US Senators propose to make scientific research freely available.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

"American legislators have proposed that scientific research paid for by US taxpayers should be freely available online to everyone. Analysts described the move as a "potential banana skin" for established scientific publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Springer and Informa."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1772235,00.html

I'm slightly worried about this. As far as I can see research being more easily available is a good thing, but would this make it harder to distinguish peer-reviewed and accepted work from crank publications, or are there still going to be safeguards against that of some form?

[w4rma]

1. The scientific journals will still be able to peer review and publish

the research, imho. However, the non-peer reviewed research would also be available to everyone under the way that I would envision this system.

[Options Remain]

2. as far as I am concerned

If the government paid for it there is no justification for it to not be public domain.

This also applies to patent rights.

[Igel]

3. I don't like the idea.

"The Federal Research Public Access Act - introduced by senators John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat - would require all federal departments and agencies that invest $100m (£54m) or more in research to demand that articles be put online within six months of publication in a subscription journal."

If that's the extent of it, then most crank research would be excluded; and it would still preserve the secrecy of research that should be secret. But I'm still against it, for personal reasons.

Acquaintances and friends in fields other than mine have had to pay publication fees, sometimes hefty, for getting their articles published; if they had to cough up the fees, they'd almost never get their work in print. Their grant money or university covers the fees. However, nearly everybody I've known in those fields gets grant money somewhere along the line.

On the other hand, linguistics is a field where a lot of research isn't government funed, but a lot is. There's rarely a publication fee for getting published. This is because the publishers make money on the publication for a long while after publication, and the subscriptions are common enough. Take away that revenue stream, and suddenly I think publication fees will strike my field--and others that are affected by this. It would mean that non-government-funded research would be harder to get published, or they'd have to charge NIH grant recipients but not self-funded research. Like Congress would let that happen for long.

Slavic linguistics (and many other language-specific linguistics) is a field where the researchers publish either in Slavic-only or general linguistics journals. They get almost no government grants.

[bemildred]

4. You have to wonder how security classification fits into this, too.

The notion sounds good, knowledge should be free, and all that, but I share your suspicions. I had no idea before now that Conryn was such a big fan of the free dissemination of knowledge.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. I consider the source. There's got to be something wrong with it if ...

Joemental and Cornyn are pushing it.

[depakid]

6. Anything that would reign in the academic publishing parasites

would be long overdue. These people add little or no value- money's not going to the researchers- the people who actuallty write the articles- and they attempt to EXTORT huge fees from schools and universities for access to their copyrighted material- which is often subject to "embargo" for up to two years.

There is NO downside to this proposal at all, except that maybe it doesn't go far enough in unleashing their stranglehold on academia- and anyone else who would benefit from the work and use the ideas there to further research and increase the body of knowledhe in this country.

[Occulus]

7. And I bet DARPA projects aren't part of that, right, Senators?

I really do wonder just what they've done in all those black projects aside from finding new and inventive ways for people to kill each other. After all, they get to play with a lot of money.

No tinfoil required, either. They do get a lot of money and we dont know what they do with it all.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. Any person...

can go to a university library and read all the journals they want.

I'll though I'd be perfectly happy if the government wanted to subsidize subscriptions to all major journals for campuses. From what I understand there's a lot of underfunded schools out there.

[NNadir]

9. I like your thinking.

I would very much like library subsidies for subscriptions to important journals.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. Peer Review needs major reforming, anyway

It costs $30 to download most journal articles, yet most of the work that went into them was subsidized by tax money. Why should the journals skim that cream? It amounts to a double-tax simply to support a dubious scientific gatekeeping system.

Peer Review has become a kind of scam on its own, especially where big-ticket medical and military applications are involved. The Internet -- and the requirement of "Skepticism" courses or seminars in most undergrad science curricula -- has enhanced the pseudo-legitimacy of Peer Review to where it's become one of those magical rituals that is invoked as a form of scientific evidence itself: "It must be Science -- after all, it passed Peer Review!" Most Internetters have bought into the idea that Peer Review is the last line of defense against the unwashed hordes of pseudoscience, but the hordes just ain't that formidable, no matter how anxiously John Stossel or CSICOP warn of our imminent scientific doom. Cranks come and cranks go, but the real and enduring threat to Science comes dressed in a three-piece suit, bearing big money.

Peer Review was never intended as a hoop that scientists were obliged to jump through to get a hearing -- it was a kind of a minimum-level set of standards designed to make sure one's research was sufficiently intelligible to other scientists working in the field. The prestige of the journal of publication would provide the level of "authority" given to the work -- itself a problematic approach, but at least less vulnerable to kind of graft that goes on these days.

If one journal goes bad, the editor and review staff can be fired, a new staff can be hired, and the reputation of the single bad apple can be re-established. At the worst, the journal loses its reputation and goes out of business. But if corruption takes hold of an entire scientific institution like Peer Review, no journal, university, or other research facility will be safe. And sadly, that institution is under siege, not from "cranks", but from profit-seekers.

There's also the possibility that some of those cranks have done legitimate work, but the biggest problem we face today is neither the presence of cranks nor the difficulty mavericks have in making their case -- it's the increasing influence of politics, money, and power in the laboratory.

We can survive the cranks -- we always have, and always will. Corruption has always extracted a far higher price than crankery. We ignore the "Peer Reviewed" pseudoscience bearing academic credentials and ready cash at our peril.

--p!