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Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

whitehouse.gov

81–90 of 293 posts

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

#81
post #11

"All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025." Why does this need a 3 year transition period? Six months would be plenty.

It has something to do with money and budgeting, at least.

Academics must still publish in the same prestige journals as before to earn merits for jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. Those journals are largely published by for-profit publishers that want their money one way or another. If their subscription revenues will be lower, they will want more money from open access fees. While subscriptions were usually paid by university libraries that receive their funding from various sources, open access fees are often the responsibility of the individual PI.

Some universities have agreements with some publishers that the library will pay open access fees for their researchers. Others will try to negotiate them, but negotiations take time. When there are no such agreements, the PI must pay the open access fees from their grants. That means grant agencies must establish policies on how much funding to include for that in their grants, and the money has to come from somewhere. The agencies must decide whether to reduce the number of grants or the amount of money available for other purposes. They may also request more funding from the Congress, but that takes a lot of time and the outcome is uncertain.

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

#82

Really happy this is happening! There's no reason we shouldn't be able to freely read research funded by NIH, NSF, etc., and there's a ton of high impact work there.

NIH research at least already had a public access requirement

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

#85

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

I think there needs to be good textbooks, but there could be some GOOD rules for conflicts of interest with respect to who chooses/requires which textbooks.

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

#86

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…

I have a friend in economy, which is also a very clossed field with respect to publishing research, and he said that doing so might result in legal action taken against you, or pressure at the least.

That said, I'm in physics and everybody publishes on the ArXiv, either before or after submiting to the journal. From what I see (thanks to SciHub) the information on either of them is the same, except when there is an update it usually is only submited to the ArXiv.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness. The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. An…

There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.

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

#90
100% agree with this. Paywalls for publicly funded research is bs and always has been. This should also be true for all state-funded or even municipally funded research (if there is any). Also should be true for non-profits who fund research (the tax exempt status is a form of public funding). Also any paper published by someone employed at university that receives any form of public funding or tax breaks should also be included. So the only ones who should be allowed to publish research behind paywalls are private for-profit companies who completely self-funded their work. And even they should, for the best interest of everyone, also use open access.
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