Or even privately funded ones? Wouldn’t everyone stand to gain from having this information freely available? Does anyone know why this hasn’t happened yet?
scientific journals are available in libraries, you can read them there.
are you asking why free copies aren’t given to anyone that wants them? the cost of those would have to come from somewhere.
“Freely available” in what sense? All interesting results from scientific studies (and a whole lot of uninteresting results, come to think of it) are published in academic journals. The journals are “freely available” in the sense that anyone can purchase them or read them in libraries.
A pretty large percentage of physics papers are posted online by their authors these days as well, so they’re freely available even to those without easy access to a University Library
I assume other sciences have or will have in the near future similar services.
All NIH-funded research must be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. This is Federal Law.
Many papers are made available (often in unformatted form) much earlier than 12 months, but not everything.
However, why is not everything immediately available, you may ask? Because many for-profit journals fight this.
I try to publish in open access journals if possible (Public Library of Science and Biomed Central are 2 very good venues), so that everything is available imediately for free to everyone.
Most journals have online sites where you can see the Contents of each issue & read abstracts. Subscriptions are usually needed to read full articles, but you could definitely get enough information to plan your next trip to the library.
OP’s got a good point – taxpayers funded much of the research, and deserve to see the results of what they pay for IMO. Basically many journal publishers are for profit and keep quite a tight grip on access. A really big portion of their income is from institutional licenses that they sell to libraries, universities, and various private companies. Just about everyone who accesses this sort of literature on a regular basis use that sort of institutional access. (Only a very small number of people actually have personal subscriptions, and almost nobody actually pays the $30/article fee that you might see). Usually the system works most of the time – the people who need regular access have it (though it’s at great cost to their parent institutions). Interested members of the public can usually find their way to a university library. But still there’s lots of people that are excluded because they can’t find access. For instance, you hear of third world medical researchers who can’t really keep up with the literature in their field. They have to rely on colleagues to send recent papers, or they have to wait or do without.
Recently there’s been a movement towards better open access. Various governmental agencies like the NIH require that the research they fund must become freely available to the public within [del]6 months (IIRC)[/del] 12 months. [ETA: compliance with this requirement used to be spotty, though it’s getting better] There have always been a number of journals that are open access. like PNAS. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit dedicated to open-access publication, and they have a number of high-quality journals. Some older academics turn up their noses at the newer open-access journals, and prefer to publish in “top” journals like the for-profit Nature. A Nature paper still carries a lot of prestige and can help secure the career of a young academic, and that isn’t quite the case for even PLoS Biology.
IMO, Open Access is gaining quite a lot of momentum, and I hope it becomes the dominant publication model in the future. I currently don’t give a toss about the academic posturing of impact factors*, and hopefully that attitude will die a bit when the older academics retire. I am going to lobby for my boss to submit to one of the open access journals when we get a publishable story out of my current project.
*though at this point I’m at an early enough point in my career that I’d be thrilled to publish in the “Proceedings of the East Bumfuck Society of Sub-Sub-Field in Organism X”.
Nitpick - PNAS isn’t open access - the authors can PAY to have their articles open access (several thousand dollars). Most for-profit journals offer this option (again, usually at a cost of several thousand per article).
I believe the link I posted above states that articles must be publicly available in Pubmed central 12 months after publication.
I post all of my articles on my faculty website. Technically a no-no, I suppose. I have never been asked by a journal to remove it - I suppose I would if they asked.
It is a little bizarre that, in most cases, the gov’t gives you a grant to do research which you then use to pay to have that research put in a journal, which in the cases of public universities, the gov’t then pays to get access to.
IIRC, the UK requires all gov’t funded astrophysical research (and maybe other sciences as well, I don’t know) to be published in a gov’t run scientific journal. That seems a lot more rational.
There are very few “government-run” scientific journals that I am aware of (at least in the health sciences). Emerging Infectious Diseases is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, it is run by the US Centers for Disease control and Prevention (CDC).
But it is a problem. The government (and by proxy, the public) paid for most biomedical research through their tax dollars, then they have to pay again to access it. This is why all federally funded research in the USA must be deposited in Pubmed Central within a year (where anyone can access it for free) - it was a compromise between those that wanted free immediate access and the for-profit Journals who argued that any free access would make them go out of business.
heh. I can tell you from my own experience with dealing with NIH (I am PI on 3 NIH grants), compliance is now a BIG issue, and they are enforcing it!. For grant progress reports etc…, you MUST have that paper deposited in Pubmed Central, and they link to those on the NIH eReporter website. If you don’t submit, your Program Officer is going to have a word with you.
In addition to papers (which mostly end up on Arxiv even though, so far as I know, it’s not actually required) NASA also has a policy that the raw data from any NASA mission is released to the public a year after it’s collected (or earlier, if the principle investigators want). And in some fields (solar physics, for instance), it’s traditional to release it immediately.
The journals have editorial staffs to pay and printing costs to covers, so some money is required. Whether the current system is best or unique I choose not to address in this post, but it seems at least economically sound.
I don’t necessarily think the “taxpayers paid for it; taxpayers get to see it” logic holds much water, even though many funding sources are starting to embrace it. Taxpayers paid to make research happen, and if a subscription-based, peer-reviewed journal system makes the best research happen (perhaps by fostering constructive competition, etc.), then that’s what the taxpayers paid for.
An analogy: much of my tax money goes to the U.S. Department of Defense. I’m giving that money to help them do their job. Does that give me the right to see the contents of the President’s Daily Briefing? Of course not, as that would greatly undermine the goals that my tax dollars were aimed at.
If there weren’t “ivory tower” journals, leaving everyone to post to arXiv.org or other web-based free article servers, the signal-to-noise would drop considerably, and the permanence of the good articles may be diminished. The system of having a few, respected journals in each field of research leads to (I think) better quality of output overall, and that’s what taxpayers should insist upon. The fact that a market of some kind is required to provide the funds for such journals seems, to me, a side effect.
There may be other market models (like author fees rather than subscription fees) that would work, but I have no particular beef with the current system. (Well, the payment part of it, at least. I have beefs with other aspects.)
No doubt. But the peer-review process is largely done by volunteers (I think even the asigning of reviewers is done by a volunteer board, but I could be wrong) and journals are increasingly accessed via interwebs rather then on paper. So while there are some overhead costs, its kinda tough to see why the journals are so high-priced. I’m not saying we should replace the peer-review journal system with something like arcivxx, but that the current system seems pretty expensive for the services provided. It seems the NSF could just use the money that it has to add to grants to allow for publishing fees, buy a bunch of servers to host papers itself, hire a few people to manage the peer-review boards and then everyone could have free access to gov’t funded scientific studies.
Libraries that wanted hard copies could just contract with an independent publisher to access the servers every month and print out and bind the last months worth of research.
Without seeing a complete budget sheet for them, I agree it would be hard to say where the pricing comes from. There certainly isn’t a rich CEO swimming in his money pit at the top of the org chart, though (at least not in physics). The Physical Review series of journals that serve most of physics are run by the American Physical Society (aps.org). I could believe that there is bleedover from subscription fees to other aspects of the APS mission (annual meetings of the APS divisions, meritorious fellowships and awards, physics outreach, etc.), but that all seems okay to me. (Although my suspicion would be that the majority of journal income stays in the journal realm, as I think it is more expensive to keep all that stuff going than it seems from the outside. I tried finding a budget breakdown online, but so far haven’t found anything.)
On the other extreme, however, you have gigantic publishing groups like Elsevier. Last year they made $9.7 billion in revenue, with $630 million in profits (from this pdf financial statement). Their directors are making several million per year in total compensation.
And while I’m not against successful for-profit journal publishers in principle, Elsevier generates those profits through some rather sketchy means in some cases. They’ve been buying up many many journals to the point where they’re the dominant publisher in many fields. And, again that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But they’ve got some very questionable business practices. For instance, if libraries want subscriptions to Elsevier’s high-quality journals like Cell or The Lancet, they also have to purchase a whole host of less desirable journals as well. Some of those include pet journals for some crazy dude, marketing bought by pharmaceuticals and masquerading as legitimate research, and generally a whole lot of nearly-useless crap. There was also a bit of a controversy as Elsevier used to run a convention for the international arms trade.
To be fair, Elsevier has responded to some of these controversies. For instance, they’ve dropped the arms trading conventions, but only after editors of the Lancet complained in very strong terms (as selling weapons to tin-pot dictators sorta conflicts with the Hippocratic oath.) But it seems that they only change their practices after being caught red-handed.
So there’s one example, at least, of a gigantic for-profit publisher which charges lots of money for low quality product, and that’s certainly not the most efficient way to support scientific research.
Whoa, there’s a PDF from Elsevier that they’re not trying to charge folks $30 to read? That’s a first.
(In case it’s not clear, I’m not a big fan of Elsevier. If I can get a piece of information from one of their journals or from some other source, I’ll always choose the other source, and I’d never willingly publish in one of them myself.)
Yeah, I have to agree on the Elsevier example…
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this isn’t unusual or shady or anything. It’s just normal.
Even if you want a government publication, you have to pay for it. You don’t just get bound, typed publications for free. Many many years ago I had cause to purchase a rather lengthy volume written by a committee headed by the USAG.
It cost me like $40 for the thing, plus shipping. The government wasn’t soaking me for a profit, but I had to reimburse for the cost of paper, printing, binding, etc.
So the report was indeed available, but no, my tax dollars didn’t cover making and shipping a copy just for me.
Judging by what most people are saying here, the information is freely available, just not available for free.
What is the upside for the scientists to get their work published in a journal if it means it will be read by fewer people, and might cost them money?