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Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#51

Post by RichardPrice »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #42
RichardPrice wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders. The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The…

>The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may ex…

It's a good question. I expect that the Office of Science and Technology is working on it to some extent, but I am not aware of how deep their efforts are.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#53

Post by DannyBee »

anigbrowl wrote: post #32
riprock wrote: post #20

This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are publi…

Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.

Try getting them in bulk for free, so you can republish them. Or not through lexis/westlaw's website, for free.

(I'm cheating a bit here, I've actually been a part of fighting this fight for a very long time.)

Note that these exclusive contracts are also longer term than one would think.

Numerous reputable folks and and reputable companies have offered to host the opinions in bulk, for free, at no cost to the courts, as well as providing search/etc. However, the courts hurt for real budget, and they all see selling these contracts as a revenue source.

(I'm generalizing to both state and federal courts here)

In the case of PACER (you may remember PACER from stories about Aaron Swartz :P), it sadly makes up for a lot of budget shortfall in the courts. PACER's revenue is > 100 million a year.

If you want to hear the long sad story, you can probably find a number of writings by Carl Malamud talking about it.

If you just want to get angry, it would suffice to check out the lawsuits over trying to claim copyright in the page numbering between westlaw and lexis, etc.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#54

Post by rdl »

anigbrowl wrote: post #48
rdl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.

Spare us your sarcasm. What you want is already available via http://bulk.resource.org There is no copyright on judicial or legislative proceedings, nor any restrictions upon their distribution.

It is now. Wasn't that the whole reason aaronsw liberated PACER? (I honestly still don't understand all the parts of the federal court publication system; PACER, the commercial stuff like Lexis/Nexis, physical records, aaronsw's actions, etc. -- there are a lot of fairly undocumented parts)

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#55

Post by bpd1069 »

riprock wrote: post #20

This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are publi…

Back when I was much younger (CDROMs had just become accessible with read speeds of 150Kb/s) I had an idea to publish volumes of case law on a CDROM. After seeing no technical reason why the idea couldn't work I hit a brick wall. Turns out the case law is free, but the pagination is copyright. Case Law is cited by the page number and without that common 'index' the citations are meaningless. At that time I was convinced that things are broken to the advantage of those who profit/monopolize a product or service. This was in the late 80's, and my drive to disrupt didn't exist.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#56

Post by rdl »

RichardPrice wrote: post #6

Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold. The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care ab…

Ugh, if they delay important things like health care, copyright reform and the economy over gun reform, I'll be angry.

I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas wars, or the drug war, health care, or copyright, or STEM education, or immigration reform.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#57

Post by csense »

icelancer wrote: post #31
mayneack wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the logistics of sharing it. Now those thi…

I agree. It's not an unreasonable thing to have to bring to the government's attention considering how quickly technology allowed for these advancements to occur. It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.

> they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.

There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star.

The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest politicians that money can buy.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#59

Post by rayiner »

riprock wrote: post #20

This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are publi…

Case law is free as in beer and free as in speech.

What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#60

Post by rayiner »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?

Because the article title is misleading. Purely publicly-funded research is freely available (e.g. NASA reports). What's at issue are e.g. papers written pursuant to research that is the subject of public funds, but by research teams who are otherwise employed by a university or research lab. In that case, the resulting paper isn't purely a product of public funding, so it's not obvious it should automatically be freely accessible.

Also, these papers are generally the result of editing/publication processes by journals. The government isn't paying for those papers to be edited and published.

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