Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
petitions.whitehouse.gov
petitions.whitehouse.gov
"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.
The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]
The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, use."
From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing something from LexisNexis.
(I'm cheating a bit here, I've actually been a part of fighting this fight for a very long time.)
Note that these exclusive contracts are also longer term than one would think.
Numerous reputable folks and and reputable companies have offered to host the opinions in bulk, for free, at no cost to the courts, as well as providing search/etc. However, the courts hurt for real budget, and they all see selling these contracts as a revenue source.
(I'm generalizing to both state and federal courts here)
In the case of PACER (you may remember PACER from stories about Aaron Swartz :P), it sadly makes up for a lot of budget shortfall in the courts. PACER's revenue is > 100 million a year.
If you want to hear the long sad story, you can probably find a number of writings by Carl Malamud talking about it.
If you just want to get angry, it would suffice to check out the lawsuits over trying to claim copyright in the page numbering between westlaw and lexis, etc.
What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.
The one thing that Google likely wouldn't do is edit. But that's because they can't do that by algorithm.
Sure. But they are paid with public dollars to do this work, and so are effectively working for the public. Therefore, their contract should state that their work must be made public.
Really, it shouldn't matter to them whether they get the right to sell copies or get paid more up front for the work; they make money either way. But it matters for democracy.
The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about this topic.
The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs.
The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic.
The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?
I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas wars, or the drug war, health care, or copyright, or STEM education, or immigration reform.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
"After a user creates a petition, he or she will receive a direct link to that petition that may be sent to friends, posted on social networks, or otherwise shared in order to gain signatures for the petition. If the petition meets a pre-set signature threshold within a designated time period, the petition will become visible to individuals browsing or searching the White House website. If enough users sign the petition to reach a second pre-set signature threshold within that time period, the White House commits to respond to the petition in a timely fashion. The White House may also elect to respond to any petition before it reaches the first or second threshold. Once the White House responds to a petition, it is closed to additional signatures."
That last sentence implies that a petition will continue accepting signatures, irrespective of any thresholds or deadlines, right up to the point where a response is posted. Surely that means that there is great value in continuing to promote and sign this original petition? A steady stream of signatures over time would attract attention in the system and demonstrate ongoing support. Eventually it might grow to the point where it is impossible to ignore.
[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy
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Addition:
Indeed, the signature count is still ticking over (gone from 53136 to 53149 in the last 15 minutes). Listing "popular" petitions [2] shows that the petition is significant, currently ranking #8 in terms of number of signatures collected.
[2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0
Death Stars, however, make for good PR without actually doing anything.
If we start a new petition, I will delete this submission.
Creating a duplicate or similar petition will make it harder for you to get an official response. Instead, sign and help promote the one that has already been created.
edit: Just to give an idea of the costs> http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...
Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.
The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.
Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.
This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.
The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.
The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.
The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
The high prices you linked too aren't an impediment, they are THE REASON TO DO IT.
Also, when it comes to tax payer funded research, it's already, you know, funded.
The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?"
And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web page as needed. And if you need a bound book, go to lulu or other JIT publisher.
Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.
I'm sorry, cmsmith.
I would argue that value would be gained by sacking these people (and organizations).
Most of the money they (and other journals) uses is dependent on excessive licensing fees charged to universities. The universities turn around and add that to each person's tuition.
And all the work the journal publishes WAS owned by the students of the very university, until the journal demands transfer of copyright to the journal... So they can sell them back work at 1000X the profit.
By definition, they are parasites. What we need is a good anti-parasitic medicine.
Basically.. the question is, is it possible for an open access journal to be run for orders of magnitude less money than every existing open access journal currently in existence? You seem to think the answer is "definitely yes", but you haven't explained why. What is your insight that has been missed by so many others?
Furthermore, thinking of finances of open access publishers, even PLoS has its issues at its current prices http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html
It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.
There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star.
The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest politicians that money can buy.
Also, these papers are generally the result of editing/publication processes by journals. The government isn't paying for those papers to be edited and published.
Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
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