Publishers Flip Out, Call Bill To Provide Open Access To Federally Funded Works A 'Boondoggle'

Mike Masnick — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:46:55 PST

A year ago, we wrote about Rep. Mike Doyle introducing an important bill to provide public access to publicly funded research. As we've been discussing for years, the academic journal business is a huge boondoggle. Unlike just about any other publication, the journals don't pay their writers (and in many subject areas, authors need to pay to submit), they don't pay the peer reviewers -- and then they charge positively insane amounts to university libraries, often knowing that those libraries feel obligated to pay. Oh yeah, and the journals keep the copyright on everything. I've heard of researchers having to redo basic experiments because they were worried they couldn't even reuse data from earlier experiments due to the copyright assignment agreement they had to sign.

Thankfully, for years, there's been a law on the books for any NIH-funded research to guarantee that 12-months after publication, those works also had to be published openly. While some publishers have tried to game this system (such as by demanding a mandatory fee to "deposit" the work in an open access database), on the whole this has been hugely important in making sure that taxpayer funded research is actually available and can be built upon. Over the years, there have been multiple bills introduced in both directions on this issue. There have been some bills that sought to take away this requirement under NIH funding and there have been bills that have tried to expand it to the rest of the federal government and any of the research they sponsor.

Last week, a new version of Doyle's bill was introduced and it's been improved. First off, it's got some nice bipartisan backing in both parts of Congress. On the Senate side, it was co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn and Wyden, while on the House side we've got Doyle along with Reps. Yoder and Lofgren. Also, it reduces the time to open publishing from one year down to six months (like a NY bill that came out last year). It doesn't spread the policy to all federal agencies, but the vast majority of federally funded resarch would qualify (all agencies that spend over $100 million on research are covered).

As the EFF notes in the link above, there are a few lingering concerns about the bill, including some broad language around exemptions for works that "generate revenue or royalties for authors." Also, it could go further in not just requiring open access, but open licensing to make sure such works can more easily be built on to create next generation research. However, those are small quibbles.

But, of course, the publishers are really not happy about all of this, calling it "different name, same boondoggle." This is quite incredible, really, since it's really the publishers who have been getting away with a giant boondoggle for ages. If that gives you an idea about just how ridiculous the publishers' claims are, read on. Nearly every claim they make in attacking the bill actually applies to the publishers themselves much more than to the bill:

It would add significant, unspecified, ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets in the midst of ongoing federal deficit reduction efforts.

As opposed to keeping the works locked up, which adds significant, unspecified and ongoing costs to anyone trying to actually do research and be educated?

Finally, it would undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way, while ignoring progress made by agencies collaborating with publishers to improve funding transparency.

No it wouldn't. We already have the NIH example. Nothing in that "undermined" the publishers' efforts. Again, all that "high quality peer review" stuff comes for free: both the content and the peer reviewing. Most other publications somehow, magically, get by paying their writers and editors and don't have to charge tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription.

“This bill would waste so much taxpayers’ money at a time of budgetary crisis, squander federal employees’ time with busywork and require the creation and maintenance of otherwise-unneeded technology,”

This is the funniest of all. The real "waste" of taxpayer money is in funding all this research that then gets locked up and is nearly useless to those taxpayers.

Basically, the publishers know that their current position with these journals is such a sweet deal that they don't want anything to mess with it at all. That's ridiculous. While they're fighting for ever bigger profits, we're talking about access to research that was funded with our own dollars. It's really sad that the publishers would fight such a thing, though it shows what they really think concerning education. To them, it's not about how best to disseminate information, but how to lock it up and charge insanely high prices for it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

How A Drone Might Save Your Life

Glyn Moody — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:08:00 PDT

There is a natural tendency to accentuate the negative when it comes to drones -- concentrating on how these "spies the sky" represent a threat to privacy and civil liberties. But as Techdirt has reported before, there are other applications that many might find not just acceptable but welcome. And that's not surprising: like the Internet, drones are just a neutral tool, and as such can be deployed for both good and bad purposes.

Here, for example, is a fascinating idea: using drones to get medical equipment to people faster than ambulances (found via Chris Anderson):

You create an app that anyone trained in first aid signs up to, creating a mobile community. You then station defibrillator-equipped drones on top of tall buildings across the city, linked by sensors. When someone needs help, they, or someone nearby, sends a request. The nearest first-aider accepts the task, and rushes to the site, and the unmanned vehicle sweeps from the sky, delivering the kit where it's needed.

This could have a big impact on the numbers of deaths from heart attacks. According to the same article in Co.Exist quoted above, 76,000 of the 250,000 deaths caused by cardiac arrest outside US hospitals could have been prevented, had the right equipment arrived soon enough. Now, it may not always be enough to use a drone to deliver a defibrillator to heart attack victims, but it seems likely that many tens of thousands of lives could, in theory, be saved in this way.

And of course the idea extends to many other life-threatening situations -- delivering blood or medicines to places that are otherwise hard to reach in time to save the patient. It's a useful reminder that drones aren't necessarily evil, it's how we use them that counts.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt. Stories filed under "faster"

Publishers Flip Out, Call Bill To Provide Open Access To Federally Funded Works A 'Boondoggle'

How A Drone Might Save Your Life