Why isn publicly-funded scientific research freely available?
FWIW, I don’t know any scientists who oppose open access. In the biomedical realm, the NIH has been gradually moving forward on the issue, largely for the reasons you state: it is indeed odd that the results of taxpayer funded research can’t be accessed by the taxpayers. You can read about their public access policy here. They’ve established PubMed Central as a repository for NIH-funded manuscripts. At present, it’s a bit odd, because uploading to PMC is a “request[ed]” and “strong encourage[d]” rather than a required. HHMI, a major private biomedical funding organization, is making uploading to PMC a requirement for any papers that investigators seeking renewal of their funding wish to include on their list of accomplishments. Individual journals are gradually opening up their archives, too. A lot of them now give free access to papers older than 6 months or a year. Further, there’s of course
Open Access News is another well-known site run by another well-known Peter (Suber). I really like his Open Access overview. The point that someone must pay for journal editorial functions is true. And it would certainly be damaging to the business of publishing if we had to immediately give free access to all journal articles. We should draw the distinction between “make NIH-funded research openly available” and “make all journals give away articles for free”. Government funded research, and science research in particular, is an interesting case. NIH funds the basic research. Then to get it published the grant might have to pay page fees. New research is published, and then government institutions (NLM, Dept. of Ag, whoever) have to subscribe to science journals to see the results of that research. So government entities might be paying for research three times o
So government entities might be paying for research three times over. And of course, not even every government-funded researcher has access to every journal where government-funded research occurs. In those cases, the government has paid for the research twice, but their own researchers still can’t get access to it. Let alone the general public.
Grouse has an excellent point. The editorial functions of a journal (careful topic selection, peer review) are paid for, already, by institutions (typically the university or the government). In other words, most scientists don’t subscribe to these journals on an individual level — their institution does. Open Access journals, by paying for the editorial function through author fees, typically will not greatly change who funds it. It might change the funding stream, but not where the money’s coming from. I just went to a talk where one of the speakers described it like this: scientific research is a socialist system, and scientific publishing is a capitalist system. When the two collide, you get all sorts of crazy affects. Honestly, though, this isn’t fully touching on the question of WHY publicly-funded research isn’t openly available.
how it is currently justified, both by scientists and by the peer-reviewed journals in which they must “publish or perish.” It looks like you already know the answer for how it is currently justified, or at least why it’s hard to change. You can’t get tenure without publishing in prominent peer-reviewed journals, most of which aren’t open access. It’s all very well supporting open access, but basically the entire tenure system (including the people evaluating tenure cases) has to support it completely before it’s going to viably replace the current publication system. That said, there’s movement towards open access journals in probably all fields. My impression is that this has not so much to do with your original concern (“research papers documenting science paid for by U.S. federal grant money”) and everything to do with general principles of intellectual freedom, not to mention people being very sick of various aspects of the commercial journal system. Also, prepublication archives
