Freely Available Publicly-Funded Research Papers
Article source Seed Magazine
Peer reviewed taxpayer funded research isn't normally available to the public, but it should be. The Senate bill S.2695 or the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 would change that. This would be a plus as far as tax-dollar funded research accountable to the public, yet we still need far more transparency on the other end. That is the anonymity problem of peers only deciding who gets what research grants to begin with. Corruption and politics, intentional or not, creeps in too easily.
You might think that the results of publicly-funded taxpayer research would be freely available to the citizens who footed the bill in the first place, but you would be wrong—and perhaps in the mood to remedy the situation. That's the logic that motivated John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to introduce a bill to the Senate that would require federal agencies with yearly budgets in excess of $100 million to put all the research they fund into digital repositories no later than six months after initial publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
If passed, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 would affect all research fully or partially funded by agencies like NIH, USDA and the National Science Foundation, and would include hundreds of thousands of papers. The NIH alone funds the research behind 65,000 papers per year.
If passed, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 would affect all research fully or partially funded by agencies like NIH, USDA and the National Science Foundation, and would include hundreds of thousands of papers. The NIH alone funds the research behind 65,000 papers per year.
Of course journal puplishers are against the legislation for obvious reasons.
Many journal publishers say that open access of the sort laid out in the Cornyn-Lieberman bill would make subscription-based publications redundant, rendering moot the valuable process of selection, editing and peer review for which publishers are currently responsible.
"You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater," said René Olivieri, CEO of Blackwell Publishing, a lead publisher of science journals including Bioethics and the Journal of Zoology. "There needs to be an income stream from the core scientific community, the libraries, the research institutions, and let's not forget, a lot of the subscriptions are paid for by corporations and scientific laboratories within the private sector. If you give it away for free the income stream dries up. The system of control and value-adding just withers away."
"You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater," said René Olivieri, CEO of Blackwell Publishing, a lead publisher of science journals including Bioethics and the Journal of Zoology. "There needs to be an income stream from the core scientific community, the libraries, the research institutions, and let's not forget, a lot of the subscriptions are paid for by corporations and scientific laboratories within the private sector. If you give it away for free the income stream dries up. The system of control and value-adding just withers away."
How about this. If the research is held from public publishing for a period of say 6 months, after which they have maybe 30 days to file the research. It would still be publically available eventually, and the corporations, labs and scientists will still suscribe to their journals, not wanting the long delay for their information. The public interest and would still be served while bringing sorely lacking accountability to research as it is presently done.
Posted Thursday May 25, 2006 | Catagory: (Science & Technology) | Permalink
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