This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this:
"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.
The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]
Back when I was much younger (CDROMs had just become accessible with read speeds of 150Kb/s) I had an idea to publish volumes of case law on a CDROM. After seeing no technical reason why the idea couldn't work I hit a brick wall. Turns out the case law is free, but the pagination is copyright. Case Law is cited by the page number and without that common 'index' the citations are meaningless. At that time I was convinced that things are broken to the advantage of those who profit/monopolize a product or service. This was in the late 80's, and my drive to disrupt didn't exist.
Case law is free as in beer and free as in speech.
What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.
Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold.
The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.
Ugh, if they delay important things like health care, copyright reform and the economy over gun reform, I'll be angry.
I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas wars, or the drug war, health care, or copyright, or STEM education, or immigration reform.
The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a Death Star by 2016".
The Death Star one was simple, so it is easy to respond to. The research one is complicated. To move from the current system to one where were everything is available at no cost, without compromising peer review and without making it much harder for working scientists to follow the important developments in their field, is a hard problem.
I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old, already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of signatures?
And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
It hasn't been responded to. I'm under the impression that more signatures might increase the probability of response? If not, should we start a new one?
If we start a new petition, I will delete this submission.
This would be nice but how is this going to be payed for? Research budgets are already being squeezed pretty tight given how much the sponsoring organization takes(universities ...), research costs, and congressional attempts to cut funding I just don't see it happening anytime soon. It already costs quite a bit to publish.
The basic idea is that the research papers should be open access 6 months after publication. 6 months is enough for publishers to recoup their costs of publication.
The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.
Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.
This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.
The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.
The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.
The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
Fees != costs. If all the work of preparing research for publication (getting it in the proper format, adding proper metadata, etc.) is done by the researcher, I don't see how it would cost that much to host it. Server/electricity/admin costs, of course, but given that scientific papers aren't exactly most high-traffic website on the planet, and marketing/etc. is not needed I don't see it as unmanageable costs. US government and various departments run hundreds of websites by now, getting one more there wouldn't be that great marginal cost.
What are you talking about? The requirement would be that the articles be published in open access journals, or else published elsewhere after being published initially in closed access journals.
The high prices you linked too aren't an impediment, they are THE REASON TO DO IT.
Also, when it comes to tax payer funded research, it's already, you know, funded.
All NIH-funded research must result in open access publications. How does it work? Basically.. the NIH set up a website and the journals submit NIH-funded papers there, where they are freely available.
It's expensive because the journals are leaches sucking money and IP out of the system. The research was funded by the people, so why should the journals get the rights? The same institutions that are paying big bugs are also the ones contributing all the content. All the reviewing is even done by researchers who end up paying for the journal and contribut to it. It's sickening how the scientific community and the public at large get exploited by those leaches!
This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?
Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the logistics of sharing it. Now those things are still around through organizational inertia. The companies that existed to fill the (necessary) service of printing and shipping all these things don't want to become obsolete. It's not a good reason to keep it around, but it's why you need more than zero effort to change.
Because the article title is misleading. Purely publicly-funded research is freely available (e.g. NASA reports). What's at issue are e.g. papers written pursuant to research that is the subject of public funds, but by research teams who are otherwise employed by a university or research lab. In that case, the resulting paper isn't purely a product of public funding, so it's not obvious it should automatically be freely accessible.
Also, these papers are generally the result of editing/publication processes by journals. The government isn't paying for those papers to be edited and published.
How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition?
Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.
The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.
[+] [-] riprock|13 years ago|reply
"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.
The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California [0]
http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ [1]
[+] [-] bpd1069|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Centigonal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardPrice|13 years ago|reply
The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.
[+] [-] pmorici|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas wars, or the drug war, health care, or copyright, or STEM education, or immigration reform.
[+] [-] thorum|13 years ago|reply
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
[+] [-] kencausey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|13 years ago|reply
And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
[+] [-] randomwalker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
If we start a new petition, I will delete this submission.
[+] [-] pdonis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] short_circut|13 years ago|reply
edit: Just to give an idea of the costs> http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...
[+] [-] RichardPrice|13 years ago|reply
The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.
Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.
This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.
The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.
The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.
The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
[+] [-] smsm42|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VigUi7vv8G2|13 years ago|reply
The high prices you linked too aren't an impediment, they are THE REASON TO DO IT.
Also, when it comes to tax payer funded research, it's already, you know, funded.
[+] [-] streptomycin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheald|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amurmann|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayneack|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
Also, these papers are generally the result of editing/publication processes by journals. The government isn't paying for those papers to be edited and published.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pm24601|13 years ago|reply
Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.
[+] [-] graywh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somid3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxfault|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] accountswu|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]