White House Grants Aaron Swartz's Wish: Taxpayer-Funded Research Will Be Free

[C.Puffs]

Puffy, you are in rare form today. Let's get real, the simple fact is that the VAST majority of this stuff is not classified, nor should it be. Yes, there is always the possibility that something, somewhere could be used my an enemy, but guess what, that's the chance you take when you set out.

So, "fvck it, let's not even try" right?

[BloodyTalon]

So, "fvck it, let's not even try" right?

Have you ever gone to college? If you did, did you ever do a research paper or dissertation?

Again, this isn't about blowing open the doors to DARPA. Anything requiring a security clearance to view stays that way. This is about research that was already accessible provided you were either...

A) a student or faculty member of a university

B) willing to pony up the money to subscribe to the journal, which could cost hundreds of dollars depending on what you wanted.

As you can see, this is something that is easily accessible to China, Iran, etc. (unless they are the god of all cheapskates) but not to the regular viewing public. All this does is make this research more accessible to the American public. So unless you advocate that all of the research done in this country remain completely hidden from the public unless you have a high security clearance, your argument is pointless.

[Mordoror]

@C. Puff are you playing the devil advocate or do you have 0 clue about what we are talking about ?
let's sum it up : public funded researches already published 1 year ago (so reachable only to specialists, even Chinese ones, if they want to pay 20 to 90 $) would be accessible to commoners for free after 1 year

so 1- if the article is published even under pay per view system the first year, there is no way that you can't stop a possible access to China/Pakistan/NK scientists if they are willin to pay. That's the principle of peer reviewed journals and was always been. Or you don't publish and it stays in "for eyes only" lockers.
Wanting for "safety" (rather paranoid) reasons to stop that is the best way to stop science and technology progress.
Keeping info about "laser" wouldnot have allowed laser surgery, DVDs, CD-ROM and all civilian applications

Another clear example : the guy who "invented" the NMR technology didn't foresee its use. By publishing it, he allowed others to think about it and come with a useful apparatus system in hospitals, something that saves lifes

2- after 1 year the article falls in public domain (so to speak) so commoners can have access to it. Obviously commoners that in 99.9% of the case won't understand (nor even read) the articles and 00.1% would use them as valuable sources for debates (be it on internet or somewhere else)
So instead of having only the link to abstract (that we all use plenty here) you will have the full article
What' wrong with that ? Especially for 1 year old articles ?

The only people that it will hurt is the greedy publishing houses that make you pay if you are not univ library affiliated to access probably outdated articles (because 1 year is often a very loooong time in research and things advances quicker than that)

Frankly on that issue, you are not credible

[RSone]

The base issue here is not even wether or not some of the research carried out with public funds should be classified (let's be honest here, the stuff that should be, is) but that online databases turn a profit on the taxpayers' money and without much in the way of compensation or acknowledgement to the academians who wrote the material. If this legislation mandates its free dissemination after a 'short' period, then that is a good thing.

[Mordoror]

The base issue here is not even wether or not some of the research carried out with public funds should be classified (let's be honest here, the stuff that should be, is) but that online databases turn a profit on the taxpayers' money and without much in the way of compensation or acknowledgement to the academians who wrote the material. If this legislation mandates its free dissemination after a 'short' period, then that is a good thing.

x2
For those who are not familiar with publishing processes

The scientists do the job, funded by public grants (private funds is another thing as there is always a industrial secret agreement so the work can be published but under a purged form)
They send their article to be reviewed
The reviewers do the work for free (no pay check for that work)
If the article is accepted, it is either published without charges or depending or the journal and article contant, extra charges (that can cost a lot very quickly : examples of some prices : open access publication : 2200-3000 $, one color picture : 600-900$, extra pages after a certain lenght can also cost up to several hundred of dollars)
Basically when you pay, you pay to publish your own work, without a dim back

Others scientists have also to pay to have access to your work (pay per view system ranging from 25 to 90-100 $)
As do librabries and univs (that sometimes have to buy package with a lot of junk to have top elite journals access)

To sum it up from an editor pov : somebody do a work you don't pay for (research),
somebody writtes an article you don't pay for,
reviewers review that article for you for free,
the scientist that want to publish in your journal sometimes pay for it,
others scientists that want to read the article pay for it too
while you never give back money to anybody (except for your internal publishing charges that look way overrated anyway, 3000$ to publish on openaccess ?? come on, the server is gold plated or what ?)


No wonder edition houses have grown exponentionaly the past years : the expenses are ridiculous and their benefits are huge, on the work and sweat of others

[C.Puffs]

The base issue here is not even wether or not some of the research carried out with public funds should be classified (let's be honest here, the stuff that should be, is) but that online databases turn a profit on the taxpayers' money and without much in the way of compensation or acknowledgement to the academians who wrote the material. If this legislation mandates its free dissemination after a 'short' period, then that is a good thing.

Not that I approve of it but it's not a new thing. Ever tried to get your hands on government specs? They use to be free. Now the SAE owns a lot of them and you have to buy them.

[C.Puffs]

@C. Puff are you playing the devil advocate or do you have 0 clue about what we are talking about ?

Little of both I'll admit. For example there are a lot of documents that are disseminated for internal consumption, sometimes widely, that you wouldn't want just anybody having. I made the mistake of lumping those in with released-to-the-public information which is why I went "WTF?" If it's stuff that's ALREADY public knowledge but simply hiding behind a paywall I don't have a problem with it being released for free. You'll still run into pay issues though. For example it may be an older document that needs to be scanned from microfilm or what not and you have to pay the fee for that.

[Mordoror]

If it's stuff that's ALREADY public knowledge but simply hiding behind a paywall I don't have a problem with it being released for free.

That's basically the proposal here as they are talking about peer reviewed articles
Let's be frank : the concurrence (and so the "paranoia about being out-published) is so strong in science that it would be dumb for any research team to release informations before publishing it
And once it is published it goes "public" (well obviously with the pay per view or pay wall the public is restricted to research centers, libraries and universities i.e other scientists)
Making it trully public to average joe will not hurt AND it may help small schools/research centers to have access to advanced research articles without wasting a penny
Because with the system as it is nowadays, it has become very expensive to reach some sources while in the meantime, institutions credits are vanishing

Frankly i'd rather pay for some materiel for my experiments rather than have to pay to access a full article
To put the things in perspective : a paywall access fee of 50 $ for a single aticle is worth 50 reactions of PCR genotyping, 5x 1000 kb sequencing, hundred of reaction tubes, several liters of culture medium etc etc
When you know that you need between 25 and 50 references to writte an article, you can see that the money intended to carry on your research can dry very quickly just to writte a single publication