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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

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Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#61

Post by TallGuyShort »

tombert wrote: post #44

I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it. I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#62

Post by atom-morgan »

burkaman wrote: post #52
atom-morgan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they only exist because the government has the power to create those laws. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

You can still hate the player, especially when they have more power than you. "It's legal" doesn't mean it's right.

I definitely didn't mean to imply that. I simply believe people target their outrage at the wrong party in this instance.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#63

Post by csperkins »

guy_c wrote: post #49
michaelhoffman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.

This is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework

The major UK research funding councils have an open access policy for the next REF - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#64

Post by TallGuyShort »

lugus35 wrote: post #3

"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?

I think that's appropriate for taxes. Some people pay virtually no tax, are we going to demand to see their W2's before we give them access if they want to read? If you want it to be fair we can't pretend the current system is a free market, because it's not. I don't think the public should fund things that benefit a single company - the whole point of forcing people to pay it through taxes is because it's supposed to benefit society as a whole. If that's not true, I want to stop funding it.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#65

Post by matwood »

lugus35 wrote: post #3

"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?

Sharing research is a benefit to everyone. On a pure cost basis, the US gives out billions in the form of cash all over the world. Including access to US funded research in what the US gives away would likely do more to help the US in the long term than much of the money.

I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#66

Post by tombert »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #61
tombert wrote: post #44

I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it. I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up...

It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#67

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tomjen3 wrote: post #48
michaelhoffman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.

That sounds doable, actually. Have the NSF only base their grants on publications in open access journals.

Or even just weight any open access journal more than any closed journal.

That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#68

Post by chias »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #42
ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…

There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers:…

> Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.

Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.

Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#69

Post by TallGuyShort »

tombert wrote: post #66
TallGuyShort wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up... It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#70

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ThomPete wrote: post #31
atom-morgan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it funny that people blame this on greed/capitalism/profit instead of IP laws.

The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.

> The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.

I believe that's the point. "Big corporations lobbying government for rent-seeking legislation" isn't capitalism, it's corruption.

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