Monthly Archives: April 2010

Response to the US Chamber of Commerce on H.R. 5037

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I recently received a copy of a letter the US Chamber of Commerce is circulating in opposition to H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act. Since I decided to respond to the letter at length, I thought I would share my response with the community. Below I quote their letter in full with paragraph-by-paragraph responses to their argument.

Dear Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than three million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region, opposes H.R. 5037, the “Federal Research Public Access Act,” and urges you not to bring it before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for consideration.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a federation that represents the interests of businesses. While the Chamber undoubtedly has deep expertise in matters of business, it cannot speak with equal credibility about the conduct and dissemination of research. Those who can speak authoritatively on this topic, such as dozens of Nobel Prize-winning researchers, research universities, academic publishers, and others have spoken forcefully and unequivocally in expressing their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act.

H.R. 5037 would require that final manuscripts of peer-reviewed, private-sector journal articles that report on federally-funded research be made freely available on government-run websites no later than six months after their publication.

An important distinction must be made about what constitutes a “final manuscript.” At least three “final” versions are of interest – (1) the author’s final manuscript before peer-review occurs, (2) the author’s final manuscript incorporating improvements resulting from the peer-review process, and (3) the final manuscript incorporating editorial and formatting changes made by the publisher.

H.R. 5037 requires that the author’s final manuscript incorporating changes resulting from the peer review process (2 above) be made available freely available on the Internet (see Section 4.b.1 and Section 4.b.2). The final manuscript incorporating editorial and other changes made by the publisher (3 above) is not required to be made freely available to the public unless the publisher agrees (see Section 4.b.3.a).

Although the Chamber has previously advocated for, and continues to support, public access to the raw data resulting from federally-funded research, the Chamber believes that the government should not undermine the fundamental intellectual property rights for research works that reflect meaningful value-added by publishers.

I agree that raw data resulting from federally-funded research should be made freely available to the public. However, the assertion that intellectual property rights in the written analysis and results of federally-funded research should belong to publishers because of their “meaningful value add” is inappropriate at best and immoral at worst.

Consider the relative contributions to the research manuscript by the authors and the publishers. In terms of amount of contribution, the researcher is responsible to:

  • Generate original, significant ideas for new research,
  • Compete for and win grant funding for the research,
  • Identify and hire highly qualified students and other professionals to conduct the research,
  • Rigorously and responsibly carry out the program of research, and
  • Write up the results of the research in a clear, communicative manner.

Other researchers who volunteer as editors and reviewers are responsible to:

  • Receive the written results of the research,
  • Coordinate volunteers who review the merits of the research results (this coordination is most often performed by the journal’s editor who is also a volunteer),
  • Make a publication decision about the research results

Finally, publishers are responsible to:

  • Edit and reformat the document, and
  • Publish the results.

The researcher / author is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the effort that goes into conceiving, conducting, and reporting the research. While the publisher does make a small contribution to the manuscript, that contribution is dwarfed by the author’s contributions, demonstrating that intellectual property rights should clearly remain with authors and not be forfeited to publishers.

We can conduct a similar analysis from a financial perspective, taking the NIH as an example. The average annual dollar value of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant is between $210,769 (Gass, 2005) and $239,826 (Druss & Marcus, 2005). The scholarly published output of the average NIH grant is approximately 1.6 research articles per year (Druss & Marcus, 2005). This puts the average financial cost of generating a research article somewhere between $105,385 per article and $119,913 per article. By contrast, the average cost for a traditional, high quality journal to publish an article, including administrative, overhead, and other costs, is $2750 (Wellcome Trust, 2003).

(My apologies that readers may not be able to access all the articles cited above. If only they were freely available online…)

In terms of financial investment per manuscript, the publisher is responsible, on average, for between 2.2% and 2.5% of the overall investment resulting in the manuscript’s publication. Again, while the publisher does make a contribution, it is tiny compared to the investment of taxpayers, demonstrating that taxpayers have a reasonable expectation to the results of the research of which they are the primary funders.

Copyright protection provides an important incentive for publishers to invest in the peer review of, publication, and distribution of scientific journal articles about the latest government funded research. This commitment of resources by the private sector aids the advancement and integrity of science and contributes to substantial gains in research and other knowledge.

Peer review is both coordinated and performed by academics who volunteer as editors and reviewers. Publisher investment in this area is negligible and the supposed cost of providing peer review cannot be the foundation of a publisher’s incentive argument. Furthermore, some research (e.g., Harnad, 2004 or Eysenbach, 2006) suggests that manuscripts made freely available online are accessed and cited more often than manuscripts published under the traditional model. Consequently, manuscripts made freely available online result in even more “substantial gains in research and other knowledge” than manuscripts published under the traditional model. There is no need to provide publishers with incentives to sustain a sub-optimal model of knowledge dissemination.

The Chamber believes that this legislation would undermine incentives for journal publishers to invest in the peer review, editing, publishing, dissemination, and archiving of scientific journal articles. As a consequence, the bill would diminish the high quality of scientific and other scholarly research in the United States as well as endanger American jobs within the publishing industry.

The legislation will decrease incentives for journal publishers to make their traditional investments. However, continued investments in the pre-Internet model of knowledge dissemination are not necessary. To claim that a decrease in publisher investment in the traditional manuscript publication model would diminish the quality of scholarly research in the United States is somewhat narcissistic on the part of the publishers. American jobs within the publishing industry are only in danger as long as publishers cling to pre-Internet models of knowledge dissemination.

The Chamber looks forward to working with you and other members of the committee to ensure that the public is provided access to the results of federally-funded research in a manner that also respects the rights of the publishing community.

The publishing community has no a priori right to the results of federally-funded research, but the taxpaying public does. The Chamber’s letter demonstrates an infuriating entitlement mentality on the part of publishers. Clearly, publishers would prefer to continue the current intellectual sharecropping system in which researchers provide all the labor but publishers hold all the rights in the results of their work.

This entitlement mentality is somewhat understandable since the publishing industry has become addicted to several decades of government subsidy. As demonstrated above, the federal government subsidizes over 97% of the cost involved in publishing these research manuscripts. The only explanation for an academic publisher like Elsevier’s ability to make over $1 billon in profit during both 2008 and 2009, during what their 2009 annual report describes as an “unprecedented global recession,” is the fact that taxpayers fund the development of the products that publishers sell.

The current state of affairs tramples on the rights of both the taxpaying public and the country’s researchers while lining the pockets of academic publishers. H.R. 5037 makes progress toward remedying this outrageous situation. I look forward to the day when the public is provided free access to the results of federally-funded research in a manner that respects the rights of the taxpaying public who made it possible.

Thinking out loud about Connectivism

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I’ve been reading George’s writing on the unique ideas in connectivism. Two assertions leap out at me in his list of how connectivism is different from other approaches.

First is the statement that “the same structure of learning that creates neural connections can be found in how we link ideas and in how we connect to people and information sources. One scepter to rule them all.”

This sounds almost exactly like the claim made in John Anderson and Lael Schooler’s 1991 Reflections of the Environment in Memory, which I consider one of the finest pieces of research in our field:

Availability of human memories for specific items shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures to the item. These relationships have defied a systematic theoretical treatment. A number of environmental sources (New York Times, parental speech, electronic mail) are examined to show that the probability that a memory will be needed also shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures. Moreover, the environmental relationships are the same as the memory relationships. It is argued that human memory has the form it does because it is adapted to these environmental relationships. Models for both the environment and human memory are described. Among the memory phenomena addressed are the practice function, the retention function, the effect of spacing of practice, and the relationship between degree of practice and retention.

Anderson and Schooler provide solid empirical data from multiple domains, strong analysis of that data grounded in their theoretical framework (that the environment is reflected in memory), and mathematical models that accurately embody the relationships they observe. Whether you consider yourself a behaviorist or not, I don’t think a reasonable person can disagree with their conclusions. They’ve simply done too thorough a job clarifying their theoretical framework, gathering relevant raw data from multiple domains, analyzing those data, and arguing their interpretation.

I would be absolutely delighted to see this kind of empirical work done to shore up the nascent theoretical framework called connectivism. I expect that if we put our brains to it for a while we could figure out how to do this. Without any kind of strong empirical grounding, connectivism will be forced to dwell in a “thought experiment” realm with the unfortunate majority of educational research that argues from “obvious” first principles and apparently needs no rigorous validation. This kind of disdain for empirical data is a large part of what is wrong with education more broadly. (Please note that I’m not accusing George of this disdain! I think he would also love to see this kind of work done on connectivism.)

The second statement that leaps out at me is “knowledge is defined as a particular pattern of relationships and learning is defined as the creation of new connections and patterns.”

I understand that it’s hip to downplay the importance of nodes and claim that all the action in a graph is in its edges. However, it’s a very valid epistemological concern to ask questions like “what are the entities that exist in relationship to each other in connectivism?” “What are the entities that, when observed, can be interpreted as existing in patterns?” In other words, “what are the nodes that are connected in connectivism?”

If we’re allowed to talk about extremely impoverished networks in connectivism (I get the sense that many of the people on this train are only interested in very complex / rich networks), let’s consider a very simple graph: a graph with only two nodes and one edge linking them. Set that graph to the side for now, we’ll come back for it in a moment.

Next let’s consider the most basic kind of learning, the kind that you’ve been taught to mock and scorn: memorizing facts. This is sometimes called paired associate learning, because you’re trying to associate two items with each other (a vocabulary word with its definition, a country with its capital, a historical event with its date, etc.) It’s also appropriate to talk about this kind of learning in terms of stimulus-response: you’re supposed to learn that when I say “France” you should say “Paris.” When you reminisce about those good old S-R approaches to learning, you realize that the popular abbreviation S-R almost looks like a very simple graph. A graph with one node labeled S and another labeled R, with a link between them.

Now, I haven’t answered the question “what are the nodes in connectivism” I posed three paragraphs ago. But I believe I just demonstrated that old-fashioned, behaviorist, S-R learning is a simplest case of, and is completely subsumed by, the connectivist framework (as I understand it). Perhaps that’s an interesting enough assertion to hit “publish” and go home for the day on.

H. R. 5037

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As reported by the OA Librarian, Open Education News, and others, the Federal Research Public Access Act has been introduced in the US House.

taxpayeraccess.org has more detail and information about how you can get involved. The awesome Govtracker is currently showing H. R. 5037 has having been referred to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform. Go check and see if you have a congressman on the subcommittee. I do! I sent him this letter this morning.

Congressman Chaffetz,

I do live within the district.

Last April 16 we met for approximately 30 minutes to discuss issues of open access to research. I stated my belief that the taxpaying public – who are the true funders of federally funded research – have a correct expectation to see the results of the research work they have funded. I related that the NIH has already adopted a policy guaranteeing the public free and open access to the results of the research they fund, and I encouraged you to find opportunities to spread this increased openness and transparency to other federal funding agencies.

Recently, legislation was introduced that would accomplish this worthy goal across federal funding agencies. H. R. 5037, “To provide for Federal agencies to develop public access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency,” has been referred to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which you are a part. I strongly encourage you to support this legislation, and would be more than happy to meet with you again should you have any questions regarding its importance or value.

Sincerely,

David

Help get this important legislation passed! Let’s open access to unclassified research funded by the Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. It’s ours, after all.