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The Scientist: NewsBlog:
Anti-open access bill is back
Posted by Elie Dolgin [Entry posted at 5th February 2009 10:43 PM GMT]
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Relative costs by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2009-02-18 18:23:22] PLOS Biology charges $2850 to publish a paper, which can be waived for those without funds to pay, and BMC Biology charges $1750 which is waived for people in low-income countries. Since some journals charge little if any for pages or figures, this means that the copyright on papers is worth at most about $2000 to the author, institution, or funder.
However, the cost to produce this research is often a year or more of time billed to public funders with a median postdoc salary somewhere around $38,000, plus tens of thousands of dollars of supplies and equipment. It is true that not all of this money goes exclusively to producing results - after all, the stated purpose of many NIH grants is to train scientists, not to produce data - but I think the average man on the street would say this is the top priority. So Conyers' law would allow private individuals to sell perhaps $40,000 worth of data for $2,000 in services, often in association with some personal career gain to be achieved by association with a particular private journal. Even if we neglect the immense inefficiency of copyright in a digital age, this is not acceptable public policy. Increased value??? by daniel miller [Comment posted 2009-02-13 20:55:44] When you consider the page charges that these publishers require and then the cost of a subscription, it seems to me that they are already more than adequately compensated. Furthermore, it is not true that the information is widely available. If you don't happen to live near a university town, you are out of luck. If you don't happen to live near a university that allows outsiders access to their collections or to their data bases, you are SOL. If my taxes have already paid for the work, I should be allowed to read it. pro-open access by LeLeng To [Comment posted 2009-02-13 16:18:49] If tax payers already paid for the research, then they should have access to the report regarding the research. Please take a stake and stab the anti-open access bill. Expose it to sunlight so it really dies then use it as fertilizer. Devil's advocate by MARK WEBER [Comment posted 2009-02-10 22:07:35] I am all for open access. I think all scientific work should be available to everyone everywhere for free. However, I also do see the value that some publishers bring to the process of getting the work of scientists into the proper form of a professionally published paper. Here is a project for the "new economy": put unemployed or retired scientists to work on transforming the scientific for-profit publishing industry to a government run industry. The government pays for the research to be done, which is great, but why does it stop there? An equally important part of science is to disseminate it! Have the government run the industries that publish papers. This will complete the cycle and get corporate greed out of this important public service. Publishing greed as usual by DAVID TRIGGLE [Comment posted 2009-02-09 13:57:24] Adam Smith had it right when he said in The Wealth of Nations: "People of the same trade or profession seldom meet together even for merriment or diversion, but that the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise pr1ces". This is why publishers make those campaign contributions by null null [Comment posted 2009-02-09 12:01:34] It takes a lot of money to get elected these days. Since it only directly affects a few persons, special interest legislation like this is legislator's way of paying back their campaign donors without getting the voters overly upset.
The epitomy of smart business practice is to privatize profits and socialize costs. The scientific publishers intellectual property cost is mostly socialized. The tax-payers fund it and the researchers donate their labor. It is as if movie studios or TV networks got their programs for free and the donors could never make them available to anyone else. Somehow, this seems unfair. The present law represents a reasonable compromise among the competing interests. Historically, monopolies tend to destroy themselves as market-based solutions evolve. E.g., by open accesss journals such as Plos. Many major journals make their material available on-line after a year anyway. Similarly, some (e.g.) Nature-owned journals allow the author to pay a fee to make the material available on-line immediately, a la the on-line journals. In a Darwinian process, Journals that do not adopt some "open-access" model are likely to lose-out for good papers to journals that do. If you can't get your paper in PNAS, Nature, or Science ( which provide free access after a year anyway), you might as well publish it in any good open-access journal. it should be open-accessed... by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2009-02-09 03:14:59] oh come on, it should be open-access not this way.. its so sad and disappointing to see and hear this.. its really enough, way beyond it should be , nearly every paper mag and online contents already have a payment to use etc.. haven't they sucked up everything from researchers (students and so on)already? what an insatiability is this ? Relax, Ellen by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2009-02-09 00:10:21] Redundancy is the best way to preserve information, as any student of DNA structure knows. When the library at Alexandria burned, it was a calamity because much of the information there was unique. The invention of printing was a vast improvement in the stability of information, because it is easy to print lots of copies of things. Still, large collections of printed material are vulnerable because it is practically impossible to copy the entire collection for backup. Electronic information storage is even more stable, because entire databases can be copied and distributed world wide quite easily. I think we can trust the techies to make sure the format is updated as the technology evolves. Carving stuff in stone (or on metal foil) would be a huge step backward, because a single copy of anything is vulnerable to the slings and arrows of fortune. Conyers should be recalled now! by DENNIS HOLLENBERG [Comment posted 2009-02-06 17:38:39] We need fewer air-head stooges in the government: get rid of Conyers (note that I'm a supporter/voter of the Democratic Party).
First author, but not corresponding author... by Sergio Vasquez [Comment posted 2009-02-06 16:54:26] ...so I do not have the ability to obtain a complimentary published copy of my work in print.
No biggie, right? My girlfriend contacts the publisher who quotes her $523 for the single issue in which my manuscript was published! I support open-source, peer-review academic work such as the PLOS archives and am astounded that more has not been done to promote such a fantastic innovation.(Though I admit it does little to help those obtain glossy print copies of their work...) Devil's Advocate by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2009-02-06 15:04:49] While I do not support this bill and am a proponent of open access, I would like to pose a question. Under the current system, who does not have access to research paid for by US tax dollars? Most major research institutions subscribe to a wide variety of journals and many have reciprocal arrangements with other institutions to access their material as well. Many major research universities (at least in my area) allow private citizens to access their collections as well. While not every area of the country has such ease of access and it is not as convienient as online access, are the US taxpayers really cut off from information?
Personally, the only people who have contacted me for copies of my publications (which I happily provided) have been from overseas, and usually right after the paper comes out (not after a year's embargo). Why Is This Bill Back? by RICHARD EBRIGHT [Comment posted 2009-02-06 13:43:41] I can see why a Republican might support a return to a system in which taxpayers pay for research results that then are transferred, without charge, to a third party that charges taxpayers for access. (This is the the quintesssence of Republican policy in the Bush and post-Bush eras: transfer public funds from taxpayers to narrow private interests.)
But why, apart from ignorance, would a Democrat support this? Ellen, Good Point... by Linda Spencer [Comment posted 2009-02-06 12:55:03] Actually this would be a good topic to send to Anderson Cooper 360, et al. There ought to be widespread public discussion of this, not as part of a doomsday scenario at all, but just as a realistic look at the fact that for example Babylon and Mesopotamia had far more durable media for their libraries than we do now. It's really nice to be able to read their old receipts and ledger pages, but it would also be nice some day to be able to read our science. IF we should have an upheaval as they did. Sometimes a bit of risk management is good. I am more concerned about a related matter by Ellen Hunt [Comment posted 2009-02-06 12:41:15] My largest concern in science publishing is that the large number of publications we have today could be lost if we have a drastic discontinuity in our civilization. If we look around and see that global warming is happening, we are in the midst of a financial crash, and our world is vastly overpopulated, this possibility becomes at least plausible.
What will happen to all of that work? Shouldn't we have a project to put the best of it etched onto metal foil or something that will last through the ages? Our media are evanescent. I can't even read old floppy disks from 20 years ago. What will happen to all that in 50 or 100 years? Anti-open access is drivel by Ellen Hunt [Comment posted 2009-02-06 12:33:18] The federal government pays for the work, so the taxpayers have a right to it, period. Scientists write it, which gives us a copyright and we do the work for the federal government. Only because we transfer our copyrighted work to the journal does it belong to the journal. The journal does not pay us for it, we are expected to be grateful that they allowed us to get our work into their journal. And the only reason that happens is that journals have been able to club scientists into submission with the journal's clout.
This idea of ownership by the journal is a recent development of the early part of the 20th century. The roots of academic publication are in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which held that science could only advance by open exchange of ideas. Simply put, open exchange of ideas is the whole point of publication in science. There is no other purpose. There never was a mandate to give ownership of that published work to private parties to play dog-in-the-manger with. Ownership of copyright came about for economic reasons only, and the time for it has passed. It was always a pragmatic matter, and never had anything to do with science. Private-SectorJournal Publishers: No Significant Value by RICHARD EBRIGHT [Comment posted 2009-02-06 12:22:12] The Association of American Publishers lies brazenly when it refers to "significant value" added by private-sector journal publishers.
All content is provided--without financial remuneration--by researchers. All substantive vetting of content is provided--without finacial remuneration--by reasearchers. Private-sector journal publishers add nothing, apart from their imprimatur (the value of which is unclear), their operation of online repositories (the value of which is zero, in view of the fact that public online repositories exist), and the delays and inefficiencies that they introduce into the publication process (the value of which is negative). Nevertheless, private-sector journal publishers extract financial remuneration. Substantial financial remuneration. In short, private-sector journal publishers are parasites. The sooner that private-sector jouranal publishers are removed from the picture, the better it will be, both for science and for the taxpayers who support science. Comment on this blog |