‘Open Science’ Boosters Look to Federal Action, Academic-Culture Revolution
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Supporters of maximum sharing in scientific research, through taking advantage of the Internet, said they're looking to Congress and the White House to free the results of federally funded efforts from the pages of expensive academic journals, and to wide-open Web collaboration to supercharge discovery. Lobbying to enact the Federal Research Public Access Act (WID April 22 p4) was buoyed by the first congressional hearing about the topic -- though the session Thursday in the Information Policy Subcommittee of House Oversight and Government Reform wasn’t called specifically on the measure, said Nick Shockey, the Right to Research Coalition’s director. He’s also the broad Scholarly Publications & Academic Resources Coalitions’ student advocacy director.
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"We have a lot of momentum, and that will certainly carry over into the next Congress,” Shockey said late Friday at the Open Science Summit at the University of California. Supporters of the bill -- HR-5037 by Rep. Michael Doyle, D-Pa., and S-1373 by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. -- are fighting against time in this election-year Congress, Shockey said. The measure would require online access at no charge, six months after publication in peer-reviewed journals, versions of articles funded by federal agencies with budgets of $100 million or more for outside research. The Association of American Publishers opposes the bills as efforts to unfairly deprive the companies that put out the journals of the fruits of their investments.
"We're expecting a report any day now” from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on handling the products of federally financed research, Shockey said. An inquiry by the office received hundreds of public responses in December and January, including more than 500 on an official blog, he said. The efforts have taken on added urgency with university libraries facing budget crunches, Shockey said. The website of the Louisiana State University libraries said cuts by the Board of Regents this summer mean the loss of 61 percent of full-text electronic resources.
In doing research, wikis and other P2p technologies can produce impressive results through ad hoc, international collaborations at high speed, said Michael Nielsen, a former theoretical physicist who writes about open science. What an Oxford mathematician called his Polymath project solved “a very difficult and challenging problem” through 800 online comments of 170,000 words by 27 contributors over 37 days early in 2009, he said. Similar efforts also have shown promising results, Nielsen said.
More often, “a lot of interesting ideas are failing,” including high-powered wikis, Nielsen said. Academia rewards scholars who work separately to publish journal articles, not to work online with counterparts set up as competitors, he said. “We don’t get enough reputational reward” for online collaboration “to be practical,” Nielsen said. There are signs that the incentives for researchers are changing, he said. In physics, a citation-tracking site called SPIRES is giving scholars credit for preliminary research published online and is gaining attention in the discipline, Nielsen said. “You are creating a new kind of reputation.”