Apr 292009
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Marketplace: Publicly funded research for a price:
Publicly funded research doesn’t seem so public when the public has to pay to read the results in a journal. A proposed law would help publishing companies preserve their business models, but it would limit public access to the research.
Publishers continue to resist the open-access movement, it seems. This Marketplace (as heard on public radio) report does a decent job of laying out some of the issues. The comments are worth reading as well.
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- Proposal to allow publishers to charge for access to tax-funded research (boingboing.net)
- Free Our Books: Extending Open Access (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)
- Congress may slam door on NIH research open access policy (arstechnica.com)
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The primary purpose of open access is not to make the research freely accessible to the public (although that comes with the open access territory too). Most peer-reviewed research is only comprehensible and of interest to the specialists by and for whom it is written.
The primary purpose of open access is to make research accessible to all those specialists, its intended users worldwide, rather than just to those of them whose institutions can afford subscription access.
Open access thereby maximizes the uptake, usage, applications and impact of research, to the benefit of the tax-paying public that funds it for the sake of research progress, not in order to furnish public reading material.
Some parts of health-related research are understandable and of interest and importance to the public, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Hence public reading access cannot and should not be used as the rationale for open access, across all scientific and scholarly fields: The primary rationale is the public benefits of research progress itself.
A very good point, Stevan. Sometimes the goal of improving access to researchers–so that they can deliver better science–is not put forth as strongly in the open-access debate as it should be.
The “sound-bite” approach of “we paid for it, we should have access” to it is often trotted out, even though I do think few (although there are some) people in the general (non-scientific) public will gain too much directly from this access.
However, I do think that the general public gains significantly from making it easier and cheaper for scientists to access research, since I think it results in better science, done more quickly, and at less cost.
So thanks for bringing this up!