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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

#271

Post by sgent »

I'm concerned that this will do nothing but result in fewer government awards and make non-governmental research more difficult to access. This directive still allows journals to charge open access publishing fees, which often exceed 12,000k, and allow grantees to add this to their grants, resulting in fewer grants.

In addition, there will be no upper limit on open access fees, so privately funded research will essentially be required to opt for closed access publishing so they can avoid the fees. This means it will save nothing for most users of these journals (academics) since now they will have to pay to publish and subscribe.

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

#272

Post by Jtsummers »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #246
tomschlick wrote: post #236

They should go one step further and require all (non-classified) government software to be developed in the open.

If the US government is anything like the military almost everything is marked as classified, it's basically the default state.

It's a common thing, but is also a great example of over classification which is supposed to be avoided (for legal and other reasons, but a primary motivator of of over classification is just laziness, failure to evaluate what is being produced). There have been efforts to properly qualify software as unclassified (maybe FOUO, or now CUI) and only data as classified (secret or above), but then you have a large contingent of classifiers who still think security through obscurity works.

But it's being worked on, maybe one day more will be open source.

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

#273

Post by [deleted] »

pagodinho wrote: post #247
raybb wrote: post #242

> the free material could also include work funded by the national endowments for the arts and humanities. I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls? Do museum admissions charges count as paywalls?

Hmm seems like there are no significant ongoing costs for hosting a file, unlike a museum?

[deleted]

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

#274

Post by _Wintermute »

martin_a wrote: post #255
kbuchanan wrote: post #245

This sounds wonderful; I'm super supportive. But, is there anyone who can articulate the trade-offs without the snark? Are there research groups that benefited from the revenue who will now have to raise even more funds? What's made it take so long? (Beyond just "entrenched interests...")

I think there might be conflicts where research was not only funded by the government but also companies, side by side. These "partnerships" will lose exclusivity/first mover advantage for the companies, so why should they get into that if they can just sit it out and get the results just as early as the non-paying competitors?

This only relates to papers, which would have been published anyway (just behind a paywall), so the companies aren't losing anything here.

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

#275

Post by jjk166 »

mattkrause wrote: post #181
jjk166 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.

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

#277

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

sgent wrote: post #271

I'm concerned that this will do nothing but result in fewer government awards and make non-governmental research more difficult to access. This directive still allows journals to charge open access publishing fees, which often exceed 12,000k, and allow grantees to add this to their grants, resulting in fewer grants. In addition, there will be no upper limit on open access fees, so privately funded research will essen…

so you're saying this doesn't change anything with regards to fees, how will it then lead to a decrease in grants?

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

#278

Post by itcrowd »

Just to clarify some things:

- this is similar to how it works in the EU now

- depositing the final accepted author version (without journal editors' final typesetting / grammar corrections) into a publicly accessible repository seems to be within these guidelines

- open access publishing is typically much more expensive than the closed model for the researchers. Open access fees can be between several hundred and several thousand dollars, depending on the journal

- these costs, ostensibly to offset the subscription model, are now most likely to fall on the researchers (i.e., the government)

- libraries might still want the subscription to the back-catalog which would still be hugely expensive

All in all, I'm in favor of this regardless of the finances (up to a point).

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

#279

Post by dr_orpheus »

martin_a wrote: post #255
kbuchanan wrote: post #245

This sounds wonderful; I'm super supportive. But, is there anyone who can articulate the trade-offs without the snark? Are there research groups that benefited from the revenue who will now have to raise even more funds? What's made it take so long? (Beyond just "entrenched interests...")

I think there might be conflicts where research was not only funded by the government but also companies, side by side. These "partnerships" will lose exclusivity/first mover advantage for the companies, so why should they get into that if they can just sit it out and get the results just as early as the non-paying competitors?

I don't know that this has an effect on mixed funding items from the government. In the acquisition structure from the government there is a delineation between what will be unlimited rights (funded fully by government), government purpose rights (GPR, mixed funding), and limited rights (company maintains proprietary information).

For GPR items they can only be shared with an NDA to the recipient of that information so I don't those would be applicable to making them public access. I think it is more addressing that the unlimited rights items will be by default public instead of being kept behind a publication or distributed "as needed".

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

#280

Post by yamtaddle »

raybb wrote: post #242

> the free material could also include work funded by the national endowments for the arts and humanities. I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls? Do museum admissions charges count as paywalls?

> I wonder what kind of papers or other works come out of National Endowment for the Arts that site behind paywalls?

They do a lot of preservation work, so maybe they fund preservation-related research.

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