Very interesting to see Darrell Issa (R - CA) as a sponsor on this bill, given how eloquently he's spoken out against SOPA in the Judiciary Committee. Here's the copy of the email I just sent his office: I'll try and contact his office by phone tomorrow.
Hello,
It's been with great pleasure that I've been able to watch Representa-
tive Issa speak out against SOPA in the Judiciary.
However, I'm concerned at seeing him offer "H.R.3699 -- Research Works
Act" as such an act is a major blow to scientific openness.
As you may well be aware, in many nations it's a requirement that re-
search receiving federal funds (i.e. research at taxpayer expense) be
made available for free to the public. The recent policy proposal by
the NIH would move the US towards a similarly open policy and would
help foster the openness of research that made this country such a
leader in science and technology for so long.
Unfortunately, companies like Elsevier have increasingly treated pub-
lishing as a private cash cow, banking (in part) on the burgeoning
costs of a university education to widen its coffers. The journals
published by Elsevier cost colleges and universities millions of
dollars each year and burden students with growing debt (and for
others, preclude the possibility of higher education at all).
I ask that Representative Issa revisit his stand on this issue.
Thank you.
FWIW, since people don't seem to know this: Dead tree letters >> phone > fax >>> email >>>>>>> any online petition, in terms of how motivated staff are to convey your sentiment up the totem pole. (Anecdotal from brothers' service with a few congressional reps.)
[Edit: Sorry, checked on my screen but didn't realize my resolution was too high to show me if it broke lines.]
Generally I've had no issues getting meetings, at least with a staffer, of my congressperson.
On a sidenote, does a group that focuses on gov't relations and PR exist that represents what would is largely the consensus HN community interest - i.e. making the case to elected officials and the public what sort of laws would improve prospects for technical innovation. The EFF focuses largely on digital civil rights, but that certainly isn't the only realm where Washington, Sacramento, Albany, etc. affect us.
I'd be really wary unless it had a very very focused mission. I think there's a lot of diversity among HN readers, and I hate being a part of organizations which claim to speak for me but end up supporting things I oppose, etc.
Right now, I think the startup visa thing and opposition to new stupid laws like sopa/pipa is all I have mental bandwidth to care about.
At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower priced publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth.
Really all NIH and NSF grants should come with open access requirements. I would suggest that all raw data be made available no later than 1 year after initial collection and all publications be open-access upon publishing with curated data also available upon publishing.
The "1 year after initial collection" allows slower writers to get publications in the pipeline before unleashing their data to the hounds of "competing" scientists.
Scientific publishing is broken. Industry and government have limited access to modern, relevant academic research. Utilizing the best science for science, management, construction and business decisions shouldn't be a daunting task that I usually chose to overcome by contacting current individuals in academics with access to publications.
What is really frustrating about scientific research? Working in a research lab, looking up something you've found from your research in the literature, and then not having access to the article without paying for it. $30 is way too much to be spending on an article that might not even have the content you're looking for as it might not be mentioned in the abstract. (I'm working in a virology lab with a professor at a smaller university and this can be a frequent occurrence, meaning we have to wait for the library to go and get the article for us, hindering our progress).
I found out about a pretty cool project called "Total-impact". They're basically tying together metrics from a vast number of social networking/online sources into one view about a specific scientific article to understand how far this research is reaching as well as the overall impact of how many people are talking about it. You can view it at http://total-impact.org/, and there is a sample collection at http://total-impact.org/collection/MqAnvI.
I'd also recommend looking at Science 2.0's FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0, as it contains some pretty interesting content.
I really hope that the "open science" movement gains more traction in the immediate future.
In response to your suggestion on data being made available, there are often issues of proprietary datasets that cannot be made public (for legal or ownership reasons). It is a frustrating situation, but one that is not likely to change anytime soon, so I would be happy with just the open-access publication requirement.
One year can also be extremely low w.r.t. a privacy viewpoint. Even assuming that anonymization is possible, a) who would pay for it? and b) it could make it impossible to verify the research (there are a lot of 'describe one patient' papers out there)
Depending on what you mean by open access, all NIH grants already do come with such requirements. Any publications resulting from NIH-funded research must be deposited, in full text, including figures, into PubMed Central.
Yes, indeed it is. But the commenter to which I was responding didn't seem to know that what he/she was proposing has already been in place for several years, at least insofar as NIH grants are concerned.
I thought this bill is for private-sector research, which NIH funded research is not. Or am I missing something in how the lawyers are going to twist this once it gets passed?
"Private sector research works" is the disingenuous and obfuscating term that the publishers are using to call publicly funded research manuscripts that the publisher has then 'added value' to. When they say they 'add value', what they mean is copy editing, archiving, distribution, etc. They include in this peer-reviewing the manuscript, but in reality that is done for free by scientists whose salaries are again, mostly paid for by public funds.
There is no post-hoc twisting involved. The bill is consciously and deliberately deceptively-worded to make you think it only applies to private sector research. That is false.
For papers you would just do what NIH requires, which is "upon acceptance for publication." Upon further reflection and discussion data would probably be more reasonably published in an open format no later than 1 year after the grant ended. That would allow multi-year studies a little more time to collect all of their data and write it up.
I was just commenting on the existing open access policy (edit: I noticed you opened the subthread by prescribing, sorry for derailing).
Open science/sharing the data can work as a voluntary movement, it has not been captured by private interests, but I'm really interested in seeing Open Access pan out before that. The current policy, if I'm reading it right, is saying that the manuscripts must be submitted to PubMed Central, but PMC or the researcher (whoever decides to trigger it first I imagine) only has an obligation to release them after twelve months. If PubMed Central doesn't release the research instantly and the researchers aren't aware of their rights or are subjet to some pressure/contradicting (possibly illegal) agreements, there's a loophole in the policy as written.
"Since Elsevier's obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company's base in the Netherlands"
I agree the proposed act is bad, but the author does not do himself any favors by quoting such bone headed nationalism. Surely anyone with a mild grasp of the way world works knows that the profits go to the _shareholder_, not to the headquarters.
Elsevier's shareholders are all over the map. Their headquarters are based in the Netherlands for tax reasons but it does not mean they don't pay tax in the US on profits made there.
my wife used to work as a tax attorney for Elsevier in Amsterdam and while it is true the company was founded in the Netherlands (Haarlem actually), the main reason they are still there are the excellent "tax facilities" (euphemism for a great deal with the tax man).
A surprisingly large number of companies have a 'great deal' with the tax man behind closed doors whether in US or elsewhere. Published corporate tax rates are, admittedly anecdotally but from good sources, not representative of what corporations actually pay.
Understandably, a company providing jobs and infrastructure investment in the local area can always strike a deal.
Here is an in-depth report on how the Netherlands is a tax-haven for multinationals: http://somo.nl/html/paginas/pdf/netherlands_tax_haven_2006_N... . IKEA (the world's largest charity) is an egregious example. A participation exemption allows corporate income and dividends to be channelled to a country with very low tax.
Im not sure why scientists are still publishing in Elsevier journals nowadays. Pre-internet, OK, but now I think journals should be following the model used by the Journal of Machine Learning Research, open on the internet.
Scientists still publish Elsevier because of the so called "impact factor" of some of these journals. As a young researcher currently looking for tenure-track positions in academia I can tell you that it is still extremely important to publish in some of these journals (ex Cell). Unfortunately there are still very few (or none) open access journals that have the same perceived impact. I try to publish in PLoS journals or other open access journals as much as I can but given the chance to publish in higher impact journals I have to take it or risk not having a job in the future. Once you have the job you need to secure funding and so there is always pressure to publish in the "best" possible journal. The ridiculous thing about this situation is that would be fairly easy to create a new open access and highly prestigious journal in any field if everyone would switch to publishing in these new journals at the same time. You would probably just need to convince some of the leaders in the field to do it. This was how PLoS was born in fact. Unfortunately for the PhD students and postdocs it is hard to do anything about it.
Exactly. The only thing holding academics back is themselves. The current state of academic publishing is ridiculous. I recently submitted something that I had to perform full copy-editing and formatting for. I know this is standard practice in engineering, but that's what publishers used to get paid for.
In the end I'll have done the research, the writing, the editing and the formatting but of course the end product will in all likelihood be behind a paywall (this is sort of my own stupidity for rushing to get something published under the advice of a prof). There's no reason individual academic communities can't decide that they should establish there own reputable and open access journals.
Academia is mostly about signalling, not entirely, but mostly (see Robin Hanson's http://www.overcomingbias.com posts on academia). Making it difficult and expensive to publish increases the signalling effect and helps keep out the riff-raff.
Maybe the silver lining is that a large scale uproar could incline more people to publish in open access journals in the first place (so-called "gold" open access). </wishful thinking>
Publishing in ACM and IEEE conferences are essentially author-pay. Technically, you don't pay to publish in the conference, but you must pay to register for the conference. And most conferences have a rule that if you don't register, you can't publish.
There are many objections to the ACM and IEEE practices about maintaining paywalls, but I think that as professional societies, their policies can change. The for-profit journals, on the other hand, probably cannot survive if they allowed such open access. And nor should they: their business model is no longer valid.
I prefer the CS model in some ways, but there are issues.
* The review process for conferences is necessarily compressed relative to journals. This usually lowers the quality of reviews and also limits paper length.
* It is difficult to "grow" a highly selective conference, so the acceptance rate is usually quite high. This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on where you publish instead of what you publish will ascribe little weight to your conference papers. If people are not submitting their best work to a conference, it can't afford to be overly selective. This is much the same problem that new journals have, but worse because conferences usually have to reach a critical number of people to be considered a success.
The conference versus journal issue is orthogonal to professional society versus for-profit entity, since the ACM and IEEE have journals.
This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on where you publish instead of what you publish will ascribe little weight to your conference papers.
Not in CS, in my experience. People in CS know which are the highly selective (what I have always heard called "top tier") conferences. In my experience in industry and academia, conferences are our primary consideration and journals are an afterthought. (Sometimes not even a thought.) The CRA memo is from 1999. I think most people have caught on by now.
That is specific to CS. I have one foot in CS, but the other two feet are in applied mathematics and natural sciences where conferences are not especially attractive publications venues.
Yes, I agree, it is specific to CS - if you re-read my posts, I think you'll find that I prefaced everything with that qualifier. I have friends in the hard sciences, and we sometimes talk about how the publishing models are quite different.
Researchers are already paying to get their articles published. Given how much journal subscription costs, that cost is a fraction of the taxpayer money that is spent buying back the articles for the university libraries the same researchers use.
It depends what institution you are at and how much research funding you have. If you are a professor at a small teaching university (even in the US), a few publications per year in open access journals is the same cost as supporting a student for a year. Depending on the field and how established you, obtaining research funding can take a lot of time that might be better spent doing actual science. (This is true at all levels, but in high-profile fields, the grant sizes are large enough that publishing costs are almost negligible.)
Although I am friends with David (the author of this blog post), I do not agree that open access is fundamentally the wrong model, but his argument is not without merit.
How much does a "small teaching university" pay for access to scientific journals?
I'd guess that a "teaching university" would have nearly the same need for access (if the teaching is any good), but much less need for submission, compared to a "research university", so the teaching university should benefit from shifting cost from access to submission.
Seems easy enough for the NIH to counter by changing their funding policy to exclude all "private sector research works", leaving academics and universities to decide whether they'd rather carry out research nominally under the auspices of some public sector organisation that handles distribution or not take the funds. If they really wanted to they could even introduce their own peer review process for final publications too...
It's remarkably short-sighted and pointless legislation, unless the real objective is to start suing authors for forwarding PDF copies of their work and related documents to interested parties without journal access.
Elsevier (or any other company) that uses lobbying or gives money to politicians is just using the system in their favor. That's not evil. It's evil that the system allows for this to happen.
Thats a very naive view - laws are often drafted by lawyers / polaticians - and what makes non corporate actors in lobying any better or worse they are just lobbying for their constituents.
With your model extremist churches or other organisations could lobby to reduce employment rights for women/LGBT etc. For example returning to the 50's wheer women who got married had to resign like they did at one compnay I used to work for.
A company with progressive views on employment issues say Google would be banned from lobbying against this.
And you would have od position where say the UAW could put their views on a bill concerning the Auto industry but Alan Mulally could not - not teribly fair.
1. Money is an extremely effective campaign tool, so effective that it is almost impossible for a candidate with no money to get elected, no matter how popular their views are. Since quite few constituents contribute money, and individual people don't speak with sufficiently organized objectives, politicians are only very weakly accountable to their constituents.
2. The promise of a high-paying job after congress, along with other benefits, influences the decisions of our elected officials.
To make politicians accountable to their constituents, we have to solve the first problem. Since advertising costs money and seems to be necessary for a campaign, this suggests finance reform along the lines that Lessig suggests (http://rootstrikers.org), whereby constituents control campaign funding, all in small-dollar amounts.
You need to first remove any civil service position from being in the presidents gift as a bribe for contributions no jollies as an ambassador ETC and NO presidential pardons for anything Scooter Libby ought to be in the cell next to Manning or more properly have been taken out and shot.
Oh and move to a fully professional Judiciary elections to Judgeship are far more corrupting.
Oh and you didn't answer my point about other actors do you want to have an internet where telcos and ISP can't lobby for common carrier status welcome to the church and other interest groups deciding what is allowed on the internet
Or would you care live a society like China or Russia where your employer and your job and sweat equity can be expropriated.
Would somebody please do a startup to provide an alternative to these evil people? It shouldn't be difficult to disrupt them, as you literally need a printer and a webserver.
You don't need a printer, online only is fully acceptable.
However, what you do need is an "impact rating" calculated by Web of Science(TM). That rating is based on the number of citations articles in your journal gets from other rated journals.
Since your journal is new, it won't have an impact rating, meaning scientists won't publish in it, meaning you won't get an impact rating.
But the alternatives exists, e.g. Bentham and Hindawi are both running spamtastic marketing campaigns for 100s of open access journals, most with none or negligible impact ratings.
There are good and successful ones too. PLoS have very high quality open access journals. Expensive, though.
That matters less than you would think. Even with tenure, you typically need research grants in order to have money for research. Research grants are typically granted based on your publishing history in high impact journals.
But again, there are good open access journals out there. And even traditional publishers typically allows open access for individual articles for an additional fee. While these fees may seem high, they will typically only constitute a small fraction of a research grant, so if you care and you plan for it in advance, there is really no excuse for not going open access.
Try the Public Knowledge Project -- http://pkp.sfu.ca (disclaimer: I work for them). We create open source publishing software for journals and conferences (among other things). Our unofficial list of journals is steadily growing (over 11,000) and we are seeing more and more highly reputable journals going open access (whether or not they use our software). The tide is slowly turning...
