Extended comment period on OSTP’s open-access data policies
The Obama administrations’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has extended the deadline for comment about new rules requiring the results of government-funded research be available to the public. These rules will, most likely, undercut the current system of research journals, which make money by charging both authors and readers (subscriptions run in the thousands of dollars). The Electronic Freedom Foundation has weighed-in on the issue, calling public access “so blindingly, obviously good that you have to wonder why it hasn’t already been implemented.” At Techdirt, Mike Masnick, who writes about the economics and politics of new media, says of science journals: “It’s a great scam, and they don’t want it to end.”
Open-access journals have come into their own recently; some of the titles from the Public Library of Science (PloS) have even broken even, showing that quality, peer-reviewed journals can operate with an open model. However, as I wrote a few days ago, there is a spectrum possibility when it comes to “public access”. Public repositories such as PubMed Central provide access to publications (i.e. text, figures, and supplementary data that is included in the original paper). As research becomes more data intensive, the real challenge is going to design systems to hold extremely large data sets, and provide the public access to that data in the form of useful, interpretable “information”.
