Make All Academic Research Databases Free For Everyone

by: Chris Bowers

Mon Mar 16, 2009 at 13:45


Yesterday was Natasha's birthday.  One of the gifts I wanted to give her was a subscription to the University of Pennsylvania library (we live right next to UPenn), so that she would have remote access to all the academic databases (the free library of Philadelphia provides remote access to some, but not all, of those databases).  Natasha has long lamented her lack of access to scientific journals now that she is no longer in school. Such journals are key to both her work as a sustainable food writer.  Also, it is relevant to her personal enrichment, due to her interests, and background, in biological science.  Further, as a long-time graduate student myself, I remember just how useful it was to have remote access to such a treasure trove of academic work.  Even now, there have been numerous times during my writing where I run up against firewalls on JSTOR.  So, I figured it was time to get us access to all of this great information.

The problem is, as a I discovered, even if you are willing to spend $400 a year for access to the library as an individual, or $800 as part of a corporate account, access to many of the academic databases is still restricted. Unless you have a job with the university, or are enrolled as a student, many of the databases with the best available research are nearly impossible to access.  Right now, the only way it seems that we can ever have access to many academic journals is for someone with access to illegally let us borrow their username and password.  Nice.

Making all peer reviewed, academic journals free to the entire world online should be a cheap, simple, no-brainer policy for the federal government to improve society.  How much would it cost the federal government to publish these journals online and for free? $10 million? $50 million?  Probably about that much.  But even if it is one billion dollars, are we seriously denying 95% of the country access to our best academic research because we are unwilling to shell out the necessary 1 / 3000th of the federal budget? Given that we constantly worry about our educational competitiveness as a country, there is simply no justification for allowing the academic publishing world to restrict access to our best research to such a small sliver of society.  It is enough to remind someone of the local monopolies medieval European monasteries had over books.

The only people who make money off of these databases are the academic publishes themselves.  The people who write and review the articles in these journals do it for free (well, for tenure, but still technically for free).  The only exchange of money is when the libraries pay the publishers for the information.  As such, these publishers are the ones restricting this remarkable cache of information for being available to anyone with the curiosity to learn.  This is ridiculous.  How can we say that we are serious about making America the country with the most per capita higher education in the world, as President Obama has recently set as a goal, if we continue to allow academic publishers to restrict our best academic research to a small sliver of our society?

It is high time that we placed all the content of peer reviewed, academic journals online, for free, and without any employment-based firewalls. It is a simple, cheap way to make a big leap forward for our culture, our democracy and our educational system. Information like this should not be restricted to a small percentage of society for the enrichment of the academic publishing world.  There really is no way to justify denying 95% of the country access to our best, peer-reviewed academic research.

Chris Bowers :: Make All Academic Research Databases Free For Everyone

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The government is already footing a big part of the bill (4.00 / 3)
It's not just the US government - governments of other countries help. But the US government is the biggest single entity.

1) The federal government funds the vast majority of scientific research. When Scientists publish, there are often charges from the publisher to cover typesetting, figure reproduction, and electronic archival. Those charges are payed out of money obtained from research grants - i.e., federal money. Grant proposal budgets almost always contain a line item for "publication costs".

2) The publishers business plan is made viable by University libraries paying the exorbitant subscription fees. The money to pay those fees is available to the University in no small part because of "Facilities and Administrative Costs" charged as a percentage of every research grant. The rate charged varies from one University to another, but it is roughly 50% of the research funding requested in the grant.

So the Federal Government is already paying for the system that then turns around and asks you for $35 for every PDF you download.

On top of that, H.R. 801 (Conyers) would prevent the Federal Government from undermining the system. Some federal agencies are experimenting with requiring that publications resulting from federally funded research be open access. Conyers would prevent those agencies from making that requirement. Tell your representatives to introduce an alternate bill that would require all publications resulting from federally funded research be open access.


Actually, Conyers may have a dead bill there (0.00 / 0)
When the Omnibus Act of 2009 passed last week and was signed into law, one of the provisions was this (scarfed from SPARC and Alliance for Taxpayer Access):

Washington, D.C. - March 12, 2009 - President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2 million users each day.

The new provision reads in full:

   The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

"This is a significant moment for all of us in the health community, and for efforts in health reform. With free access to health research, individuals are empowered with the knowledge necessary to understand the health threats they and their families face," said Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. "Congress recognizes the incredible power of technology and innovation in enabling new solutions for the proactive management of health, consumer-driven healthcare, and novel partnerships and collaborations in research. Congratulations to us all."

The NIH Public Access Policy addresses the public's growing need for high-quality health information and promotes accelerated scientific advancement in the biomedical sciences.

"Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education," said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). "Improved access will enable universities to maximize their own investment in research, and widen the potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for others to build upon."

Heather Joseph, spokesperson for the Alliance for Taxpayer Access noted, "Thanks to the work of a wide coalition of patients, libraries, researchers, publishers, students, and taxpayers, the results of NIH-funded research can be accessed - and used - in ways never before possible. The successful implementation of this policy will unlock the potential of this research to benefit the public as a whole. "

However, it never hurts to continue to put the pressure on Conyers to drop the bill, just in case.

This doesn't fully satisfy what Natasha and Chris want, and I will post more comments about the issues involved.  I can assure anyone we are talking more than a Billion though.  


[ Parent ]
I should note (0.00 / 0)
the ~50% F&A charge covers a lot more than library budgets, but library budgets are a part of it.

Before trashing the academic publishers (4.00 / 2)
it would useful to know how much value they add to the system. Perhaps it's really close to zero, and they are just middlemen who need to removed from the equation. But my guess is that they do add something, generally. If so, somehow their function has to be paid for.

Peer reviewed (4.00 / 1)
Peer reviewed publications are a big deal; it is the journals that provide the objective/subjective peer review today.  We are better off keeping the peer review in place, one way or another.

The elitists aspect of the journals might have real value, as well, as it allows scientists to figure out what they should read.  Obviously, this function is highly related to the peer review; each journal has its own threshold.

In both cases, the value journals really provide isn't information, but an information filter.  That might not be how journals originally thought of themselves, but in the internet age one can see how valuable that can be.

Clearly in the internet age this journal process is radically outdated.  But something needs to replace it.  The peer reviewed filter is still needed, I believe.


[ Parent ]
Yeah, but the reviewing is usually done pro bono! (0.00 / 0)
Sure, the journals have people on staff who contact qualified reviewers and hassle them when they don't hear back. That seems to be the only real value that they add.

[ Parent ]
Usually is the watch word (0.00 / 0)
Not all do it for free, but even the ones that are paid aren't paid very much.  

[ Parent ]
Prestige (0.00 / 0)
Right, reviewers don't get paid.  My assumption is they do it for the prestige, as it 'proves' they are an expert in the particular subject matter.  There is where the elitist aspect of the journal helps in the current environment.

One can make the arguement a journal doesn't need to be more than an RSS feed and Good Housekeeping seal of approval.  But something needs to take its place.  I don't think fellow scientists marking papers +4/Troll is quite the way to go.  Though, it is an interesting thought...


[ Parent ]
Prestige? (4.00 / 2)
Many do it anonymously. Where's the prestige?

I'd say most do it because it's necessary - if you're publishing, then someone's doing peer review for you. If you're publishing but not doing peer review, you're a freeloader.

A secondary reason is that it gives you some ability to shape the field. Through a well thought out review, you can have a substantial impact on the tone and emphasis of the final publication.


[ Parent ]
yes, it is part of the job (0.00 / 0)
Reviews are part of the job for professors. Assigned time is divided into research, teaching, and service, and teaching can be less than half of the workload.

 

New Jersey politics at Blue Jersey.


[ Parent ]
I stand corrected (0.00 / 0)
I was making an assumption that seemed straight forward to me, but apparently was not.

This actually implies it would be easier to replace the journal system than I thought.


[ Parent ]
And Happy Birthday, Natasha (0.00 / 0)


[ Parent ]
This Really Bugs Me, Too (4.00 / 7)
Not just in terms of my own limited access, but in terms of how it dumbs down the internet as a whole.

How many times have I done a search, and located some very interesting-looking articles, only to find they're behind an academic firewall, available for maybe $24.95 or whatever?  But I can get all the free blather I want from the Heritage Foundation.  There is simply a vast imbalance in information quality here that virtually ensures the dominance of bad information.  It's frankly quite amazing how well we manage to do in this sort of environment .  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3


This is a significant advantage (4.00 / 3)
that the right has.  Their distortions are free.

Another advantage: the right's ability to create bogus books which mascaraed as scholarly works from the Heritage foundation or the Hoover Institution.  See, for example, the recently released book on the financial crisis describing how the government is to blame for the entire mess.  It's absolute nonsense, but they released it quickly and it allows right wingers to cite the book as proof that it was all the government's fault.


[ Parent ]
There are non-profit publishers (4.00 / 2)
The American Institute of Physics is a non-profit that provides publishing services for a number of scientific societies. The charges for their journals are a fraction of those for the commercial publishers.

They defray the costs somewhat by having the author's pay a fee to cover production costs (a page charge). This is voluntary, but most research grants include a provision for this as part of the funding, so the authors don't actually pay it. The journals always have more papers submitted than they can accept.

Some groups have taken to publishing online either as pre-prints or along with the print publication.

A simple solution is for the agreement between the author and the publisher to be such that copyright remains with the author and they are free to post a copy of their paper online for others to download.

Many journals are a scam, especially in biology and medicine where a subscription can cost $10,000 or more a year. Libraries are already sharing subscriptions and taking other steps to minimize cost.

We live in a capitalist society and gouging is part of the landscape. If you are going to pick on this flaw then you should look at other areas like how government sponsored research in medicine get turned into private patents. This used not to be the case. Anything that the government paid for was available to others.

This is all part of the privatization of everything that isn't nailed down. There is nothing preventing a group of scientists from forming a rival journal that exists online with whatever fee structure they wish. In fact there are many such now. The problem is that authors like to publish in the most prestigious journals since this has the biggest effect on tenure and promotion.

If "publish or perish" were eliminated from career tracks the volume of junk published would diminish greatly. With all the talk about reforming K-12 education there is little about having qualified college professors.

Between the researchers who have little interest in teaching and the huge number of adjuncts student's college experience is spotty at best.

Some public libraries have access to databases, you should check with yours and see what they provide. They may also have agreements in a regional consortium.

Policies not Politics


Anyone seriously interested in researching either (4.00 / 4)
economics or politics will quickly find access to JSTOR is an absolute necessity.  My own personal interest, political polling history, is hard to pursue without access to two resources:

* JSTOR
* The Roper Center's data repository

Both are expensive, and absolutely include information that should be in the public domain for free.  



The STM and Business Publishing Industries (4.00 / 2)
are the biggest problems.  While its true that the contracts preclude remote access for subscribers to places like Penn and Harvard, I think many of them allow one to go in and use the resources there.

That said, it wouldn't solve the problems Natasha and Chris would run into.   Business publishers preclude anyone but faculty, staff, and students from using their products, particularly market research reports, and iconic products such as Bloomberg Financial Markets.   Why?  Because of two reasons:  one, they sell data on the retail market, and expect people to buy it.  (Associations BTW also are a problem in not giving away free information as their primary shareholders are members) and two, the libraries or schools who buy it get significant discounted rates, even though they are still expensive as hades to the general entrepreneur like Chris or to an ordinary citizen like me.  

The next question that arises is, well, why do libraries or schools buy the content if it is off limits to most except the 3 constituencies Chris identified?   Because, first, the curriculum and research have gotten so demanding and these databases help students be more successful in their projects (after all, it is the student who is footing most of the bill through tuition and fees), second, and more important, the students are exposed to an array of resources in which they may use themselves when they get out, and can negotiate which pieces of the reports they want if they are part of a small business.  Otherwise, allowing Chris and Natasha to use it for profit, which they would be, let's be honest, is a conflict of interest when it comes to buying it on the retail vs the wholesale market that research institutions pay for it.

That's the business publishers side of it.   We haven't addressed the problems with scientific materials.   So I can only throw out a couple of things.

1) Open Access models can be sustainable, but someone has to pay.  Chris is suggesting the Feds to do it.  That's not a bad idea, except the Federal government doesn't like entitlements, which is what Chris is sort of asking for.  And academic journals are not life and death to most citizens--nor do they contribute to that many livelihoods. Thus, it would be one time payments, with hopes that they could be continued, but one cannot guarantee it.   If one recalls, Bush tried to get rid of Amtrak a few years ago.  Congress saved it because too many folks, especially in the NE where Chris lives, rode the system.  Many commuters' livelihoods depended on it, including Joe Biden's.

If one is to choose between Amtrak, Head Start, and academic journals for free, which do you think would not likely be funded first?

2) The bigger problem is recognition of work and the impact factor of the research.  The more the work is cited, the higher the impact, and it makes the scientist and his affiliated institution stand up and out in rankings.   Most of those high impact journals are in the sciences, and in the evil publishing empires.  Until science (and business as well) deans embrace the Open Access model, and getting those journals in with the other yard sticks of measured impact, scientists at research universities will continue to pay 2 times in getting the research:  (1) the time to write the grants (2) the time to do the research (3) libraries pay for the outrageous prices of journals.  Thus the costs have to recouped.  And unfortunately, $400 per outsider person is a droplet in the bucket, especially as endowments have dropped, and operating budgets are getting tighter.  

What bothers me is that the publishers are sort of like the drug cartels.  Black market is reinforced, and many outsiders will sneak in or use friends to get to these works if they want them badly enough.  And the friends who loan out passwords illegally are putting their universities at risk by losing access, lawsuits and all kinds of problems.  It's a dog chasing its tail.



My impression (0.00 / 0)
was that some of the open access journals, such as the PLOS (public library of open science) journals have become very competitive in terms of impact in a short period of time. Signs of hope?

And in the biomedical sciences, published work that is funded by NIH must be made available in their accessible database:

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded  research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts  that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.  To help advance science and improve human  health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the  public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.

Now, I access PubMed through a university, and I have only seen a selection of papers available freely through PubMed Central to the public. The memoranda linked in that page is dated Jan 2008, so I wonder if that rule will be made retroactive... (I haven't, uh... published in a long time, maybe because I spend too much time reading OpenLeft?)

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
-Lawrence Summers


[ Parent ]
Don't Some Universities Also Have An Interest In Limited Access? (4.00 / 1)
"Elite" universities boast of their large libraries.  If any school can have free access to the same research tools, then richly endowed schools have less that they can toot their horns about to differentiate themselves from the riff-raff.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

[ Parent ]
No (4.00 / 3)
Elsevier has actually priced some universities out of the market. Whatever self-interest there is in limiting access has now been far far far outweighed by the extraordinary increase in the cost of subscriptions. I think University Librarians would pretty universally jump at the chance to have everything open access and save them the constant headache of figuring out which journals they can afford to keep and which they have to cut.

[ Parent ]
Don't Some Universities Also Have An Interest In Limited Access? (0.00 / 0)
"Elite" universities boast of their large libraries.  If any school can have free access to the same research tools, then richly endowed schools have less that they can toot their horns about to differentiate themselves from the riff-raff.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

[ Parent ]
But some isn't available at any price (4.00 / 4)
Considering the price of subscription to most academic journals, we were totally willing to plunk down the $400 for a year's worth of access. We're not rolling in the dough, but we pay more than that per year for access to much more variant quality information via cable and phone internet. Science magazine all by itself costs nearly that much.

But the government, as noted, already pays most of these costs already. Then the fact that you have to be wealthy to access a lot of what's potentially useful business information also means that good business ideas are being restricted to people who already have money.

It also unecessarily restricts research itself. Many leading lights of early scientific enquiry were self-taught hobbyists, often well-to-do types who decided to spend their free time doing something more productive than attending theatre or shooting game. This is still possible.

Anyone can be a scientist. Anyone can contribute valuable knowledge to the human enterprise. And we should be encouraging the democratization of science if we want it to be embraced and trusted, and more properly evaluated, by the general public.


[ Parent ]
Points are well taken (4.00 / 1)
Not all of gov't information that is funded is free either.  Stat-USA is one example.  Getting access to FDA rulings and trials is almost impossible.   And those companies who pay for access and put into intelligible formats charge the big bucks.

I'm not demeaning your best intentions to pay for access, but unfortunately, it's a big can of worms.

BTW, happy belated birthday, Natasha.  


[ Parent ]
A misconception (0.00 / 0)
Most of those high impact journals are in the sciences, and in the evil publishing empires

Elsevier, Blackwell, Kluwer, etc. all publish some high quality journals, with high impact factors.  (Well, maybe not Kluwer.)  But they also all publish a number of journals that basically duplicate association/non-profit journals.  In this case, the impact factor of the for profit is most often lower or much lower than the association journal.  Scientists will publish in their association's journal, usually to support the association and because it has a longer history and better rep than the for-profit equivalent.

So Science is an association journal.  Nature is not.  While both are highly regarded, (tenure-earning) last I checked Nature had a lower impact factor than Science.

When the Conyers' bill came to light, I wrote some more about this.  (Sorry for the self-cite, but copy/paste seemed worse.)


[ Parent ]
i totally agree (0.00 / 0)
it should be free for EVERYONE.  i used to give my access to my friends in india because the idea that money should influence what information you have access to runs counter to the ideals of academia (but not its reality, unfortunately ;).  But that applies to anyone who doesn't have the same access to resources.

And I agree with Paul as well that it's really irritating when you don't have access to articles that would be really useful.  It almost seems like they don't want people to know the detailed history of palstine or u.s. foreign policy in latin america or iran ;)


I'm wary of having government pay (4.00 / 1)
What's being suggested is basically making government the biggest publisher of academic research.  Consider how the Bush administration politicized science.  I can see, in the future, the potential that academic research will be similarly politicized if government played a direct role in publication.

I would like to explore the idea that government could be more indirectly involved, perhaps by subsidizing non-profit organizations.  I'm not sure how that would work, though.  Maybe money goes to the states in education grants to give to the public universities of their choice with some of the money designated to go to publishers of journals that put their archives freely available online (allowing a reasonable lag og 12-24 months, perhaps).  Working through non-profits would also mean that this isn't U.S.-centric but opens up the effort to covering research from other countries in multiple languages.

George Soros sounds like a guy who would be open to helping fund a non-profit academic publisher of open-access journals, given his interest in things like promoting democracy and independent media.  I've heard that the academic publishing business is shaky.  Maybe someone can start a non-profit that could buy some distressed titles, convert them to open-access, and work to kill off the current academic publishing business model.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both


Public University system? (4.00 / 1)
I don't know whether you tried it, but some State University systems have more generous "Friends of the Library" type plans for state residents than private universities have for their alumni. It might be worth looking in to.

Actually... (0.00 / 0)
most don't, and the ones that Natasha would be interested in are generally off-limits to friends' donors, except if she or those friends wanted to walk in and use the databases there.   More private institutions have been able to make better negotiations on alumni access.

Or, better yet, move to Ohio where they have the very best access via their consortia, OhioLINK.



[ Parent ]
Michigan State University does--or did (0.00 / 0)
nt

[ Parent ]
How to find relevant articles (4.00 / 1)
A primer for anyone from someone who works at a university with a lousy library system.

1.  Use your favorite search engine or scientific database.  Usually you can get abstracts from JSTOR or some other non-google database if you don't like the randomness of Google.

2.  Search Google scholar, then Google web for the article you want.  Search the whole title in quotation marks.  In Google Scholar, if it says "See all x versions" click that because one might be a pdf.

3.  Find the author names and affiliations of the article of interest and search them.  You may have to access author web pages from the university's main page rather than from Google.  Frequently authors will post pdfs of their work.  Some journals prohibit this, others don't. Start with lead or corresponding author, then look for the others.

4.  If this fails, email the corresponding author (email is listed with abstract, usually) and ask for a reprint.  This was SOP in the pre-electronic days, and I remember my PhD advisor still had preprinted 3x5 cards he could send out with requests.  For awhile access was easier so this fell out of fashion. Now it is common again.  I have never had someone tell me no to a request.

Yes, this isn't really efficient, but it's better than nothing.

For those of publishing--some guidelines:
1.  Pick journals that allow you to post on your website or are open access.  Many of these are still good quality.
2.  If you have the publication costs budget, pay for your article to be open access.  Nearly all journals have that option now.
3.  Support your librarian and publish in journals with publishers that don't shaft the school.  Your librarian will know who the crooks are.

Finally, there are some new model journals that are peer-reviewed, on-line only, and allow reader comments--just like Open Left but without the troll rating and other internet jargon.  They haven't really caught on yet.  Who wants to deal with a bunch of religious fundamentalist crap following a paper on evolution of insecticide resistance by mosquitoes, for example?  However, some open access journals like PLOS have earned very high impact ratings.


ha ha ha (0.00 / 0)
The cost of academic journals is a serious problem -- I'm very sympathetic to that cause -- but forcing publishers to put the content online for free is not the answer. The entire industry would immediately go "poof" and there would be pretty much no more articles published. The end. Maybe a better solution would be tax incentives etc. etc. to encourage publishers to move to alternative business models or to encourage libraries to expand access.

The truth about Saxby Chambliss

BS (4.00 / 1)
Do you really think that if Elsevier went belly up, there would no longer be any research or researchers looking to publish? You're confusing supply with demand.

Precautions need to be taken that imply doing this gradually rather than "poof" - i.e., the online journal content at ScienceDirect and other sites must be preserved somehow - but the eventual net result will be the for-profit aspects of publishing going "poof". Ideally, an extra benefit would be reducing the amount of redundant or mostly redundant publications, which would have great benefit to the quality of life of most researchers now facing inordinate pressure to publish early and often.

If the government made an across the board rule that all publications resulting from future government grants must be open access, it would lead to a surge in the line-item request for publication costs in grant proposals. The requirement that researchers pay up front to provide open access to publications would suddenly subject the industry to real market competition: journals with cheaper publication costs gain a competitive edge against more expensive - even if historically prestigious - journals. It will also provide a market incentive for publication quality rather than the current career incentives for publication quantity. Much like the ideas of pitting for-profit health insurance against a government plan, if the for-profit publishers are able to compete and survive, then there's no problem.

No publisher will really "go Galt" - close up shop and throw away the electronic archive. Even if it did drive for profit publishers out of business (which I highly doubt), they would sell off their electronic archives to others at whatever the market rate would be. Those archives have value, and no business throws away a valuable commodity in the face of bankruptcy.

There is no real reason not to attach a requirement to every future government grant that resulting publications be made open access.


[ Parent ]
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