A frontier where copyright reformists are actually scoring wins – not by reforming copyright, but by working around it. “The European Commission has announced its intention to make open access all research findings funded by Horizon 2020, its enormous, EUR 80 billion research-funding programme for 2014-20. And it is urging member states to follow its lead.”
1) How much really is ‘all’?
2) What if the publicized results show that the money was largely spent on redundant/useless research? Like redoing same old crap but with a tiny quirk, say “New Economic models for home insurance based on Social Networks”, or actually good sounding research like “Common ontology for Telecommunications” which ends up being a bunch of papers that no telecom would use. A reform of EU research spending perhaps?
3) Would be nice if they would mandate open access for national administration to disclose information held by them to the citizen.
Just like Facebook or Google was made to offer a way to download your complete track record, we should be able to request the same from the government institutions. All data, all institutions. Of course whatever’s allowed under law.
I’m sorry, but how would you define “ground breaking” in this day and age?
There never was a lot of truly ground breaking research results at the same time. Research is accelerated by iterations. Hell, even with the mostly undiscovered biological species we will still not see anything really shocking out of it.
So we can rest assured that a confirmed Higg’s bozon will be the biggest or one of the three biggest discoveries this decade.
That does not mean, that the 80bn spent will be a waste of time. Even the “New Economic models for home insurance based on Social Networks” can be enlightening in some areas.
First thing : even without mandatory open access, there are already a fair number of articles accessible online for free (arxiv comes to mind). A lot of research in computer science (I do wearable computing R&D) is available online. But maybe it’s not as good in some other less “computerized” fields such as the humanities or medicine (anyone has experience in those ?).
The enormous majority of published papers is about doing something we already know but with a small improvement (or in a different situation). It’s pretty rare to have a new ground breaking finding. So if you look at it that way, a lot of research money is “wasted”. But that’s how you move forward. Research is really incremental and it’s about exploring unknown stuff, so failure and dead end are to be expected.
Now, there is quite a bit of bullshit published too. Mainly because most of the academics are evaluated based on the number publications per year. This is a f–king dumb metric and this lead people to publish unfinished experiments (or hide bad results) that are just good enough to get accepted. But this is a completely different problem than the open access problem.
Now I agree with you that they should extend this open access policy to area other than research. But this is a very good first step. Science is about disseminating knowledge and in that sense, it should be accessible to all.
Edited 2012-07-17 20:11 UTC
Actually, I’ll go beyond that. I work in research for 10 years now (if I count in my 3 years as a phd student), and it is the exception when I can’t find something for free, not the rule. In such occasions I asked around and sometimes friends could get it for me, or the author sent it to me. And I have yet to witness a situation when an author won’t give you the paper you are looking for, it certainly never happend to me or my colleagues.
Also, I’m sorry, but mandating open access is only good the publishing companies. Yes, I know they have high subscription fees, but I would bet that getting 2-3-4k Euros per paper would top that. And now you’ll have to pre-calculate costs of publications when submitting the proposal, otherwise you won’t be able to finance publications, since most research institutions and universities (I’m not talking money-rich US research labs here) don’t realy have millions lying around for publication fees of their entire personnel.
Well, some results will always be below the expectations, I’m sorry, but that’s how research is. You propose something, you try your best (hopefully), and sometimes you reach beyond the expectations, sometimes you don’t. It’s up to the reviewers – who sometimes can be really PITAs believe me – to decide whether the work done still deserves the money.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Don’t expect too many grand discoveries any more – they are and will remain almost exclusively the realm of modern mythologies (overall, http://www.osnews.com/permalink?526126 and the posts it links to)
Call me skeptical, but I can’t get excited about this when the EC is (at the same time) trying to sneak ACTA in through the back door via a trade agreement with Canada. There was even an article about that here (a few days ago).
I’ll be convinced that the EC is serious about “open access” when I see a fat pink thing with a curly tail flying paat my window.
The proposal was floated by the EU Commission last week and would comprise a Europe-wide deposit guarantee……
http://dhaninfo.com/Home/link-building/“>Property
Edited 2012-07-19 12:30 UTC