Impractical question

[eirias]

Something occurred to me just now. Research that's done on the government dime -- you'd expect that, except in cases of classified info, The Public At Large in principle ought to have open access to the results. But all the journals cost money, and most people have no access to an academic library. Huh. I guess private citizens could write to the authors and ask for reprints, but that implies that they can find authors and addresses for works on the topic of interest, and not every govt-funded project is going to wind up indexed in a publicly-accessible database.

Is this as unfair as it looks on the surface? Is there a practical way around it?

It probably doesn't come up that much, but still.

Comments

[cognative.livejournal.com]

Public Libraries should have them available (I'm not sure who would pay the bill).

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

they could be available at public libraries via the internet. thus, no cost for printing.

[beckyjen.livejournal.com]

I think part of it may be that it is ambiguous as to what is actually done using government money. Most research is funded from multiple funding sources, so you couldn't disclose the government side of things without also disclosing the rest. You are still able to file patents on government funded project etc, making public disclosure sticky (until something has been published of course). Most state universities are available for public use on site (they just can't check out books etc), so in theory if someone was interested enough to drive to their nearest public university they could probably read the articles.
I know that some government groups are required to publish an annual disclosure of research results. For example, when I was looking at doing some work with a resource from Yellowstone, they had an application process that required an annual report so that results could be disclosed to the public and I suspect if I get the EPA fellowship the same thing will be required.

[feuervogel]

There's been a push through PubMed that any study funded by grants from the fed be made freely accessible. Some people want it to be free from the moment of publication; others say 6 months or 1 year.

Quite a topic of debate.

NIH [hearts] you

[(Anonymous)]

in general, NIH is pushing for more access. not only are they pushing for the articles to be available at some point (immediate, 6 months, or a year), they are also pushing researchers to make publicly available datasets (read: deidentified) after their project is done and preferentially funding studies that say they will do so. there are some data repositories for those datasets both at NIH and universities. there is a particularly large one at the university of michigan. they also host identified datasets, but you need IRB approval to get at them.

-janel

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Not only should the publications be available but the data and code written should be as well. I know as a matter of federal law that computer code someone writes at NASA must be open source and must be freely available to any member of the general public. The sad fact of the matter is that neither is true. I shouldn't over generalize like that. What I should say is that I have dealt with criminal circumstances where people at NASA have refused to share thier code. I've had headaches regarding this that I deal with daily in my job.
Actually though Astronomy is taking steps toward the public accessibility of data gathered at national observatories. There is this thing called the National Virtual Observatory that right now is pie in the sky but might be a reality someday. And anyone can access any of the raw data gathered by the Hubble Space telescope and a number of other publically funded space satellites at: http://archive.nasa.gov

[vja2.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of work about this. Two popular links (or, at least, two links I pulled out of my bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/V/academia):

• Science Commons (http://science.creativecommons.org/) (a Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org))
• Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/)

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

oooh... very nifty
*adds to bookmarks*