I had a few minutes today and decided to do some surfing around the web to look for items for tomorrow’s “Science Headlines” in the News Bucket, and I ran across an interesting little item at the British Medical Journal. Since I don’t subscribe, I could only get the first 150 words that they had posted for free, (which is ironic, as you’ll see below) but it looked worth investigating:
Most researchers who are funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) do not provide free public access to their papers by posting them on PubMed Central, says an NIH report. Mandatory posting may be necessary to ensure that free access is given in future, says the report.
Prodded by federal departments and Congressional committees, the NIH last year announced a policy on public access to increase the availability of research that it funds. It asked researchers to submit their final, peer reviewed manuscripts to the PubMed Central database–the NIH’s free digital archive of journal literature in the biomedical and life sciences–when their paper was accepted by a journal.
However, less than 4% did so. Several senators have suggested that even more federally funded research should be publicly available for free, the Washington Post reported (15 Mar, sect A: 17). [sic – see date below] Such research includes studies funded by the Centers for [Disease Control, presumably]…
I found the story (dated 9 March?) at the Post, led into an analysis of the wider question of mandatory posting of academic articles on the internet. Which seemed like something we might want to discuss, hence the poll (vide infra). [My research adviser in grad school loved to put vide infra (Latin for “see below”) in his papers, and I’ve never had the excuse to use it until today, LOL.] From the Post:
Political momentum is growing for a change in federal policy that would require government-funded health researchers to make the results of their work freely available on the Internet.
Advocates say taxpayers should not have to pay hundreds of dollars for subscriptions to scientific journals to see the results of research they already have paid for. Many journals charge $35 or more just to see one article — a cost that can snowball as patients seek the latest information about their illnesses.
Publishers have successfully fought the “public access” movement for years, saying the approach threatens their subscription base and would undercut their roles as peer reviewers and archivists of scientific knowledge.
There are several issues in play here that we can discuss in the comments (no subscription needed):
Should information generated using taxpayer dollars only be available to those who can afford a subscription? After all, that amounts to a taxpayer subsidy to the firms publishing technical journals and making a profit in the process; the cyberspace equivalent of allowing mining or logging on federal lands at a cost of pennies on the dollar. Other analogies might be drawn between Microsoft and Linux, Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, or the New York Times versus Google News or ePluribus Media…
The journals answer critics by noting that they serve a useful public function which entitles them to a profit; namely, peer reviewing and refereeing articles submitted to them, thus ensure that errors in the research are identified and corrected to the greatest degree possible before being disseminated to the scientific community and public at large. In the past, the access question has been addressed by large public libraries or university libraries having journal subscriptions that the public can access. But with the proliferation of journals and soaring subscription rates, libraries increasingly cannot afford this function. And if there is a new means of distributing information [i.e., the internet], shouldn’t we all be encouraged to use it?
But the peer-review process does provide added value to the final product. None of us have the time or expertise to check each item of research we run across to see if it’s in the scientific mainstream or kooky pseudoscience. This `weeding out function” is of value to society and should be worth some kind of recompense.
An added level of complexity arises because scientific journals are not just published by private firms, but by professional organizations as well, that need the profits from their journals (aka, the profits from their monopoly distributorship on information) to fund other “good works,” as the WaPo notes:
…Some nonprofit scientific and professional societies fear that without the income they receive from their research journals they will no longer be able to finance their educational and training programs.
“We make money off our journals, but it all goes back to enhance publishing and to enhance the needs of our scientific community,” said Martin Frank, executive director of the Bethesda-based American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals. The society runs an award-winning mentoring program for minority scientists and educational programs for elementary schools and high schools.
One way that has been proposed to address the problem is to make scientists submitting research for (peer review and) publication pay for the service, rather than the end users of the information. What makes this a workable proposal is that the cost would then be passed back to the funding source for the research, which in a great many cases is the federal government. The proposal would be close to revenue-neutral for the government, as it is now paying for all those library subscriptions at universities and the like, and that cost would go away if the publication cost is borne on the “production” end rather than the “distribution” end of the scientific research pipeline.
This model would allow publication of “finished product” research for public use, and is the funding model being attempted at journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS). There are several PLoS e-journals to date, but the general scientific community is still getting used to the idea:
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) seeks to catalyze a change from traditional subscription-based scientific and medical journal publishing to open access publishing. We work toward our goal by publishing our own open access journals and through advocacy for open access among producers and consumers of the scientific and medical literature.
There are PLoS journals in Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics, Pathogens, and Clinical Trials.
Another system for handling access to information is to make the entire process of peer review prior to publication transparent as well. This is happening in the world of the physical sciences, where who gets published first gets to claim the discovery of a new subatomic particle, a new planet around a distant star, or a new theory that might be the quantum mechanics or relativity of the 21st century. In this system, draft papers are published for the scientific community to read and send comments back to the author. The site, arXiv (pronounced “archive”), provides a way for “prospectors” to “file claims” before the “gold rush” starts… “Everyone knows” [at least among scientists] that the papers are works in progress, have not yet been submitted for peer review (the comments from other scientists are, in fact, the first-pass pre-journal-submission peer review, and papers are sometimes withdrawn from the site by their authors if they don’t pass the rough and tumble scrutiny by the scientific community. Here’s their self-explanatory blurb:
arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Cornell University Library acknowledges the support of Sun Microsystems and U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (providers of the E-Print Alert Service which automatically notifies users of the latest information posted on arXiv and other related databases).
A related paper discussing these issues in greater detail than I can here was presented at a UNESCO conference and is available here; here’s a taste:
The essential question at this point is not whether the scientific research literature will migrate to fully electronic dissemination, but rather how quickly this transition will take place now that all of the requisite tools are on-line. Secondary open questions include determining the most effective means of cost recovery for the disseminators of this information, what agencies will be responsible for insuring the long-term archival integrity, indexing, and cross-compatibility for the various research databases, and how peer review will be organized for those disciplines that depend on the value-added it can in principle provide.
Additional resources for those wanting to wade into the fray are available here, here, and here.
So what are our legislators doing about the issues discussed above? From the WaPo again:
After years of asking NIH to encourage public access, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) upped the ante in December by introducing the American Center for Cures Act. It would require recipients of grants — not only from the NIH but also from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality — to post their final manuscripts within six months after publication, or risk losing funding.
That is an option that makes publishers cringe. But it could get worse.
A spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said last week that the senator has been mulling over broader language that would compel public disclosure of research findings from an even greater number of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
With that option looming, the National Library of Medicine’s recommendation — which applies only to NIH-funded research — could start to look good to publishers.
In some respects what system you’d prefer to have adopted comes down to a matter of preference, and may depend on your particular circumstances:
Do you like to eat by going into a fine but pricey restaurant and have your food presented to you fully prepared? If so, the traditional journal model is probably your cup of tea. If you don’t have the time or inclination to check out whether a result is reliable, this may be a valid approach. Say if you’re an entrepreneur deciding whether to invest millions in a pharmaceutical factory.
Do you like going into the kitchen and watching the food be prepared, knowing that some of it may end up not being served because it gets burned or the cook got the recipe wrong, but getting to lick the spoon with the hot pudding on it? If so, the LANL site is probably to your liking, even if most of the papers have not been translated from technobabble into layman’s English. [The British magazine New Scientist typically trolls these papers looking for scoops for their website and magazine, which is why some of their stories of new discoveries turn out to be flash in the pan theories that are never heard from again, like (perhaps) cold fusion. But it’s jolly good fun to ride the intellectual roller coaster of science as it happens in real-time.]
Do you like to grow your own food, forage for mushrooms, chop the wood for your campfire, hunt for game, and cut out all the middlemen – knowing that you’re responsible for not eating something life threatening? Then you might like having everything posted on the Internet prior to peer review so you can have the freshest information possible. You’re willing to assume the responsibility of educating yourself so you don’t rely on bad information. This may be a valid approach if you’ve been told you have a life-threatening illness and have only months to live, especially if you plan to take what you find and run it by your doctor as you’re “peer-reviewer.”
Or do you like to shop at the supermarket, where the food has passed at least some level of health inspection, but it’s still reasonably fresh and wholesome. And the milk is even fortified with vitamin D, and the salt with iodine, for your benefit. But you still enjoy taking it home and cooking it for the family; you’re willing to spend that time. Then a system where research is published for free six months or so after journal publication may be your preference.
Just as there are many ways to obtain a meal, and we all choose different approaches at different times, it may end up that the best approach for the dissemination of scientific information is some combination of the ideas I’ve outlined.
But if we’re the ones paying for the food, whether we’re paying for fishing line and lures or for the services of a five-star restaurant, we have a right to the information we’ve paid for, in some form. The debate is over how, and now that you’ve been informed as to what’s afoot with your tax dollars you can make up your own mind and let your representatives know what you think. As of right now, odds are you know more about it than they do, so help them choose wisely. 🙂
Here is a link to the Lieberman-Cochran bill noted above, found via the Library of Congress’ wonderful THOMAS database:
S.2104 – American Center for Cures Act – introduced by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)
[The Cornyn bill has not yet been introduced, apparently; I could find no link for it.]
