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Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

Depending on what you mean by open access, all NIH grants already do come with such requirements. Any publications resulting from NIH-funded research must be deposited, in full text, including figures, into PubMed Central.

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That (NIH's policy of requiring things to go into PubMed) is precisely what this bill is taking aim at.

I thought this bill is for private-sector research, which NIH funded research is not. Or am I missing something in how the lawyers are going to twist this once it gets passed?

"Private sector research works" is the disingenuous and obfuscating term that the publishers are using to call publicly funded research manuscripts that the publisher has then 'added value' to. When they say they 'add value', what they mean is copy editing, archiving, distribution, etc. They include in this peer-reviewing the manuscript, but in reality that is done for free by scientists whose salaries are again, mostly paid for by public funds.

There is no post-hoc twisting involved. The bill is consciously and deliberately deceptively-worded to make you think it only applies to private sector research. That is false.

Yes, indeed it is. But the commenter to which I was responding didn't seem to know that what he/she was proposing has already been in place for several years, at least insofar as NIH grants are concerned.

I knew, but decided to lump NIH in because it doesn't require any open access to data collected with taxpayer monies.

“no later than twelve months” means publishers can still get rewarded for rent-seeking.

For papers you would just do what NIH requires, which is "upon acceptance for publication." Upon further reflection and discussion data would probably be more reasonably published in an open format no later than 1 year after the grant ended. That would allow multi-year studies a little more time to collect all of their data and write it up.

I was just commenting on the existing open access policy (edit: I noticed you opened the subthread by prescribing, sorry for derailing).

Open science/sharing the data can work as a voluntary movement, it has not been captured by private interests, but I'm really interested in seeing Open Access pan out before that. The current policy, if I'm reading it right, is saying that the manuscripts must be submitted to PubMed Central, but PMC or the researcher (whoever decides to trigger it first I imagine) only has an obligation to release them after twelve months. If PubMed Central doesn't release the research instantly and the researchers aren't aware of their rights or are subjet to some pressure/contradicting (possibly illegal) agreements, there's a loophole in the policy as written.

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