This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs and researchers). This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work, which would have benefited all researchers.
Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
91–100 of 293 posts
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#92Having 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…
Does “public” here refer to nationally-available, or internationally? Should I be able to access your taxpayer’s research?
I was thinking nationally but honestly there's nothing constitutionally that would prevent a non-citizen from accessing the research. I guess, aside from military/encryption research of course.
I see no problem with publicly funded stuff being available world-wide. But given the choice between nothing or taxpayer only, the taxpayer should get first dibs.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#93As 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…
There are similar things in other fields, but I think formal peer review still supercedes them, at least as it's perceived. Things are changing though.
I do think unless there are some significant changes to the system there will be some tipping point where journals will start being ignored but I'm not sure how that will occur.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#94This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding stud…
You're right it doesn't fully address the issue, but it does provide some pressure.
If an article is available for free immediately, there's no need to spend $6K to make it available at all.
Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#95Earlier 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…
The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG.
And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#96No post body was provided.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#97Taxpayer-funded research should automatically enter the public domain, period. Anything less is theft.
No post body was provided.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#99So, we don't have to pay for the access, great.
But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher.
.....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, people.
Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
#100Seems like a good thing. Any downsides to this? Any low hanging fruit it misses in making research more open access?
For consumers of the information and those paying for it, it’s all upside to me. My only prediction for downside will be increased author fees for open access publications. Some venues have ridiculously high fees for open access authors, which is a barrier for some (not every author is funded by a research grant or in a department with a budget that can cover such fees). I expect they’ll go even higher, and the avail…
It is not just a barrier for researchers without lots of grant funding, but also diverts public funds from funding more research and research personnel to paying significant publication fees. This really needed a complementary cap on what would be allowed in paying such fees via grants to bring the costs down.