely benefitting from tax dollars as well. Public education? Arts? Internet? etc...etc...etc...
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Ah...... you are losing credibility here...
But please don't think that scientists are someone "entitled" to tax-payer money. If a majority or even plurality of tax-payers would like science to get money, only THEN should it be the case. Wars too. (:
Society only benefits from education and research and have voted year after year to support science as the vast majority of Americans realize its benefits.
Parent
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Every time someone says, "the government should regulate/make a law/fund everything/give me healthcare" that person advocates for a larger government. Skateboarding isn't a crime until a gov't bean counter realizes that skateboarders take a larger share of socialized healthcare resources....etc.
Which is unlike today's society where skateboarding in public is virtually a crime because private insurance company bean counters realize that skateboarders (or those heel skate shoes) are injured more frequently than pedestrians, how exactly? The problems that exist in big government don't disappear with big business. At this point, I'm not sure whether these problems are a consequence of bigness or simply a property of modern society. Those truly worthy are the small organizations with an idea and an ap
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I would be thrilled to have a company telling me what to do and paying me for it, but why should they do that when some government (US, EU, China...) will pay for basic research and grant them patent rights on the resulting engineering?
From one point of view, what we've done gives our companies an unfair advantage. From another, it's good business. That's why our science system is being duplicated
Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:4, Informative)
What we might have developing here is a serious conflict-of-interest situation. NIH grants are generally reviewed by peer researchers within our scientific specialties. Since funds are now so limited, I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers themselves are thinking, "Well, if I score this grant favorably, that would leave less funding for my lab!"
But I digress. Star foreign scientists and students are no longer seeing a stint in the US as obligatory. Between the increasingly dire funding situation and immigration difficulties as well as rapidly increasing prestige of non-American research, they're opting to go elsewhere.
I also worry for the future of the US. But if the US doesn't want us back, I'll be more than happy living somewhere the people appreciate and respect science, and provide the funding to back it up.
Parent
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Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun (Score:5, Informative)
This is ten times the yearly expenditure on the NIH, yet there are more Americans who will develop (cancer | heart disease | diabetes/metabolic syndrome | clinical depression) than the entire population of Iraq.
Who's not spending their money wisely?
Yes, there is some dishonest stuff that goes on in the grant process, and the scientific community would appreciate any genuine help in stamping it out. But even if ten percent of NIH's funding is dumped in a pile and burned, NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military) that we spend our cash on.
Parent
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If it were not for the money we spent on our military, our military AND NIH budget would just end up getting spent on the German/Russian/Chinese military (depending on when you had decided to stop funding the military).
Now, if you s/military/pointless wars/g you might have something.
Or how about this (Score:5, Interesting)
The US defence force when it is deployed, it ships a whole heap of equipment over, no attempt to find out what is and isn't needed, then once there, find our what is required, then ship back what is unneeded. Compare that ot most other defence forces. Take New Zealand, sure, we don't go into big battles, our main focus is on peace keeping, but when things are sent, the government demands that it comes out of the exiting defence force budget, that all the equipment is delivered on time and on budget.
The last big deployment by the NZ defence force was to East Timor. On that deployment, it was achieved under budget, before time - they came out of that with a surplus. Yes, a surplus.
The US government needs to start constricting spending, forcing efficiencies on these departments. Actually hold some REAL tendering of contracts rather than just rotating between the differing US defence force contractors - clue to the clueless, there are contractors outside America! and when they don't deliver on time, penalise them! This isn't charity, this is procurement. In the private sector, if suppliers aren't delivering their products ontime, there are penalties, its time the US defence force (and public service as a whole) woke up!
Parent
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Hope that makes you feel better.
About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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NIH, that's all? (Score:2)
Still a rip off, but better than it was (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishing costs professionals time. (Score:2, Informative)
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The journals can remain private if they want to take all of those extra steps. Personally, I just want the research. I want the paper on Pubmed, you can keep all the rest of the crap.
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The editors are compensated somewhat, but this is a symbolic amount, not even close to the analogous compensation in non-scientific magazines. Besides, the authors pay page charges, somewhat like $50/page nowadays. Does it cost $50 to typeset a page for the web if you start with an already electronic text? Hell, I used to do this work for $10/hour and I would do a lot m
What about non-NIH government funded research? (Score:2)
Free isn't the big thing - PubMed is (Score:5, Informative)
This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.
At The New England Journal of Medicine [nejm.org], subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science [sciencemag.org], registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.
The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.
good idea, but problematic execution (Score:3, Insightful)
The only alternative is to publish in open access journals, which is fine in principle. However, for a cash-strapped lab, it can be hard to pay open access fees for several articles a year, even with NIH funding.
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You're in luck. As it turns out, Open Access journals are actually cheaper to publish in for the authors than for-profit journals, with most of them charging no author fees at all:
http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2007/12/if_it_wont_sink_in_maybe_we_ca.php [sennoma.net]
And that is before you factor in that Ope
Re:good idea, but problematic execution (Score:5, Insightful)
This change is a good thing.
Parent
obmeme (Score:3, Funny)
Open access (Score:3, Informative)
- another blog [sennoma.net]
Alliance for Taxpayer Access [taxpayeraccess.org]
Directory of Open Access Journals [doaj.org]
Directory of Open Access Repositories [opendoar.org]
The "Open Knowledge" Definition [opendefinition.org]
And Wikipedia has lots of text on the subject.
It's a great start (Score:2)
Media Companies Getting Rich (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't the idea of being a nonprofit, you know, I mean, like, not getting rich?
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Maybe it's the American Ceramics Society? [ceramics.org] :D
Non-profit is just a nice way of saying wealth redistribution to serve your own interest. Non-profits seek to control more and more wealth, not to mention the personal gains of the controllers as they pay themselves through administrative fees.
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1) Pay employees well, even extravagantly, in order to keep the 'best' management.
2) Use income to grow, adding mission creep and bloat.
3) Spend the money on nearly anything, calling it an investment.
Non-profits love profit, and will never have any shortage of ideas on how to spend it.
Ready, Fire, Aim (Score:2)
research is for everyone, not for the researchers (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a tremendous asset to researchers
It is, but is it only to them?
The assumption that research is useful only or primarily for researchers must stop: This assumption undermines the open access idea (it goes like this: "since research is read only by researchers, and most of them probably get access from their institutions or have the money to buy access if this is their job, there are no strong drivers for the adoption of open access"). This is wrong. Everyone can, should, and in many cases does read research.
Apart from researchers in the same field, there are other professional researchers from other fields who may be interested to read, for example a physicist may want to broad their horizons by reading some of the latest finds in archaeology. There are also the amateur researchers and gentleman scientists who may not have an official position in academia but nevertheless they also do research. But research can, should, and sometimes is being read by students as well. Moreover, even the general public should, and sometimes may, read some research if there is easy access to it.
Research must be democratised and ideally everything should be done publicly on a wiki (by the way I recently started CosmosWiki [cosmoswiki.org] to support this idea). If research was more easily accessible and approachable, perhaps more people would take the steps to learn more about the world and become amateur or even professional researchers, and people's kids would perhaps feel more inclined to study science instead of becoming supermodels or office employees.
One could say that the public should read books instead of research, but the problem is that there are not enough authors who are capable of translating science in simple terms, therefore books often do not fully capture the available research in a meaningful way, and books quickly become outdated, and most importantly it usually takes a few years until the newest trends in research start appearing in book form. Therefore, if you only read books, you get maybe only 10-20% of what you could get by reading research papers (and when I say papers I mean real papers with actual results, not papers written simply to put one's name in a conference or spend a grant - you usually can distinguish betweenthe two categories of papers by checking whether the conclusions are testable or repeatable and whether the author makes extremely broad claims about the importance of their paper). I believe everyone should spend some time every week to skim through the most interesting papers on arxiv [arxiv.org] and similar sites where papers can be downloaded for free. Even though you may not understand everything, usually you can get the basic idea and keep yourself updated on the newest scientific findings.
We need to make people more inclined to integrate science in their daily lives. Open access can help with this. But another danger comes from the researchers themselves: They often assume that what they write is read only by people who are in their field. Papers authors should write keping in mind that interdisciplinary researchers or even students (and when I say students I also mean high school nerds, not only those in university) and the general public may read their paper, and they should do so without compromising the quality of their papers. For example, they could explain the various shorthands or abbreviations they use, rather than assume that every reader is familiar with them. So, please, when you write your next paper include a brief list of abbreviations to help people who need to search in order to understand some words or symbols they are unfamiliar with.
I really wonder why people generally don't understand these ideas... How can one in their right mind be more interested to learn the most uninteresting trivia about their favourite basketball player but not this [arxiv.org]? (by the way this guy is real
No copyright and no one getting rich (Score:2)
Third, why am I wasting my time commenting? My only residual interest in
Re:Bad news for the libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think that just about every good libertarian here will say that if we are going to fund this research, that the publicans should be public domain, not private. Once it is opened, then it should remain that way for all to work with (think ben franklin).
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Do the rich deserve better police or fire protection?
Public services can be distributed equally, yet those who pay more can receive more benefit. A pharmecutical company will receive more benefit from research than Joe down the street in terms of supporting their business. So the fact that the research is done in the first pla