Bill proposed to block public access to publicly funded research

[Pythagorean]

More threats to the open research community. Between this and SOPA...

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/o...-for.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=research works&st=cse

 

[Evo]

Here is more information on the bill and what you can do to oppose it.

“Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.”

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/31184

 

[Jack21222]

What possible purpose does this bill have, other than to be a handout to a few journals?

 

[Evo]

What possible purpose does this bill have, other than to be a handout to a few journals?

Out of the blue two clueless politicians come up with this? Anyone think something is rotten in Denmark? Come on. I doubt either of them even knew any of those journals existed before they were "approached". And what's their reasoning to support this?

 

[Jack21222]

Out of the blue two clueless politicians come up with this? Anyone think something is rotten in Denmark? Come on. I doubt either of them even knew any of those journals existed before they were "approached". And what's their reasoning to support this?

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.

 

[Evo]

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.

I'm not either, but how else would this have come about? It's obvious lobbyists got to them, whether it was perks or brainwashing doesn't really matter. How can this be in the best interest of the public? If taxpayer money is used to fund the research then stipulations on availabilty of the research should be allowed. Right now the journals have exclusive rights for a year. Considering that the journals don't actually pay for the research, they just profit off of publishing, I think that is more than fair. And they make a lot of money.

 

[Moonbear]

Sounds like they're just returning to the old way. When NIH first started requiring free access, there was a lot of pushback from publishers. It's hard to cover costs if you're giving away your product free. All it ended up doing was raising publication costs since journals had to start charging enormous page fees to publish in order to offset free distribution.

 

[Evo]

Sounds like they're just returning to the old way. When NIH first started requiring free access, there was a lot of pushback from publishers. It's hard to cover costs if you're giving away your product free. All it ended up doing was raising publication costs since journals had to start charging enormous page fees to publish in order to offset free distribution.

But they charge huge subscription fees, do you really think they are hurting? Considering the costs that book publishers have with no guaranteed sales or subsciptions, I can't see how these journals aren't making a killing.

 

[ThomasT]

... It's obvious lobbyists got to them. ...

That seems like the most reasonable guess ... until more is learned about this. This has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy, imo. It's just business as usual ... imho. And it's one of the things that might be improved upon wrt American politics ... again, just imho.

 

[Evo]

That seems like the most reasonable guess ... until more is learned about this. This has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy, imo. It's just business as usual ... imho. And it's one of the things that might be improved upon wrt American politics ... again, just imho.

No one is suggesting a conspiracy.

 

[Pengwuino]

But they charge huge subscription fees, do you really think they are hurting? Considering the costs that book publishers have with no guaranteed sales or subsciptions, I can't see how these journals aren't making a killing.

That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, I can probably count the number of subscriptions to the American Journal of Physics in my city of half a million on my hand. There is certainly good reason to suspect there is something going on but just saying that what they sell is expensive is hardly an argument.

 

[Evo]

That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, I can probably count the number of subscriptions to the American Journal of Physics in my city of half a million on my hand. There is certainly good reason to suspect there is something going on but just saying that what they sell is expensive is hardly an argument.

But book publishers have to pay authors up front before anything is published. It's a gamble that doesn't pay off many times. They have to pay for book tours and all of the associated expenses, advertising, forwarding books to bookstores never knowing if anything will sell. Journals have none of these expenses, it's pure guaranteed profit. What expenses do journals have? And they have exclusive rights for the first year! After a year, it's a bit old, eh? Plus they've already raked in the subscription money. There is no need for this bill.

 

[Drakkith]

No matter what medium is used all journals will have expenses. As was said, it's hard to sell something if its being offered for free. That said, I do see an issue with not being able to see the results of something that our tax dollars paid for without having to pay for it again. But I'm sure the details are much different than what I imagine.

 

[Evo]

No matter what medium is used all journals will have expenses. As was said, it's hard to sell something if its being offered for free. That said, I do see an issue with not being able to see the results of something that our tax dollars paid for without having to pay for it again. But I'm sure the details are much different than what I imagine.

But it's not free. They have pre-paid subscriptions that are a fortune, I would bet they're higher profits than your average publication, they have a captive audience. They don't need to print and distribute more than ordered. And for the first year, they can charge ridiculous amounts per paper. $35 for a paper when an entire magazine costs two bucks? What is that, $600 per magazine and they have no costs other than printing (and paying themselves). And that's on top of the millions of dollars in subscriptions fees. They will still continue to get all of this without the bill. They are not at risk of losing anything that they already have, that's the point, they want not only keep what they have, they want to take everything away from the public. What's wrong here?

 

[Drakkith]

But it's not free.

What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

They will still continue to get all of this without the bill. They are not at risk of losing anything that they already have, that's the point, they want not only keep what they have, they want to take everything away from the public. What's wrong here?

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.

 

[Evo]

What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

Do they not have pre-paid subscriptions from universities, medical centers, etc?? It's not provided for free.

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.

How many publishers have a bill passed guaranteeing them perpetual profits, on tax funded research, no less.

 

[Pengwuino]

But book publishers have to pay authors up front before anything is published. It's a gamble that doesn't pay off many times. They have to pay for book tours and all of the associated expenses, advertising, forwarding books to bookstores never knowing if anything will sell. Journals have none of these expenses, it's pure guaranteed profit. What expenses do journals have? And they have exclusive rights for the first year! After a year, it's a bit old, eh? Plus they've already raked in the subscription money. There is no need for this bill.

There's the key, can you actually show me that they have such minimal expenses?

 

[Evo]

There's the key, can you actually show me that they have such minimal expenses?

They don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, I don't believe they pay the reviewers, Vanadium50, ZapperZ, etc... can confirm this. Aside from printing and paying themselves what are their expenses? Do they disclose this publicly?

Cost

Many scientists and librarians have long protested the cost of journals, especially as they see these payments going to large for-profit publishing houses. To allow their researchers online access to journals, many universities purchase site licenses, permitting access from anywhere in the university, and, with appropriate authorization, by university-affiliated users at home or elsewhere. These may be quite expensive, sometimes much more than the cost for a print subscription

Concerns about cost and open access have led to the creation of free-access journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) family and partly open or reduced-cost journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics. However, professional editors still have to be paid, and PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs; smaller journals do not often have access to such resources.

An article titled "Online or Invisible?" [4] has used statistical arguments to show that electronic publishing online, and to some extent open access, both provide wider dissemination and increase the average number of citations an article receives. Lawrence postulates that papers that are easier to access are used more often and therefore cited more often.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journal#Cost

The term serials crisis has become a common shorthand to describe the chronic subscription cost increases of many scholarly journals.[1] The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index for several decades,[2] while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining current subscriptions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

 

[Ygggdrasil]

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.

One of the co-sponsors of the bill Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), received $8.5k in contributions from executives of the Dutch publisher Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals.

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807

I will note that the author of the above blog post (and the NY Times Op-Ed in the OP) is a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a group which publishes many open access journals. Instead of charging subscribers for the content, PLoS charges the authors of the scientific articles to defray the costs of publishing (these journals are also online-only, so there is much less overhead).

One disadvantage of charging authors instead of readers is that very good journals reject many more papers than they accept. However, the rejected papers still take up the journals resources (especially if they were sent to reviewers). Some critics claim that PLoS is able to make their model work because of the PLoS ONE journal that they publish, a journal which has more relaxed publication standard than other journals (it reviews papers to make sure the science is done correctly but articles are not judged on their perceived importance).

 

[Pengwuino]

They don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, I don't believe they pay the reviewers, Vanadium50, ZapperZ, etc... can confirm this. Aside from printing and paying themselves what are their expenses? Do they disclose this publicly?

Yes they do not pay reviewers nor the authors. The few journals I regularly read are published by non-profit publishers. It would be interesting to compare the costs journals purchased from for-profit and non-profit publishers

 

[Jack21222]

What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

From what I understand, the research isn't free the first year.

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.

Yeah, but the business isn't going after possible profit on its own merits. It's begging the government for more profits. Worse than that, the business is bribing members of the government to give them more profits. So, yeah... I'm telling the business not to do that. And so should you.

 

[Drakkith]

From what I understand, the research isn't free the first year.

Ah I see.

Yeah, but the business isn't going after possible profit on its own merits. It's begging the government for more profits. Worse than that, the business is bribing members of the government to give them more profits. So, yeah... I'm telling the business not to do that. And so should you.

If you call lobbying bribing, then sure. The only issue I have with the whole thing is that it, apparently, is supported by taxes. If so, then there might be an issue. I'd have to get a lot more info to form an educated opinion, as I know that one thing I have learned in my life is almost always true; nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

 

[Pythagorean]

Authors should be charged to submit to journals, which means it inevitably comes from the taxpayers (i.e. the authors write it into their budget for their grant proposals) but distributed to ALL taxpayers, rather than the individual, poor researcher trying to make it. The idea being that all taxpayers benefit from R&D.

It's difficult as a starving college student when your library doesn't have a subscription to important journals in your field. It's hard to get a feel for what has been done and what's worth doing when you can't keep up with the field. Rural campuses suffer dramatically, since they're less likely to have diverse journals and faculty: double whammy. At least with diverse journal access, faculty and students could work together to keep up with the research.

 

[D H]

From an article printed in The Guardian last August, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist,

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays.​

The answer is of course academic publishers. Perhaps this is just a case of the non-academic media being a bit jealous of academic publishing. There is a quite a bit to be jealous of. Who else has 30 to 40 percent profit margins? From an article published in The Economist last May, http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/

Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.​

 

[Vanadium 50]

Let's back up a bit.

First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Second, there is no question that it costs money to produce a journal. You have to pay editors, compositors, and so on, so even if you don't pay authors and referees, there is money involved. The amount of money depends on the journal - medical journals, which often include high resolution photography are more expensive than physics journals which use line art - which are more expensive than philosophy journals, which are just text. Also relevant is the fact that most of these are fixed costs - printing 1 copy or 10 costs the same, and 1000 costs very little more.

It is certainly true that there are for-profit journals that make obscene profits. But even if they did not, journals would still be expensive. There are non-profit journals and they are less expensive, but not that much less expensive. A 30% profit is a lot, but setting that number to 0% won't reduce journal costs by a factor of 100.

In the "good old days", individual investigators charged journals to their grants. This was maybe a few thousand dollars. Then the funding agencies started asking the question "why are we paying for ten copies of the same journal to the same institution"? So they stopped paying for them, instead suggesting that the department share a single copy.

So, the number of copies of the journal circulating fell by an order of magnitude, and because the costs are fixed, the prices skyrocketed. It is not uncommon to have journals costing more than $5000 a year. That in turn provoked the question, "why should the public pay for this twice?" Somehow ten copies at $500 each is easier to swallow than one at $5000.

Where it looks like the field is going is back to "page charges", which will probably be steeper than we are used to. If we want journals, the money to produce them has to come from somewhere, and if the receiving end has grown to be impractical, the other end has to pick up the slack.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once got a $10 Starbucks or Amazon card from a journal for banging out a large number of reviews in a short time. The editor asked me to report on a pile of long-lingering papers.

 

[Jack21222]

If you call lobbying bribing, then sure.

Well, yes, I do call many forms of lobbying bribery, particularly when part of the lobbying process is campaign donations.

DH quotes a source that says one publisher made 1.1 billion dollars in a year, even with the current rules. They're not exactly hurting. But, that isn't stopping them from buying off congresscritters to try to squeeze us for even more money.

 

[Curious3141]

Let's back up a bit.

First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Second, there is no question that it costs money to produce a journal. You have to pay editors, compositors, and so on, so even if you don't pay authors and referees, there is money involved. The amount of money depends on the journal - medical journals, which often include high resolution photography are more expensive than physics journals which use line art - which are more expensive than philosophy journals, which are just text. Also relevant is the fact that most of these are fixed costs - printing 1 copy or 10 costs the same, and 1000 costs very little more.

It is certainly true that there are for-profit journals that make obscene profits. But even if they did not, journals would still be expensive. There are non-profit journals and they are less expensive, but not that much less expensive. A 30% profit is a lot, but setting that number to 0% won't reduce journal costs by a factor of 100.

In the "good old days", individual investigators charged journals to their grants. This was maybe a few thousand dollars. Then the funding agencies started asking the question "why are we paying for ten copies of the same journal to the same institution"? So they stopped paying for them, instead suggesting that the department share a single copy.

So, the number of copies of the journal circulating fell by an order of magnitude, and because the costs are fixed, the prices skyrocketed. It is not uncommon to have journals costing more than $5000 a year. That in turn provoked the question, "why should the public pay for this twice?" Somehow ten copies at $500 each is easier to swallow than one at $5000.

Where it looks like the field is going is back to "page charges", which will probably be steeper than we are used to. If we want journals, the money to produce them has to come from somewhere, and if the receiving end has grown to be impractical, the other end has to pick up the slack.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once got a $10 Starbucks or Amazon card from a journal for banging out a large number of reviews in a short time. The editor asked me to report on a pile of long-lingering papers.

A very fair and balanced perspective.

In your opinion, is there any further real role for print circulation of journals? Practically everyone in academia has (or should have) access to the Internet, so why the need for hard copies? Shouldn't the removal of the need to pay for printing and binding services pare costs very considerably? Just collate articles, proofread, format, fire up your desktop publishing software, upload it to your server, and presto, an issue is born! Server space cost per virtual page is ridiculously cheap compared to cost per printed page. And one can always print out the pdf with one's personal IT equipment should one choose to.

The funny thing is that the journal subscriptions which I've had that offer a differential rate between "online only" and "print version" schemes do give a cheaper rate for the former, but not by much. The difference seems artificially narrowed - almost as if the schmucks who make do with the soft copy online version are being compelled to subsidise the fossils who insist on hard copy bound issues.

Having done a fair number of reviews and authored some articles for medical journals myself, I can attest to having been paid exactly zilch. My friend and colleague serves as an editor for a few International journals, and I can tell you he's paid zilch too. I don't know how much the proofreaders are paid, if anything. The alleged escalating costs to produce these journals must be going somewhere. If it's not going to inequitable profit margins for the benefit of commercial publishers, it must be going to unnecessary printing costs. So I say: let's get rid of printing once and for all, go fully online, and see whether the costs come down by an order of magnitude (at least).

It's the same model as for music sales - for the longest time, the music cartel fudged the issue by selling music at inflated prices on commercially pressed media. When, after much resistance and reluctance, they were finally forced to go the "online" route by selling mp3s, the price per track became far more reasonable all of a sudden.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Journals traditionally serve three purposes:

1. Transmitting information
2. Archiving information
3. Keeping score.

Electronic distribution of papers has rendered the first one obsolete. The very first web application was "Spires", a high energy physics publication database. The communications function is now essentially done by the arXiv today.

The print journals are taking the second one very seriously. They are going back through past issues and making this available electronically - not just scanned, but re-entered so that text is searchable. Just because a paper is old doesn't mean its obsolete. I am reading a paper now from 1986 which is likely very relevant for a 2012 experiment. The money to do this is coming from subscriptions. And while the arXiv could take this role on, it's not really designed for that.

As for the third one, don't laugh. University administrators pay very close attention to things like number of publications and journal impact factors, and these do affect rankings, and rankings matter. (Rankings are why we get messages like "I want to go to MIT, but I don't know anything about it.") It's a system that is far from optimal, but nobody has come up with a better one. The problem here is that the people who most want to use this kind of ranking - university administrations and funding agencies - are the least willing to pay for it.

As one final thing to think about - why isn't there anything better than PubMed out there? The answer is that as long as PubMed is legally mandated, nobody can switch from PubMed to something else. A replacement would have to exist in addition to PubMed, not instead of PubMed. That's a pretty high barrier. One can argue that the requirement not to make the result public but to use the government's own database to do it has negative as well as positive effects on the public's ability to access this data.

 

[KingNothing]

If you call lobbying bribing, then sure.

I definitely see a lot of lobbying as bribery. Just my two cents.

 

[Drakkith]

Thanks Vanadium, that's what I was talking about when I said that nothing is as simple as it seems.

 

[Pythagorean]

First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Yeah, I actually didn't put that title. My OP title said "Not again...". In defense of whoever changed the title though, it depends on how you define block. For me, it's definitely a block; I can't afford to buy articles at $30 a pop, and we know what it means for the publisher's that are actually lobbying for it... that they're going to block access; it will be a coin-operated block, sure... maybe you would prefer "socioeconomic filter".

 

[MarcoD]

Personally, I think it's unavoidable that the Internet will, and must, change the rules of the publishing game. In my field, most information is already publicly available from the authors' sites or citeseeer.

The only hindrance I see is funding and 'keeping score,' or legitimacy. I would hope for some public sites where the publications are commented upon by professionals and are, say, backed with public endorsements of people. Which should be a better system since now a lot of comments on publications are now hidden from the viewers' eyes, which implies a lack of transparency, which implies a lack of scientific scrutiny and a lack of scientific debate.

To put that into perspective. Even in the semi-mathematical science which is computing science, I -as a hobbyist- frequently ended up having read articles which, on closer inspection, could not make their claims stick, or, rather, were just a damned waste of time to read. A public publishing scheme can avoid a lot of wasted time by scientists trying to decipher the legitimacy or validity of claims made.

 

[Vanadium 50]

For me, it's definitely a block; I can't afford to buy articles at $30 a pop.

Nothing in this, as far as I know, prevents an author from posting his work on PubMed or any other site. What it does do is change it so that authors can no longer be required to post their papers on one particular site: PubMed.

There is a difference between "not requiring" and "forbidding".

 

[Pythagorean]

Nothing in this, as far as I know, prevents an author from posting his work on PubMed or any other site.

One of our professors, in an open access conference, said that publishers have asked them to take their manuscripts down... not sure how many actually comply or if there's really any repercussions for not doing it.

Anyway, that wasn't my point (that authors can't post it). The point is that it's not automatically available. It shouldn't be left up to the author, either.

 

[Curious3141]

One of our professors, in an open access conference, said that publishers have asked them to take their manuscripts down... not sure how many actually comply or if there's really any repercussions for not doing it.

Anyway, that wasn't my point (that authors can't post it). The point is that it's not automatically available. It shouldn't be left up to the author, either.

In all the publications that I've made, there is a "transfer of copyright" from the author(s) to the journal. This is a sine qua non before they will agree to publish the paper.

This means that the author(s) lose the right to freely distribute or publish the article independently.

If the previous regulation (as I understand it) *mandated* that the article appear in PubMed as a precondition of the grant, then that's obviously something that the commercial publishing houses have to abide by. But in the absence of a legal stipulation, I suppose they can (theoretically, at least) come down hard on any author who goes his own way and publishes to PubMed (or anywhere else) without their explicit say-so.

 

[Curious3141]

Nothing in this, as far as I know, prevents an author from posting his work on PubMed or any other site. What it does do is change it so that authors can no longer be required to post their papers on one particular site: PubMed.

There is a difference between "not requiring" and "forbidding".

Please see my post with regard to "transfer of copyright". Seems to me that this would mean that authors who disregard the publisher's wishes would be on very shaky ground, legally speaking.

 

[ThomasT]

Are most physics papers presented for free access at, say, arxiv.org?

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

From an article printed in The Guardian last August, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist,

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays.​

The answer is of course academic publishers. Perhaps this is just a case of the non-academic media being a bit jealous of academic publishing. There is a quite a bit to be jealous of. Who else has 30 to 40 percent profit margins? From an article published in The Economist last May, http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/

Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.​

I checked up on the profits for Elsevier in another discussion. They do not just publish journals so straight profit margins don't necessarily reflect the profits for journals. Same with Wiley and Springer.

 

[D H]

There is a difference between "not requiring" and "forbidding".

Exactly. By requiring that papers whose research was funded at taxpayer expense eventually be made freely available, publishers are forbidden from denying such eventual publication. Lifting these requirements makes publishers free to forbid authors from doing so.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Yes, journals ask for transfer of copyright. They do that today with results going to PubMed. There are complex legal reasons for this, reasons that I do not entirely agree with. However, nothing changes.

If I transfer the copyright to the journal and post the results on PubMed, and (as hard as it is to imagine) was sued for that, the fact that it was a condition of my grant or contract is not a valid defense. (If A commits a tort against B, the fact that A had a contract with C to do so is not a defense. Although it might also get C in hot water) This is true today, and it will be true if this bill passes.

There are certainly legal issues with the way things operate in real life and the way copyright is held and transferred. Eventually these will come to a head and things will have to change to bring the practical and the legal into alignment. But this bill is not trying to change any of that, so it's somewhat of a red herring.

 

[Curious3141]

Yes, journals ask for transfer of copyright. They do that today with results going to PubMed. There are complex legal reasons for this, reasons that I do not entirely agree with. However, nothing changes.

If I transfer the copyright to the journal and post the results on PubMed, and (as hard as it is to imagine) was sued for that, the fact that it was a condition of my grant or contract is not a valid defense. (If A commits a tort against B, the fact that A had a contract with C to do so is not a defense. Although it might also get C in hot water) This is true today, and it will be true if this bill passes.

But under the old "scheme", the journal should have been aware that an NIH grantee was under the obligation to publish to PubMed. I'm not an expert on contract law in the US (so please put me right if I'm wrong), but isn't it reasonable to expect knowledgeable contracting parties to be aware of each others' obligations, especially ones as well-publicised as this? Which means that winning such a lawsuit against author(s) simply fulfilling the condition of their grant would have been highly unlikely because it would've been easy to argue that the journal ought (reasonably) to have been aware prior to accepting the paper. Since, after all, authors are required to declare all sources of funding and potential conflicts of interest. The fact that the journals agreed to accept the paper anyway could be deemed to have been tacit agreement to let the author(s) fulfill that particular obligation.

If it was difficult for the publishers to win such a suit before, maybe it's easier now. And authors might now feel more intimidated about publishing their work freely to sites like PubMed in the absence of any sort of prior contractual stipulation to fall back upon. Would you agree with that assessment?

 

[Vanadium 50]

, but isn't it reasonable to expect knowledgeable contracting parties to be aware of each others' obligations, especially ones as well-publicised as this?

That's not how it works. Under US Law (and I believe UK law as well), if A violates his contract with B, the fact that A had a contract with C to do so is not a defense.

It's fair enough to oppose this bill - indeed, I oppose it. But the opposition needs to be grounded on what is actually there, on what problem is trying to be solved, and what the alternatives are.

 

[wuliheron]

This reminds me of the radical right wing having a field day with the news the government had spent a few million dollars studying lobsters walking on a treadmill. Like everything else they took the research completely out of context and conveniently forgot to mention that the US seafood industry is one of the strongest growth industries we have today and already worth 70 billion dollars a year. The government spending a few million and lending their expertise on the subject to help the industry was a small investment to encourage its growth.

Like gerrymandering all these proposals for increased censorship are aimed squarely at manipulating the vote and the reason they do it is because it works. Despite congress now having an 8% approval rating 80% of the house seats have not changed party hands once in the last ten years. The things we to do to maintain the fiction of still being a democracy never cease to amaze me.

 

[D H]

This reminds me of the radical right wing having a field day with the news the government had spent a few million dollars studying lobsters walking on a treadmill.

How does this remind you of that? This bill has bipartisan support. One of the two sponsors is a Democrat, the other, Republican.

 

[John Creighto]

We don’t need Journals to keep score. How good of an indicator is publication count when there are many publications which are cited very little? It seems to me that the number of times an article is referenced would be a better indication (sort of like a Google rating) except that it matters who is referencing it and where it is referenced. Surely we can come up with a better rating system then Journals.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Citations have their own flaws. I wrote a paper once that has 30 citations. The previous paper I wrote on that subject had 185. The reason 30 << 185 is that that paper definitely settled an issue. Several lines of theoretical research were immediately shut down by this paper, which unambiguously showed they were wrong. Since nobody wrote any more papers on this subject, why cite it?

Which is the more important paper?

 

[John Creighto]

Citations have their own flaws. I wrote a paper once that has 30 citations. The previous paper I wrote on that subject had 185. The reason 30 << 185 is that that paper definitely settled an issue. Several lines of theoretical research were immediately shut down by this paper, which unambiguously showed they were wrong. Since nobody wrote any more papers on this subject, why cite it?

Which is the more important paper?

What about citations from textbooks or literature surveys? If people purchase the textbook, the schools considers it relevant. If a textbook cites a paper it considers it relevant to the material it is presenting. Text books tend to collect established research and consequently should cite what is considered relevant at the time.

Your point is relevant but even when a paper shuts down a line of research don’t people often cite it as a rational for not taking that given approach?

 

[Vanadium 50]

No, what happens is that people explain why their new ideas are good, not why their old ideas are wrong. I gave you the numbers above.

 

[atyy]

Is the bill really that damaging? It doesn't prevent scientists from putting their work on arxiv first, then submitting it for peer-review as is the norm in theoretical physics. Arxiv does have a biology section. It will just put the onus on scientists to behave as if they believe in open access.

This solution existed before the NIH open access requirement. This solution used to be partial, since although Nature and http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/preprints permitted posting on arxiv before journal submission, some journals such as those run by the American Physiological Society did not permit it. As I understand, that society has now changed its policies, meaning that the theoretical physics solution is even more available to biologists than before.

It's my impression that experimental physicists put their work on arxiv less habitually than theorists. Is this true?

 

[Borek]

From CHMINF-L:

For an opportunity to weigh in on the Research Works Act (RWA)HR 3699, which threatens to reverse progress made in ensuring open access to publicly (NIH) funded research, please consider signing the "White House We the People" petition at http://wh.gov/K25 (slow loading). *You will need to create an account on whitehouse.gov before signing. *

This "White House We the People" petition needs 25,000 signatures by February 22 for the White House to take action, so it is another mechanism, other than writing to your congressional representative, to weigh in with opposition to HR 3699. Please consider signing, passing along to others.