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Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

whitehouse.gov

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Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#181

Post by mattkrause »

jjk166 wrote: post #165
koheripbal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume military R&D would be a big exception?

I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.

It does!

DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me).

The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast.

A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#182

Post by hervature »

jjk166 wrote: post #165
koheripbal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume military R&D would be a big exception?

I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.

> I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers

Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#183

Post by librarianscott »

hyperbovine wrote: post #132
Test0129 wrote: post #39

Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continu…

When was this? The NSF has had a 12-month open access policy in place for almost a decade now: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1

Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#185

Post by Ar-Curunir »

jltsiren wrote: post #172
ml_basics wrote: post #62

As someone in the ML community where arxiv rules supreme, I really do not understand why other communities do not also have something similar. I get that there are some perverse incentives around, but there is a relatively straightforward solution to all of the problems with journals - just publish your work on the internet first so that it's out in the open, then send it to some journal who can make money from your…

Publishing is the trivial part of academic publishing. Preprints already solved the problem of disseminating research results cost-effectively to everyone interested decades ago. The hard part is assigning merit. Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If t…

ML, and other preprint-heavy fields like TCS, mathematics, and physics, all have prestigious venues coexisting with preprint servers. Sometimes these venues are even ArXiV overlays. I don’t see the correlation between open access and merit assignment.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#186

Post by librarianscott »

hedora wrote: post #119

They somehow manage to avoid using the words "copyright" and "patent" anywhere in the press release or the memorandum. I assume they mean for this to apply only to copyrights over the actual text of the published paper and supporting data, but it's strange that they are so vague.

No, the author(s) of the journal article still retain their copyright in most cases. This is about access to the articles without having to pay a charge to read it.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#187

Post by jlarocco »

golem14 wrote: post #184

Note: goes into effect in 2026. Much can happen until then. A new administration might be able to undo this relatively easily. I imagine there are lots of lobbyist dollars available. That said, looks great!

I wonder why something like this takes 4 years to roll out?

Is there a legitimate reason? Or is it lobbyist dollars at work already, buying time?

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#189

Post by okennedy »

jlarocco wrote: post #187
golem14 wrote: post #184

Note: goes into effect in 2026. Much can happen until then. A new administration might be able to undo this relatively easily. I imagine there are lots of lobbyist dollars available. That said, looks great!

I wonder why something like this takes 4 years to roll out? Is there a legitimate reason? Or is it lobbyist dollars at work already, buying time?

For the NSF at least, most grants are awarded for 3-5 years. When the last policy shift happened (all grant-supported publications need to be publicly released into the NSF's publication archive), it applied to newly awarded grants. 4 years should give most existing grants a chance to cycle out.
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