NASA Follows NIH To Make All Research It Funds Open Access

from the good-to-see dept

We've written in the past about how the National Institute of Health (NIH) requires any research it funds (and it funds a lot) to be published under open access rules via its own PubMed Central platform after a certain period of time. There have been some efforts in Congress to require other government funded research to go down the same path, and some other agencies have worked on some similar ideas on their own. Now, NASA has announced that it will be requiring all research published via the $3 billion NASA spends each year to to also be published on the PubMed system (and also within in 12 months, as the NIH requires)

The provisions of NASA’s policy on articles track with those in the current NIH Public Access policy, and will require NASA-funded researchers to deposit articles into the PubMed Central database, to be made accessible with no more than than a 12 month embargo. However, the NASA plan notes that, “publishers may petition for longer embargo periods, but strong evidence of the benefits would be needed.” This language is notable, as it seems to suggest that any determination of changes in embargo length will be measured against the public good, rather than specific industry concerns.

Also, it looks like the plan will include efforts to make the raw data more available as well:

One final item that is tucked away at the end of the NASA plan, but is worth noting: the Agency will explore the development of a “research data commons” along with other departments and agencies, for storage, discoverability, and reuse of data with a particular focus on making the data underlying peer reviewed scientific publications resulting from federally funded scientific research available for free “at the time of publication.” This is an idea that appears to be gaining traction in the federal agency community, and is well worth tracking closely.

It's good to see more government agencies moving in this direction. It would be even nicer to see shorter time frames for the embargo, and even further commitment to releasing the data beyond just "exploring," but this is good for science, data, learning and innovation.

Filed Under: federally funded research, nasa, nih, open access

Publishers Flip Out, Call Bill To Provide Open Access To Federally Funded Works A 'Boondoggle'

from the gotta-lock-it-up dept

A year ago, we wrote about Rep. Mike Doyle introducing an important bill to provide public access to publicly funded research. As we've been discussing for years, the academic journal business is a huge boondoggle. Unlike just about any other publication, the journals don't pay their writers (and in many subject areas, authors need to pay to submit), they don't pay the peer reviewers -- and then they charge positively insane amounts to university libraries, often knowing that those libraries feel obligated to pay. Oh yeah, and the journals keep the copyright on everything. I've heard of researchers having to redo basic experiments because they were worried they couldn't even reuse data from earlier experiments due to the copyright assignment agreement they had to sign.

Thankfully, for years, there's been a law on the books for any NIH-funded research to guarantee that 12-months after publication, those works also had to be published openly. While some publishers have tried to game this system (such as by demanding a mandatory fee to "deposit" the work in an open access database), on the whole this has been hugely important in making sure that taxpayer funded research is actually available and can be built upon. Over the years, there have been multiple bills introduced in both directions on this issue. There have been some bills that sought to take away this requirement under NIH funding and there have been bills that have tried to expand it to the rest of the federal government and any of the research they sponsor.

Last week, a new version of Doyle's bill was introduced and it's been improved. First off, it's got some nice bipartisan backing in both parts of Congress. On the Senate side, it was co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn and Wyden, while on the House side we've got Doyle along with Reps. Yoder and Lofgren. Also, it reduces the time to open publishing from one year down to six months (like a NY bill that came out last year). It doesn't spread the policy to all federal agencies, but the vast majority of federally funded resarch would qualify (all agencies that spend over $100 million on research are covered).

As the EFF notes in the link above, there are a few lingering concerns about the bill, including some broad language around exemptions for works that "generate revenue or royalties for authors." Also, it could go further in not just requiring open access, but open licensing to make sure such works can more easily be built on to create next generation research. However, those are small quibbles.

But, of course, the publishers are really not happy about all of this, calling it "different name, same boondoggle." This is quite incredible, really, since it's really the publishers who have been getting away with a giant boondoggle for ages. If that gives you an idea about just how ridiculous the publishers' claims are, read on. Nearly every claim they make in attacking the bill actually applies to the publishers themselves much more than to the bill:

It would add significant, unspecified, ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets in the midst of ongoing federal deficit reduction efforts.

As opposed to keeping the works locked up, which adds significant, unspecified and ongoing costs to anyone trying to actually do research and be educated?

Finally, it would undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way, while ignoring progress made by agencies collaborating with publishers to improve funding transparency.

No it wouldn't. We already have the NIH example. Nothing in that "undermined" the publishers' efforts. Again, all that "high quality peer review" stuff comes for free: both the content and the peer reviewing. Most other publications somehow, magically, get by paying their writers and editors and don't have to charge tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription.

“This bill would waste so much taxpayers’ money at a time of budgetary crisis, squander federal employees’ time with busywork and require the creation and maintenance of otherwise-unneeded technology,”

This is the funniest of all. The real "waste" of taxpayer money is in funding all this research that then gets locked up and is nearly useless to those taxpayers.

Basically, the publishers know that their current position with these journals is such a sweet deal that they don't want anything to mess with it at all. That's ridiculous. While they're fighting for ever bigger profits, we're talking about access to research that was funded with our own dollars. It's really sad that the publishers would fight such a thing, though it shows what they really think concerning education. To them, it's not about how best to disseminate information, but how to lock it up and charge insanely high prices for it.

Filed Under: faster, federally funded research, john cornyn, mike doyle, open access, publishers, ron wyden, zoe lofgren

Unfortunate: 'Open' Advocate Darrell Issa Sponsoring Bill That Will Close Off Open Access To Gov't Funded Research

from the tragic dept

For years, we've pointed out the ridiculousness of various attempts to lock up federally funded research. If anything, it would seem that research that is federally funded should be required to be open to the public. After all, the public paid for it. And, in fact, a few years back, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) instituted a program that said that any research funded by NIH had to be offered in an open access manner by 1 year after its publication date. The "issue" here is that the big academic journals have the greatest scam in the world running: they don't have to pay writers (and, in some fields, the writers actually have to pay them) who submit their papers. They don't have to pay other academics to do peer review, as that's done for free. So all of their content isn't paid for. But... they do require that the writers hand over their copyright, and then lock it up in journals that are crazy expensive -- and totally inaccessible to the average person who isn't affiliated with a university library willing to shell out the cash.

That's not good for science or innovation. And, when it's on federally funded research, it's almost criminal.

So, the NIH had this open access requirement, which was then augmented by a Congressional requirement. The 1 year still lets journals get crazy monopoly rents... but even then, many journals have sought ways to make these open access requirements difficult. For example, if you click that link, you can see how the American Psychology Association tried to charge the academics who wrote for it $2,500 to "deposit" their publication to PubMed to satisfy the NIH requirement.

So, for years, the big publishing houses have been trying to get Congress to pass a law to lock up federally funded research. In the past, this effort was led by Rep. John Conyers -- who has received lots of campaign contributions from the big publishers. A few years ago, the Obama administration actually suggested it was leaning in the other direction -- and actually requiring all federally funded research to be open access, rather than just NIH. That would be huge... but of course, the big publishers won't allow that to happen. They even made the ridiculous argument that open access requirements would harm transparency in government. Yeah. Don't even try to understand it, because it doesn't make sense.

Tragically, it appears that a new version of this bill has been introduced... called the Research Works Act. It's a pretty short bill, but here's the key part:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

Note the use of "private-sector research work." There's a definition for that:

PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term 'private-sector research work' means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.

This is tragically bad drafting in that depending on how you interpret the commas, it almost certainly means that the NIH requirements and anything similar would be barred. That is, it appears to define federally funded research as "private sector research work," if it's going to be published by a private journal. The Association of American Publishers sure was quick to celebrate the bill, making it clear that it was exactly what they wanted: a ban on forcing works they publish into open access models. Of course, the language is purposely vague so that if you misread it, you might think it doesn't include government-funded works. That's not true. It simply doesn't include government produced works, which are public domain by definition and couldn't be thus limited anyway.

Furthermore, the bill appears to create a new copyright-like "right" for publishers outside of copyright itself. That is, it grants the final say in permission to the publisher, rather than the copyright holder. So, even in a case where an author retains the copyright, or retains distribution rights, this bill could potentially grant the publisher extra rights out of thin air.

The real tragedy here? The bill's sponsor is Rep. Darrell Issa -- who's based much of his recent political career on the claim that he wants more open government. Yes, the same Darrell Issa who put forth the SOPA/PIPA alternative, the OPEN Act, with its awesome open website that allows for direct feedback on the bill. And he's behind the open access to Congressional hearings video that we just talked about.

This bill seems to go against everything that he's said he stands for on related issues, and people are definitely noting how odd this seems.

There's no two ways about it. This is a bad and dangerous bill that will only serve to lock up important, taxpayer-funded research. As we've discussed in detail in the past, such locking up of research does tremendous harm to important scientific research, puts people in harm's way and slows down innovation. It's tremendously disappointing that Rep. Darrell Issa would be behind such a bill. It really does seem to go against everything that he stands for.

Filed Under: copyright, darrell issa, federally funded research, nih, open access, publishers, research

The Intellectually Dishonest Claims Of Those Fighting Against Open Access To Federally Funded Research

from the shameful dept

We've written a few times about the ongoing fight over whether or not federally funded research should be somewhat accessible to the public. This kicked off a few years back when the NIH, which funds a tremendous amount of research, required that any research that was funded by them had to be published in PubMed, its free and open database of such research one year after it was published in a journal. Scientific journals, as you probably know, are basically a huge scam. Unlike most publications, the journals don't pay the people who provide all the material in those journals. Instead, the researchers pay the journals to publish their research. Not only that, but in exchange for paying the journal, the researchers also have to hand over their copyright on the research. This gets really ridiculous at times, as professors I've spoken with have needed to totally redo their own experiments because some journal "owned" their research, and they couldn't reuse any of the data.

On top of that, these journals don't pay people to do peer review. Other researchers in the field are expected to do the peer review for free. Oh, and then did we mention that these journals charge ridiculous sums (thousands upon thousands of dollars) for subscriptions, which many university libraries feel compelled to pay? And that much of the research is paid for by your tax dollars anyway?

So the journals have been complaining about this attempt to actually have federally funded research available to the public who paid for it, where it can actually be much more useful. The American Psychological Association has been the worst of the bunch in dealing with this, trying to (on top of everything else) charge institutions $2,500 to "deposit" papers with PubMed as it's required to do (as if researchers couldn't just upload the paper themselves). On top of that, various publishers lobbied hard for a law to end the requirement to publish such federally funded works. Thankfully, it hasn't passed. Instead, the Obama administration has supported extending the policy beyond the NIH to make all federally funded research publicly accessible after a year.

As this is being debated, it's really rather stunning the level of intellectual dishonesty being pushed by those who want to lock up federally funded research. Glyn Moody points us to the astoundingly ridiculous claim from Steven Breckler of the American Psychological Association, that requiring free access to federally funded research one year after it's published would violate the administrations pledge for transparent government. Yes, read that again. With a straight face, this guy is claiming that a requirement for making federally funded research publicly accessible will violate a pledge for more transparency in government. This is shockingly dishonest.

If you want to understand the specious reasoning, it's as follows: the requirement for transparency from the government says that there are limits on that transparency, and those limits include "national security, privacy or other genuinely compelling interests." And, according to Breckler, one of those other "genuinely compelling interests" is his job. Well, that's not quite the way he put it. But, basically, he claims that if required to publish content after a year, there would be fewer peer reviewed journals. But he presents no evidence to support that whatsoever. In fact, what the research actually shows is that the journals that have chosen to be open are actually doing quite well when it comes to actually having their research being used for scientific advancement. They're cited much more frequently and used much more often in moving research forward. In other words, if the real goal is to promote scientific advancement, opening up federally funded research makes a tremendous amount of sense, totally contrary to Breckler's and the American Psychological Association's claims.

If you're a member of the APA, you should frankly be disgusted with this display of intellectual dishonesty.

And it gets worse. Moody also points us to an attempt by Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance to side with the APA as well. Ross, amusingly, always claims he's fighting the fight for "content creators." And yet, when you look at nearly everything that he and the Copyright Alliance seems to work on, it's always working with middlemen who regularly screw over the actual content creators. That's the case here as well. These journals are getting researchers to pay them to take away their copyrights. Defending them and pretending that's defending content creators is sickening.

But that's exactly what Ross does, where he claims that the rule would effectively limit copyright to 12 months. That, of course, is not true at all. But, more importantly, it's worth pointing out, again, that this is federally funded research. US copyright law already says that anything produced by the federal gov't should not get a copyright, and it's silly that this does not extend to research funded by the government as well. Beyond that, Ross' attempt to toe the APA's line is so blatantly misleading, it's amazing anyone takes anything Ross or the APA has to say seriously. In his writeup, Ross quotes new APA research (so that's not biased at all) that claims that only 15% of access to journal articles happen in the first year.

Ross then takes this to conclude that requiring open access after year one is asking a publishers to "forfeit 85% of their economic return." Except that's simply not true at all. Not even close to true. This assumes that all journal revenue is on a pay-for-access basis. But that's not the case at all. First of all, journals make money from the fees researchers and professors pay to submit their articles. Second, the vast majority of their income comes from subscriptions from libraries. Most libraries will continue to pay for subscriptions for important journals, because it'll still be worth having access earlier. The fact that people access the data later doesn't change the economic model very much, and certainly not by 85% as Ross claims.

The whole thing, frankly, is ridiculous. Academic journals are immensely profitable operations, in part because they not only get free labor from peer reviewers, but they also get people to pay them to give them their content. No other publishing business in the world has it so good and so easy. And much of this rides on the back of the American taxpayer. The system, as it stands, is effectively a way to transfer taxpayer dollars to private publishers, and lock up federally funded research in the process. It helps no one other than the publishers. It doesn't help the researchers, who have much more difficulty sharing and building on the research of others. It doesn't help science, which is held back by having such research locked up. And it certainly doesn't help the public or the government who foots the bill.

On top of all that, there's increasing evidence that the traditional peer review journal system doesn't even work very well. More and more frequently, we're hearing of junk science making it through the peer review process. Simply having two people review a work and signing off on it is not a real peer review. A more open system, where lots of experts get to look at the information and weigh in on it is significantly more effective and efficient.

What's amazing is that this is all so painfully obvious to anyone who looks at this stuff, that those who are still trying to defend this ridiculous taking of taxpayer money in an effort to lock up federally funded research for profit are forced to make such laughably intellectually dishonest claims to try to keep such a scam going. It's really quite shameful, but does suggest the lengths to which some people will go to keep cash flowing in their direction.

Filed Under: copyright, federally funded research, journals, open access, research
Companies: american psychological association

White House Wants Input On Public Access Rules For Federally Funded Research

from the good-for-them dept

The Office of Science & Technology Policy remains one of the few White House operations that seems to actually have a good grasp on the internet and what it means for various other aspects of governance. That's why it's good to see them asking for input into what the administration should do in terms of requiring public access for federally funded research (thanks to Lee for sending this over). There's been a big debate over this for years. Given that a significant portion of academic research is federally funded, it is immensely troubling that the results of much of that research is locked away in extremely expensive journals. There has been a good push over the years for requiring federally funded research to be accessible by the public, and OSTP is now looking for views into how to create policies that would achieve that goal. Who knows what will come out of it, but for those of you concerned about tax-payer-funded knowledge being locked up by private journals, now is your chance to comment in a way where (hopefully) the government will pay attention.

Filed Under: federally funded research, open access, ostp, white house