This is actually from a couple weeks ago, but I am only getting around to posting it now.
The article is here.
According to the article,
The Federal Research Public Access Act - introduced by senators John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat - would require all federal departments and agencies that invest $100m (£54m) or more in research to demand that articles be put online within six months of publication in a subscription journal.
Maybe some distinction between for-profit (I'm looking at you, Elsevier!) and non-profit publishers should be made, but in general I think this is a very good idea. The article briefly alludes to supposed problems this would cause researchers, although I never really saw any coherent statement of them. Journals are no longer used to disseminate research results---we have the arXiv for that---but rather are now there to put final stamps of approval on research. (I know many people who would gladly see all research journals wiped from the face of the earth. I disagree with that, as the final stamp of approval is important not only to have an extra check on the results but also for practical reasons [jobs, promotion, tenure, etc.].)
Certain publishers---Elsevier is frequently cited here (I know several people who refuse to publish in their journals)---have very annoying policies. Their journals are prohibitively expensive for many, etc.
I think my boss and a NASA bigshot he knows were chatting about this earlier this week - it fits the context, anyway. If that was indeed what they were discussing, it sounded like their main quibble would be costs. By definition, this cannot be done "for free", it's a change from the status quo, and somebody will pay for it if it happens. That somebody will either be taxpayers, in the form of increased funding to offset the higher page charges, etc., or it will be the scientific community in the form of decreased real funding. Cornyn's remark about taxpayers paying for research twice doesn't make a lick of sense to me. Much like the very similar rhetoric rebranding the Estate Tax as the "death tax", come to think of it.
ReplyDeleteSo my take would be this is fine if the bill explicitly ties in additional funding to pay for the public access, and I oppose it if this is another unfunded mandate. I'm also not completely sold on the need for this kind of law - sure, it's nice to allow people access to journals even when they don't have an institutional subscription to use (say if someone's between jobs for a few months and wants to spend the time getting up to speed on a new specialty), but that strikes me as a pretty rare case. Public access per se is pretty much moot IMHO, generally one has to be (bare minimum) well along towards a BS in the field even to make sense of a journal article. The overwhelming majority of the public long since forgot most of what science they may have learned in college, so most articles may as well be written in Sindarin for all they'd get out of it. So I'm almost inclined to treat this bill as just one of those random and irrelevant things Congress tends to do (see English-as-official-language; flag burning; gay marriage; etc., etc.) instead of tackling issues that are actually important... I'm trying very very hard to ignore the sponsors of this legislation and look at it purely on the merits, btw. :-)
Conventions in different disciplines are obviously different regarding publication, too. Astro-ph doesn't have anywhere near the prestige or relevance that you seem to give to your arXiv, for example. I hardly ever look at astro-ph due to the low S/N (if there was a sub-archive for just galaxies papers that have been accepted in refereed journals, then I'd pay attention). And most typically a paper doesn't even appear on astro-ph unless it has been accepted. Conference proceedings are different, of course, that's a large chunk of the noise from my point of view. So anyway, the journals are still unquestionably central and indispensable in astronomy.
Paying for research twice: People at smaller universities have difficulty getting access to many journal articles. In practice, I think they'll just go without access instead of paying for it, but it can be extremely annoying when one's institution doesn't have a subscript to major journals, and I even had this happen to me a number of times at Georgia Tech, which is going to have much fewer problems of this sort than most places. At least if it is free after the relatively small gap, then this law can really help some people. It goes far beyond the relatively rare situation of being between jobs. Not everybody is at an institution like Caltech, which has access to everything. My friends at liberal arts colleges face a constant struggle for journal access. (I'm certainly not thinking of the public at large, but legislation can be reasonable even when referring to a small set of people. My immediate reaction upon seeing this is that )
ReplyDeleteActually, there are situations in which an estate tax can be extremely annoying (like if you are middle class and inherit property and can't pay the taxes without selling stuff off, which if you inerit something jointly with somebody else can be extremely troublesome, to put it mildly---it's particularly great for internecine warfare). I don't know any precise details about the bill to which you refer (so I'm not commenting on that), but there are situations in which non-rich people can get royally screwed by the estate tax.
I don't think those "random or irrelevant" things are particular examples of either. While those laws may be mostly symbolic, I have a big philosophical problem with, e.g., laws that disallow gay marriages. That's just as irrelevant as a law that disallows atheism. Yes, the attitudes are there without the law but can't we at least fuck people over unofficially and not have it written down as law that we're doing that? (And I'm not convinced that there wouldn't be tangible effects of at least some of these laws.) I would hardly argue that these aren't important issues---I think they are extremely important, and I actively want these things not to be legislated (i.e., let people do as they see fit). But that makes it important that Congress not interefere, so this is hardly random or irrelevant!
If I waited for the journals to catch up in certain areas I study, I would always be 6 months to a year behind what the state of the art is. The journals do provide a final bit of quality control (although it's hit-or-miss), but they're no longer the ones disseminating the information in most of the things I'm studying. (The cond-mat section of the arXiv is absolutely huge.) I agree there is still a role for them, and that's for the final check of quality to weed some things out, but one can disseminate research without them.
I didn't realize smaller schools had less journal access - I've only been at Caltech, Columbia, and UC, all of which have access to every major astronomy journal... Considering the small-school case you mentioned, this law sounds more reasonable. I still worry that there might be a net loss of research funding as a result, though.
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with real-life examples of people actually being screwed by the estate tax, so I'd be interested if you were referring to one above. The standard attempt at such an example is a family farm, but the law was written specifically to exempt such cases as much as possible. I vaguely recall reading that there was precisely one case of a family getting screwed by the estate tax in the last ~5 years it was on the books (can't recall the reference, unfortunately). And if it comes right down to it, I'm A-OK with shafting a few upper-middle-class families now and then if that's what it takes to try and keep a lid on this country's hereditary aristocracy (Hiltons, Bushes, Kennedys, etc.). Repealing the estate tax was horrifyingly bad law.
"Random and irrelevant" was perhaps a poor choice of words on my part - my meaning was not relevant to the ostensible mission of a government to work towards solving problems affecting the nation as a whole; the gay marriage issue in particular is quite relevant personally to a lot of people, including me (one sister-in-law is a lesbian).
We may have found yet another difference between fields regarding journals etc. Personally I'm not too concerned if I'm 6 months or so behind the latest results. Observational astronomy is constrained by availability of data, and observing proposals happen on 6-12 month time scales anyway. As long as I'm up to date when submitting a paper or observing proposal, it's all good. :-)
Geophysics/high-pressure physics doesn't use arXiv at all. Some people submit to it as a statement of support (my advisor looked at my funny when I mentioned doing this), but really, what everyone reads is conference abstracts and then journals, and articles sent specifically to them.
ReplyDeleteJust another data point to consider...
Small schools have a constant struggle for journal access. I know the mathematics community discusses this a lot. I'm less sure about how much of a discussion there is in other communities.
ReplyDeleteOne doesn't have to be upper middle class to be screwed by an estate tax. (By the way, I should mention that I'm not necessarily espousing a specific view on the tax. I'm just indicating that there are situations in which people in lower tax brackets can get seriously hurt.) Essentially, if one inherits property jointly with others (and doesn't have the rights to sell it on one's own and the others don't want to sell), there is a major problem depending on the amount of estate taxes one has to pay versus the cash one actually does have---say, a young person being part of the group of siblings but not having a lot of savings yet to be able to deal with this.
OK on the random/irrelevant part, since we're obviously agree that it's something government specifically should not be doing. For personal life, I tend to resent any interference with my desired policy of "Let them do as they see fit."
The arXiv is indeed much more important for fields with fast time scales. Being six months behind can hurt a lot in some of the stuff on which I work. (This also adds to the pressure occasionally of getting something done/submitted before somebody else throats you on it.)
As I understood it, the estate tax had a minimum threshold of $Lots (where Lots may have been 2e6, but I can't recall for sure). So if I manage to buy a cheap-ass condo for a few hundred thousand and then die, my siblings would not have to pay any estate tax even if it were reinstated. We very likely will have to pay an estate tax when my mother and stepfather die, if an estate tax exists when that happens.
ReplyDeleteOK, looking at wikipedia, looks like the estate tax law is another W-era act of wacky bookkeeping gimmickry. It's "phasing out" now, in the form of ever-increasing minimum thresholds (it is now $2M, as I remembered), going up to $3.5M in '09, off the books entirely in '10, then returns in full 2001 force in 2011. So, I'm sorry, if a group of siblings inherits a multimillion dollar estate and whines about how they're getting screwed, tough shit. My lack of sympathy knows no bounds. :-)
Lack of sympathy is fine (I am hardly known for being sympathetic)---I'm just pointing out there can exist examples of major suckage that extend far beyond who is supposed to be bending over. How often that will occur is unclear, but I don't think you would like to be the one losing your life savings in a situation like that. My own view on the law would depend on precisely how extreme this can get and how often people would be inadvertantly screwed like this, but as long as you're aware this can happen and are making your choice factoring in such possibilities, that's fine with me. (Not that this isn't true for every other serious law too...)
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