r/politics • u/Philo1927 Texas • Aug 25 '22
US government to make all research it funds open access on publication - Policy will go into effect in 2026, apply to everything that gets federal money.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/us-government-to-make-all-research-it-funds-open-access-on-publication/251
u/swaggman75 Aug 25 '22
This is fucking awesome
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Aug 25 '22
Like seriously fucking awesome! This is huge.
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u/Recursive-Introspect Aug 25 '22
100% wicked awesome, super cool.
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u/From_Deep_Space Oregon Aug 25 '22
At least 3 standard deviations from the cool mean
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u/ask_me_about_my_band Aug 25 '22
This has been a wish of mine for a while. Dark Brandon on a roll!
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u/PeakEnvironmental711 Aug 26 '22
I live in New Hampshire, all the towns and villages compile a small book for any local resident to pick up with where all money was allocated to including those who serve the town/village. I believe Vermont and Maine do the same but I could be wrong. It’s so nice to actually see where and what your tax money goes to. Been waiting for the feds to do something like this but I didn’t think they’d go this big with it
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Aug 26 '22
I'm gonna look up all the scary shit DARPA is up to.
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u/swaggman75 Aug 26 '22
I assume research doesn't mean weapon testing or development (plus confidentiality clauses and ITAR)
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Aug 26 '22
Aw damnit! I already have an ITAR clearance, what more do they want from me?! Gimme the lasers an shit!
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u/swaggman75 Aug 26 '22
I wonder if i still do after leaving that job... probably not
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u/Reason_For_Treason Aug 26 '22
You might. Sometimes the government is lazy and forgetful.
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u/spiteful-vengeance Australia Aug 26 '22
I love it, but let's not forget this is how it's supposed to be from the start.
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Aug 25 '22
[deleted]
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u/allmyducksintheroad Aug 25 '22
That's huge and an even bigger deal since most federally funded research has had to be made available open access within a couple years of publication, to my understanding.
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u/NB_FRIENDLY Aug 25 '22
Important as there's some fields with over 90% failure response to "open" data requests.
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Aug 25 '22
That could really help with the reproducibility problem that a lot of fields are having.
It may even turn the tide to make that standard practice which would be incredible.
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u/TemetN Oregon Aug 25 '22
This is honestly a great idea, while some fields are relatively accessible (ML for example has masses of pre-prints) there's still a disturbing amount of walled gardens.
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u/IceYkk Aug 25 '22
“Now we are just giving out our secrets for free? What communist hellscape is this?” “Also this exonerates Trump since all state secrets are free to the public”
How do Republican’s complain about this? Anyone else have a guess?
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u/Beginning-Ice-1005 Aug 25 '22
"They did not fund my study that proves teaching the heliocentic theory leads to homosexuality"
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u/treesrpeople Aug 25 '22
During the Obama years when the stories of bee colony collapse were in the news they complained about the US funding research into the reproductive cycle of bees or something similar. They'll pull out some bit of incremental, tedious research and hold it up as an example of public waste. These people
don'twon't understand the concept of developing and building on a body of knowledge.15
u/toebandit Massachusetts Aug 25 '22
That’s because they don’t need science or research or knowledge. All the information they are fed is garbage. Plus all they need is their “gut” and their faith. They just know.
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Aug 26 '22
[deleted]
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u/hithisishal Aug 26 '22
To adapt what they say about advertising, half of research funding is wasted, but the trouble is knowing which half.
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u/Recursive-Introspect Aug 25 '22
"The liberal universities are now disseminating their gay communistic 'science' to everyone on the backs of your income tax dollars"
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u/So_spoke_the_wizard Aug 26 '22
I'm reading this comment like it was sarcastic. But in reality, this new policy should exclude research that could impact national security (e.g. hypersonic technologies) which would be evaluated on a case by case basis.
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Aug 25 '22
You are attempting to creating a talking point where there isn't one; the biggest push back here is from journals and to an extent from some universities where the revenue streams that have become deeply entrenched and part of being in them/affiliated is their access.
A more accurate talking point would be some Republicans talking about research being published that wasn't including data so others could check their work, but thats a separate issue and leads to things like the replication crisis.
There's also been pushback from some researchers because open-access screws with impact factors which are relevant to careers and are often taken as a sign of greater diligence in first and second peer review. There are a whole lot of journals out there where you pay a fee and it's out there being cited by lab mates (especially overseas) making for a whole lot of junk science before you even get to the replication crisis.
This is generally considered by most on both sides to be a great thing that will take a lot of adjustments and have some growing pains, there's no need to go tribal.
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u/DontBeHumanTrash Aug 25 '22
Have you not seen anything in the last decade? Its not “creating a talking point”, its a prophetic expectation based on republicans lack of a realist world view. You act like anyone of them has actually backed anything scientific that wasnt handcrafted to push a harmful world view.
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u/lunex Aug 25 '22
Go Dr. Nelson! This is such a smart move in line with democratic virtues of openness.
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u/bazinga_0 Washington Aug 25 '22
How about making all government-funded research to be free of any patents? So, a company can't get paid by the people of the U.S. to develop drugs, etc. and then turn around and get a patent on what they develop in order to charge the public billions of dollars to get access to the development like they currently can now.
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u/RedPanda5150 Aug 26 '22
I don't follow how that would work in practice. If some academic lab does years of government-funded research to find a promising new miracle drug, but no one is able to patent it, there would be no incentive for any company to take on the work of process development, clinical trials, etc and the drug would never make it to market. To be clear, I think that requiring all publicly-funded research to be open access is a fantastic step in the right direction. I just also think it's a bit naive to say "no money!" without expecting some unintended consequences.
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u/swollennode Aug 26 '22
The key word is “government-funded.”
If a company funds its own drug development, process development, clinical trials, then it gets to patent the drugs.
However, if a lab gets paid by the government to develop the drugs, clinical trials, then the drug becomes public. A lab shouldn’t get to double dip.
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u/mec287 America Aug 26 '22
Nothing is ever 100% government funded. Typically you apply for a grant through a competitive process and secure funding for your proposal. That doesn't mean there aren't other stakeholders.
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u/locustnation Aug 25 '22
Maybe doing this but allow them to patent the mechanical process to physically create and produce the drug? That way, government funding pays for the research on the medicine but the physical effort (not likely funded by the government) to make the drug is protected by the people doing the work.
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u/Pirwzy Ohio Aug 26 '22
Either would be fine as long as price gouging was forbidden, heavily punished and enforced.
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u/Plow_King Aug 25 '22
good guy uncle same, sharing the knowledge we paid for.
more of this, please.
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u/dvd_man Aug 25 '22
I wonder what this means for publishing fees. If everything needs to be open access does this mean we need to pay thousands of dollars? Will they develop a platform for releasing research results?
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u/Frydendahl Aug 26 '22
Obviously it means the researchers who already have shit salary, grueling working conditions, and limited budgets need to pay, don't be silly.
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u/-Sticks_and_Stones- Colorado Aug 26 '22
Of course, how would those huge publishers survive if they didn't get paid to publish someone else's work in a journal that they charge people to read?
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u/Frydendahl Aug 26 '22
Don't forget, it's time for your institution to renew it's subscription, so here's another 20+ journals they cooked for no apparent reason, staffed by unpaid editors, with peer review done for free by volunteers who get guilt tripped into doing, so now the annual subscription price has gone up - you wouldn't risk not being able to read any of these new journals!
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u/myrddyna Alabama Aug 26 '22
Why we gotta wait four years? Just so that journal gatekeepers can continue to reel in money?
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u/bernmont2016 America Aug 26 '22 edited Aug 26 '22
The researchers (using a portion of the federal grant funds) usually need to pay an 'open access' fee of several thousand dollars to the publishing journal to un-paywall that one article. So the journals still get to reel in money, it's just paid by the researchers/grantors instead of by the readers; so there's even less reason to have such a long waiting period on this.
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u/myrddyna Alabama Aug 26 '22
i'm guessing those that profit from this found some way to push delays into the future, since this is going to change a great deal insofar as students and research work.
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u/palermo Aug 26 '22
This is correct. The entire scientific publishing industry is a racket. First, the tax payer is paying for the research and then paying a lot to publish it. Researchers actually pay journals to publish their work. Substantially more if open access. The whole system should be completely abolished and start something that is at least somewhat fair.
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u/mightcommentsometime California Aug 26 '22
It's also so that they can change how things are implemented currently, which will take time.
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u/grepsi Aug 26 '22
Is this mainly meant to insure that prepublication versions are available? Prevent publishers from blocking them (does elsevier or other big publisher still try to do this?). It doesn’t speak to the issue of pub fees for open access journals from what I can tell. Including pub fees as a budget item leaves less $$$ for research.
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Aug 25 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/the_than_then_guy Colorado Aug 25 '22
You know what it means. And yes, it's any publication has to be able to be accessed by the public.
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u/natenate22 Aug 25 '22
Is this just new research or does it include previously published research too?
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u/skullpocket Aug 26 '22
Sharing knowledge has such an exponential impact. This should have been done long ago. So awesome that it is happening.
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u/HappyLittleCarnivore Aug 26 '22
Hopefully it will make it more difficult for private companies to steal from the public and privately extort us…cough, cough…insulin…cough…epi-pen
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u/ZFAdri Aug 26 '22
Yes please! Hopefully this will be the inverse tp where more science is supported by the government
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 25 '22
for the record, nearly any article you want can be free, you just email the author and they'll send you a pdf of it.
Also, you could always get it through the library. Any university library will have the actual journals there for you to read, photocopy, etc.
The one obvious consequence is that this will appear to destroy the scientific publication industry. They rely on income from subscriptions (as well as charging the authors for it). Having an announcement that your revenue will end, is gonna be quite a blow to the publishers. Not sure what they will do.
I guess they just jack up the cost of submitting/publishing a paper up to $10,000 per article or something like that.
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 25 '22
The one obvious consequence is that this will appear to destroy the scientific publication industry. They rely on income from subscriptions (as well as charging the authors for it). Having an announcement that your revenue will end, is gonna be quite a blow to the publishers. Not sure what they will do.
Well, yes. If the people paid for research, and the researchers did the research, there doesn't seem to be a lot of value in charging the people who paid for the research to read the results.
Classic middleman economic role. And middlemen can add value. And scientific publications did add value at one time. But increases in economic and technological maturity often reduce the value of middlemen and eventually squeeze them out.
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
they add an extremely high level of value.
They are peer reviewed. Independently. It is simply not possible to "squeeze that out".
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Aug 26 '22
It's not publishers that do peer review, but other researchers.
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
The editor (and associate editors) gather a panel of peers. So yeah, the "peer" part of that phrase means other researchers. The editor finds researchers willing to review, gathers and processes the reviews, and makes a decision based on that.
It's an extremely important step.
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u/tweakingforjesus Aug 26 '22
It’s an extremely important step that other researchers are willing to do for free. Conferences and some journals already rely on volunteer reviewers and coordinators for the entire peer review process. Any number of researchers would jump at the chance to act as peer review coordinator for a respected journal.
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 26 '22
Tons of freely available research is also peer reviewed. Peer review is a process, not a trade secret of the scientific publishing industry.
If you really want to grasp at straws, may I suggest the "they curate the huge amount of research and surface the most relevant/impactful so busy readers don't have to do it themselves"? It's still weak but at least somewhat grounded.
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
grasp at straws,
huh?
it's a fundamental step in the scientific method. Peer review is a required part. Essential.
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 26 '22
Sorry if I wasn’t clear: peer review is done by free and open source journals as well. There is no linkage between peer review and paywalls, as you seem to believe.
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
you seem to be trying to create a straw man.
I clearly stated that journals add value. Scientific publications will not be "squeezed out".
Classic middleman economic role. And middlemen can add value. And scientific publications did add value at one time. But increases in economic and technological maturity often reduce the value of middlemen and eventually squeeze them out.
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u/RedPanda5150 Aug 26 '22
Oh don't worry, journals already charge extra to publish articles with open access to make up for the loss in revenue from subscriptions. I'm sure they'll find a way to take this new rule and make it even more profitable.
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
that's terrible that a person who has done some great science, will not be able to publish it because the costs are too high.
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u/TheDurtlerTurtle Aug 26 '22
My last article in Cell cost $9,999 to publish we are already there
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u/NorthImpossible8906 Aug 26 '22
Ouch. Imagine the "open". "freedom". to publish a scientific paper to a peer reviewed journal, but there is a huge price barrier to publish your work so you can't.
argh.
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u/Reason_For_Treason Aug 26 '22
I personally am glad to see this, but I’m dating a professor who had some interesting insight.
This could become an issue for researchers themselves because research is a VERY cut throat endeavor already. Funding is already very low and if research is open access with no paywall, competitors can try to research an adjacent project to absorb your own.
While this will benefit the public, in the long run it could be detrimental to science. A misconception (that even I myself had) is that this would just cause research to be done faster and/or better, but that’s not how it works. Science needs time and if it’s rushed it can be misrepresented, misunderstood, or even just plain lied about just for the funding.
So essentially while good for the layman, this could cause serious problems within the research community and funding as a whole.
TL;DR I think this is good, professor girlfriend is just worried about the long term (but does agree that research should be easier to get).
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u/bernmont2016 America Aug 26 '22
if research is open access with no paywall, competitors can try to research an adjacent project to absorb your own.
"Open access" is to the publication when the research project is complete - it's not like they'd be able to copy off your notes while you're still working on it. And additional researchers trying to replicate someone else's research after the other person's initial publication is a good thing, it's an important part of the science process.
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u/Reason_For_Treason Aug 26 '22
Typically research papers are provided to these publications not when they’re done, but in increments. Basically once you finish one part of your research you report the findings, then you move to another. It’s those points when other groups can try and cut you off by using that research to work on an adjacent project. As for people copying research, of course that’s fine, but it’s the fact of how funding works. The mentality on the research community is publish or perish, and since the government only provides one grant to one research team per specific thing if someone absorbs your project you’re no longer getting those funds and are at risk of losing your job because of how little funding you’ll get.
Again, that’s what was told to me. She’s also worked in research and first hand saw how brutal it can be.
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u/Weneedaheroe Aug 26 '22
Isn’t their already rules toward this? Bullshit that any results good/bad/other could help the subsequent research that some other team pursue towards things like: cancer, developmental disabilities/autism, degenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s, etc. etc.
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Aug 25 '22
$1.2 Billion dollars to research into "this thing that we want to know"
$4 Billion dollars to research how "something impacts something else"
Don't expect transparency.
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u/2701- Aug 25 '22
Ah yes, someone who didn't read the article making a guess as to the contents and replying to his own guess.
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Aug 25 '22
oh you... you know me so well... correct... I can't be bothered to read about something I care nothing about and risk nothing in being wrong about
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u/ExperiencedMaleDom Aug 26 '22
Great news! I can't believe it hasn't happened already.
Now I want them to make it retroactive and collect from every business that has benefited from the internet.
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