Having 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 continues.
I agree. All that data should be publically available for reproduction of the work as well as open season. No one should be able to patent it either, or should only be able to file a patent to make it "publically available into perpetuity" to protect it. If tax dollars funded it, we own it as a society. If companies foot the bill then maybe something more complicated needs to exist, but if it is 100% public funded, universities should not be able to sell it off to corps.
That's the system we had in the 1970s (government owned the patent to government-funded research). And what happened is that the government didn't know what to do with the patents, and the inventors, who were best positioned to commercialize their invention, could not justify spending time and money to commercialize something that they didn't own. So the Bayh Dole act of 1980 allowed universities to commercialize their federally funded inventions. The result was an explosion of startups, especially in the biotech industry.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
I'm pretty sure the US doesn't need a revolution in the federal government subsidizing private business ventures. We've got more than enough of that already. The idea of federal funding being verboten in the corporate world is more akin to an ideal state, rather than one to be avoided.
Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.
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. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.
You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.
But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.
The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
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.
"public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"
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.
Although I am generally supportive of research products (data, papers, reagents) being broadly open, I think there is the possibility of a perverse incentive to free-ride on the scientific funding of other nations. As the velocity of information (i.e., faster spread) and international mobility of academics increases, the perverse incentive goes up.
We should be able to use the international patent system for that. Make it publically open to any single "citizen" any international corp seizing on it should have to pay patent fees to the general fund of the US treasury or something set up to feed it back into our government sponsored R&D programs.
Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves...
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
I see no reason why the answer shouldn't be "yes" to each of those bullets. I don't think the logic falls apart. Public goods and services should be public goods and services, full stop.
We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society. So, in that vain, I agree with another poster who said this should all be free. Perhaps with some changes.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
US Federal grants are involved in almost all research done in the US, so this likely means that the vast majority of research papers will become open access.
Open Access will mean that top quality research will no longer require membership of a University; anyone will be able to access research.
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 hard work without adding any value, if you still want to.
Publishing is the trivial part of academic publishing. Preprints already solved the problem of disseminating research results cost-effectively to everyone interested decades ago. The hard part is assigning merit.
Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If they already know the person they are evaluating by reputation, they evaluate the reputation. Otherwise they use things like publication venues, citation counts, academic pedigrees, and earlier grants and prizes as proxies. Anything that tries to replace prestigious for-profit journals needs to provide non-expert evaluators a way of determining which published papers are likely to be of higher quality than the average.
ML, and other preprint-heavy fields like TCS, mathematics, and physics, all have prestigious venues coexisting with preprint servers. Sometimes these venues are even ArXiV overlays. I don’t see the correlation between open access and merit assignment.
I think you're missing the part where academics still submit to these journals and conferences just like everyone else. They just also put it on ArXiV or theri own website at the same time or sometimes before publishing in the bigger journals.
The majority of journal copyright agreements allow authors to post the article publicly if they choose.
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.
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.
The national plan for open science announced by Frédérique Vidal on July 4th 2018 makes open access mandatory for articles and data from state funded projects.
(Edit: actually, I think the Horizon 2020 program already mandated Open Access for most research, although enforcement back then was lacking (and still isn't perfect). Coalition S's plan also attempts to ensure that they don't indirectly fund journals that aren't fully Open Access.)
They should do the same for patent. I see companies and now universities freely take tax payer money to develop their own products. It just becomes an additional source of funding with little string attached.
It's fine to use tax dollar if there's potential for public good, but the tech developed should be released to the public domain right away. I have seen a selfless act from an academic group making decision not to patent a technology because they felt its an important one that many other things can be built on. Now tens of companies were started based on that tech and counting. I hope our gov understand how much value can be unlocked by public domain technology.
Great news. The current situation is basically a stealth transfer of tax money to certain publishers who abuse their position in an artificial oligopoly. Glad to see it slowly ending.
This doesn't seem right. Instead, the author should be forced to send a copy to the whitehouse when they send it to the journal, and the whithouse should make it available for free as a government output.
This is being downvoted for some reason, but there's no reason that some govt branch couldn't require a copy that they would publish as part of the grant.
> Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications4 authored or co- authored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.
"publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories" -- so figuratively "sending a copy to the White House", but also literally "govt branch requiring a copy that they would publish".
In addition, by publishing an "agency-designated repository", presumably it would be vacuumed up by NARA as the government equivalent of the "wayback" machine, so that the published record could not be altered without an audit trail.
Current grant agreements already include a provision for licensing to the government; however, they also offer a 12-month embargo before being made public. This seems to be the "paywall" they are speaking of. The policy change is to eliminate the embargo period, so it can be made public immediately.
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.
Readit News
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 continues.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
And non taxpayers should not get it at all.
https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research...
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. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.
You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.
But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.
The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
Freedom of information is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence.
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.
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Dead Comment
Open Access will mean that top quality research will no longer require membership of a University; anyone will be able to access research.
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 hard work without adding any value, if you still want to.
Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If they already know the person they are evaluating by reputation, they evaluate the reputation. Otherwise they use things like publication venues, citation counts, academic pedigrees, and earlier grants and prizes as proxies. Anything that tries to replace prestigious for-profit journals needs to provide non-expert evaluators a way of determining which published papers are likely to be of higher quality than the average.
The majority of journal copyright agreements allow authors to post the article publicly if they choose.
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.
The theory seems to be that the thesis doesn't count as a publication so you must keep it secret while they turn it into papers/book??
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.
So yes, perverse incentives all around.
https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/fr/le-plan-nat...
Approximate translation:
The national plan for open science announced by Frédérique Vidal on July 4th 2018 makes open access mandatory for articles and data from state funded projects.
(Edit: actually, I think the Horizon 2020 program already mandated Open Access for most research, although enforcement back then was lacking (and still isn't perfect). Coalition S's plan also attempts to ensure that they don't indirectly fund journals that aren't fully Open Access.)
It's fine to use tax dollar if there's potential for public good, but the tech developed should be released to the public domain right away. I have seen a selfless act from an academic group making decision not to patent a technology because they felt its an important one that many other things can be built on. Now tens of companies were started based on that tech and counting. I hope our gov understand how much value can be unlocked by public domain technology.
> Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications4 authored or co- authored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.
"publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories" -- so figuratively "sending a copy to the White House", but also literally "govt branch requiring a copy that they would publish".
In addition, by publishing an "agency-designated repository", presumably it would be vacuumed up by NARA as the government equivalent of the "wayback" machine, so that the published record could not be altered without an audit trail.
https://www.engadget.com/white-house-says-federally-funded-r...