Public research hidden from the public

I got a press release the other day, “Congressional support builds for publicly funded research.” And it’s about time. The scientific-journals market is a huge scam being paid for by taxpayers, while the publishers laugh, to be cliché, all the way to the bank.

And bank it they do.

Here’s how it works. Scientists get grant money, quite often from the federal government, to do their research. I.e., you and I are paying for it. I have no problem with that; you can argue over whether a particular project deserves funding, but overall, not being a Libertarian, I don’t take issue with the general idea of government-funded basic science.

But here’s where it gets ugly.

The currency of science is the paper. “Publish or perish” isn’t a catchphrase, it’s the way they live. Getting grant money and a good tenured position — really, getting ahead career-wise — depends on being published in a respected journal.

So the scientists send their papers out, pitching them to journals from the top of the heap (Nature, Science, etc.) on down. (The quality of a journal is measured by several things, including the “impact factor” of the papers it publishes — that is, how often they’re cited, and by whom. It’s not dissimilar to how Google does PageRank.)

When a journal accepts a paper for publication, it usually has editors on staff to do a basic clean up — making sure it follows standard notation, etc. Then it’s published to the Web and then in print.

And then libraries pay through the nose for those journals, whether we’re talking access to the Web sites or the actual printed copies.

That means universities have to pay to access the very research done by their scientists. Furthermore, that research was in may cases funded by taxpayers, who also have to pay to access it.

The release comes from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Here’s a snippet:

The House and Senate spending bills require that NIH-funded researchers deposit an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central online archive upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. 

But get this:

Under the current voluntary NIH Public Access Policy implemented in May 2005, individual investigators have deposited less than five percent of eligible manuscripts.

Shockingly, it seems, voluntary action on the part of these publishers isn’t working.

Why should it? It’s an incredible scam. I should know; I used to work for the American Chemical Society and was privy to some of the discussion.

These companies charge a premium for doing essentially a light edit on this work and putting it in a nice printed edition. The entire value the American Chemical Society or Elsevier or any of these publishers delivers is the brand name. And if you saw the location and amount of real estate the ACS owns in Washington DC, not to mention the salaries it pays its executives, you’d realize what a lucrative scam it is.

Some scientists (and many librarians) have complained about the setup for a long time, not surprisingly. Scientists are the ones who need access to those journals, and the last thing they want to hear is a librarian say, “Sorry, we don’t get that journal” because they couldn’t afford it.

The Public Library of Science was formed for this very reason. It charges scientists a nominal fee to publish their work (if it’s accepted; PLoS journals are also peer reviewed), but makes the papers accessible to anyone. It’s a great and proper model.

It’s taken Congress a long time to realize what’s going on, not the least because the ACS and other publishers have lobbyists on their payrolls. They want libraries to have to pay them for access to publicly funded work. But now, maybe, Congress will finally realize the breadth of the scam and demand that publicly funded research be made available to the people who paid for it.