NASA's New Research Result Portal

1. This appears to be a website to apply to add already-published papers to Pubmed commons.

   1. I’m confused. Is NASA now requiring every juried paper to be public when it is published? So something in Science or Nature or whatever to be public contemporaneously?

      And I see that Ms. Dava managed to use ‘innovation’ in a context where there’s no actual innovation.

      1. Yes to both your questions. This is part of the open government initiative, and the simple principle that if the taxpayers pay for it, they should be able to read it, regardless of snooty journals’ pay walls – journals that exist to sell advertising, not to further scientific communication.

         1. While I fully agree with your point, this is, to be fair, not a NASA initiative. A dedicated group of medical researchers and authors have for years fought to make the results of their work accessible to physicians and patients, when they were forced by a small group of publishers to refuse to distribute their own work to those who might be helped, unless every reader paid an exorbitant price for every journal. Commercial publishers typically charge $35 for each paper downloaded, and they cannot be redistributed. A few years ago they achieved at least a partial victory in that any tax-supported research may be made freely available by the author. Of course this can be done on your own website and indexed by Google, but Pubmed Commons provides a convenient server where authors can post their papers for free and unrestricted access.

            I would not classify this as a “government” initiative; the physical cost is negligible. Rather the government has finally agreed to the demands of researchers who care more about their patients than their profits and against publishers who have long misused the Copyright Act, which was intended to protect the right of the author to income derived from the sale of a “creative work”. Instead publishers have long used it to keep the income for themselves and prevent authors from sharing their knowledge with those who it might help.

            1. What are the actual costs to NASA (or any government agency)? The papers are still published in the usual journals, before being put online and made publicly available. Those journals charge page fees to publish papers (at least most of them do.) If they can’t make money off subscriptions, I suspect they will just increase their publication fees. Scientists bill those to their government grants. So the cost to NASA will be more than just hosting the open access document server.

               Not that I disagree with this approach: Even if it costs more than you think, I’m in favor of open access. But I believe there will be some hidden costs.

            2. There are legitimate costs in editing and reviewing papers, Open-access journals like the Public Library of Science (PLOS) have to charge a publication fee, and I do not object to it. PLOS is much less expensive to publish in than the traditional journals and the information is immediately accessible.

            3. Sorry if I implied it was a NASA-only initiative. I don’t know to what extent the biomed researchers’ efforts led to the OSTP memo ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/… ) of three years ago, which is part of the the President’s Open Government initiative. NASA was given a deadline of (iirc) 2015 December 31 to implement their part, and are only eight months late to the table. Pretty good for a NASA decision-making process (they had to decide whether to go with Pubmed or another solution).

         2. Surely the big publishers are pushing back on this.

            1. Science and Nature have time-limited pay walls. At least in my field, traditionally they and the other publishers have made most of their profit from library subscriptions (and now through corporate/site licensing of full access to institutional ranges of IP addresses); the downloading of PDF reprints has become a questionable fraction of income since almost everyone uploads their manuscripts to arXiv before submission to the journal. The EU, whatever else one wants to say about it, has been forceful in pushing open access, at least within 6 – 12 months. They back it up with a willingness to pay for full access. I suspect that makes the publishers happier than NASA’s method.

               What both US and EU policy appear to be establishing is a dual-track system where papers by authors from wealthier parts of the world are available by the public at an early date, and those by authors from poorer countries take longer or may never see free access, depending on the journal.

               An aside: In astrophysics and related fields, the NASA-supported, online Astrophysics Data System makes search and discovery for paper publication information and abstracts trivial, and provides reprint access to whatever the publishers allow for a user at a given institution. I believe people in my field will continue to use it for downloading reprints and arXiv preprints in preference to the Pubmed system, simply out of habit snd convenience. NASA pretty clearly intends the Pubmed for use by non-experts who have a right, as taxpayers, to equal access.

            2. As I make (very slow) progress on my book project I run into paywalls all the time on research that is decades old.

               I don’t poke around much in Science or Nature or medicine, but in the agronomy or horticulture or plant science fields, I frequently need to find a colleague with a library pass.

               Oddly enough I can sometimes find what I need by looking through published monographs on Amazon. Who knew.

         3. No most of the scientific/engineering ones exist to collect page charges and library subscriptions

Comments are closed.