Interesting Links for 22-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• The Silliest Things said to a group of SF editors, writers and academics
  (tags: funny scifi epicfail )
• Building new London homes is cheaper than providing temporary housing
  (tags: building housing london )
• All publicly-funded research data should be made freely accessible says UK government
  (tags: GOVERNMENT uk research data free )
• No payouts for damage during the summer "riots". Because they weren't riots. Apparently.
  (tags: riots police uk law )
• Dog+Ducks=CUTE
  (tags: dogs ducks cute photo )
• The biology behind severe PMS
  (tags: pms menstruation hormones emotion women biology )
• Judge says extradition from US quicker than from UK
  (tags: extradition uk usa law )
• A fantastic teacher shows her class that they don't have to conform to gender roles
  (tags: Education gender bullying children lgbt discrimination )
• Stupid Things the British Believe About Americans (and vice versa)
  (tags: usa uk beliefs culture )
• Microsoft Bringing HTML5 and JavaScript to Office 15
  (tags: office microsoft javascript html5 html )
• What really caused the eurozone crisis?
  (tags: euro europe finance )
• Want to know if you're depressed? Look at a picture of your mother.
  While lying in an MRI scanner, of course.
  (tags: psychology mother parents depression )

Comments

[andrewducker]

There are already plenty of places that mandate using open access journals, rather than closed ones. This would be taking research that's paid for by the government and saying that it should be available to everyone, for free. I totally agree with that ethos.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Certainly it needs to be accessible. What winds me up is the introduction of yet more bureaucracy (that cuts into student contact time) and the assumption that there is only one kind of research.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that it's going to add much in the way of bureaucracy. The NIH in the US has a nice simple requirement - that all papers are uploaded to the PubMed library. Almost no overhead at all:
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

The assumption is annoying, certainly.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I wish I could share your hope, but so far, every move to codify research has led to even more red tape.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm very much in favour of this sort of requirement, but even with the best will in the world, it will be bureaucratic.

What about work that's jointly funded? What about a paper spanning work from more than one funder? (With possibly mutually-incompatible requirements?) What about re-analysis or meta-analysis by third parties? What about review articles? What about work written up after all funding has ceased? (Possibly temporarily.) What counts as peer-reviewed?

The NIH specifies some of this. Other public sector funders will have their own regulations and requirements. Commercial, charity and foundation funders are likely to take an entirely different line. (Some charities and foundations might well fall in with widespread public sector practice, but by no means all. Commercial research funders often have very hard-line policies about not publishing, at least for a certain length of time and/or only after scrutiny/veto.) Universities and subject bodies have their own requirements and/or traditional practices for paper depositing. Almost all researchers get funding from multiple bodies, so there will multiple regulations, which will differ. With luck and a lot of international coordination the amount of mutual incompatibility will be minimised, but I suspect it's unavoidable.

All of these requirements and compliance data will need to be logged, captured, reported and audited, on both funder and funding recipient side. Very little of which can be done by non-specialists.

I still think it's worthwhile, but to pretend it's cost-free is mistaken.