Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation

Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 7:25 pm by Public Interest Declassification Forum By Diane DiEuliis and Robynn Sturm Yesterday we announced the launch of the Public Access Forum, sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Beginning with today’s post, we look forward to a productive online discussion. One of our nation’s most important assets is the trove of data produced by federally funded scientists and published in scholarly journals. The question that this Forum will address is: To what extent and under what circumstances should such research articles—funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers—be made freely available on the Internet? The Forum is set to run through Jan. 7, 2010, during which time we will focus sequentially on three broad themes (you can access the full schedule here). In the first phase of this forum (Dec. 10^th-20^th) we want to focus on the topic of Implementation. Among the questions we’d like to have you, the public and various stakeholders, consider are:

• Who should enact public access policies? Many agencies fund research the results of which ultimately appear in scholarly journals. The National Institutes of Health requires that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months after publication. Which other Federal agencies may be good candidates to adopt public access policies? Are there objective reasons why some should promulgate public access policies and others not? What criteria are appropriate to consider when an agency weighs the potential costs (including administrative and management burdens) and benefits of increased public access?
• How should a public access policy be designed?

1. 1. Timing. At what point in time should peer-reviewed papers be made public via a public access policy relative to the date a publisher releases the final version? Are there empirical data to support an optimal length of time? Different fields of science advance at different rates—a factor that can influence the short- and long-term value of new findings to scientists, publishers and others. Should the delay period be the same or vary across disciplines? If it should vary, what should be the minimum or maximum length of time between publication and public release for various disciplines? Should the delay period be the same or vary for levels of access (e.g. final peer reviewed manuscript or final published article, access under fair use versus alternative license)?
   2. Version. What version of the paper should be made public under a public access policy (e.g., the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript or the final published version)? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of different versions of a scientific paper?
   3. Mandatory v. Voluntary. The NIH mandatory policy was enacted after a voluntary policy at the agency failed to generate high levels of participation. Are there other approaches to increasing participation that would have advantages over mandatory participation?
   4. Other. What other structural characteristics of a public access policy ought to be taken into account to best accommodate the needs and interests of authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, the federal government, users of scientific literature and the public?

We invite your comments [...]

Give government your feedback on how to release data and publications from publicly funded research.

• Register for an account on the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy site here: http://blog.ostp.gov/wp-login.php?action=register
• Leave your policy comments on their WordPress blog!

More information is in the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy video:

Promoting Transparency in Government

Posted by Peter Orszag on December 08, 2009 at 10:52 AM EST

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On his very first day in office, President Obama signed a memorandum to all federal agencies directing them to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve. [...] You may want to start by reading a more complete description of the issues in the Federal Register.

If you want to post comments directly to the government office, create a wordpress account on the government site at http://blog.ostp.gov/wp-login.php?action=register and post comments yourself to the government post at http://blog.ostp.gov/2009/12/10/policy-forum-on-public-access-to-federally-funded-research-implementation/#comments. Deadline is Dec 20 for the first “phase”!

Q0: Who should enact public access policies? The National Institutes of Health requires that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months after publication. Which other Federal agencies may be good candidates to adopt public access policies? Are there objective reasons why some should promulgate public access policies and others not? What criteria are appropriate to consider when an agency weighs the potential costs (including administrative and management burdens) and benefits of increased public access? Q1: Timing. At what point in time should peer-reviewed papers be made public via a public access policy relative to the date a publisher releases the final version? Are there empirical data to support an optimal length of time? Q2: Version. What version of the paper should be made public under a public access policy (e.g., the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript or the final published version)? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of different versions of a scientific paper? Q3: Mandatory v. Voluntary. The NIH mandatory policy was enacted after a voluntary policy at the agency failed to generate high levels of participation. Are there other approaches to increasing participation that would have advantages over mandatory participation? Q4: Other. What other structural characteristics of a public access policy ought to be taken into account to best accommodate the needs and interests of authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, the federal government, users of scientific literature and the public? Further questions (from “Federal Register /Vol. 74, No. 235 / Wednesday, December 9, 2009 /Notices” ) 1. How do authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, and the federal government contribute to the development and dissemination of peer reviewed papers arising from federal funds now, and how might this change under a public access policy? 2. What characteristics of a public access policy would best accommodate the needs and interests of authors, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, the federal government, users of scientific literature, and the public? 3. Who are the users of peer-reviewed publications arising from federal research? How do they access and use these papers now, and how might they if these papers were more accessible? Would others use these papers if they were more accessible, and for what purpose? 4. How best could federal agencies enhance public access to the peerreviewed papers that arise from their research funds? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access? 5. What features does a public access policy need to have to ensure compliance? 6. What version of the paper should be made public under a public access policy (e.g., the author¿s peer reviewed manuscript or the final published version)? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages to different versions of a scientific paper? 7. At what point in time should peerreviewed papers be made public via a public access policy relative to the date a publisher releases the final version? Are there empirical data to support an optimal length of time? Should the delay period be the same or vary for levels of access (e.g., final peer reviewed manuscript or final published article, access under fair use versus alternative license), for federal agencies and scientific disciplines? 8. How should peer-reviewed papers arising from federal investment be made publiclyavailable? In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search, find, and retrieve and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit? How are these anticipated to change? 9. Access demands not only availability, but also meaningful usability. How can the federal government make its collections of peer reviewed papers more useful to the American public? By what metrics (e.g., number of articles or visitors) should the Federal government measure success of its public access collections? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? And, what makes them exceptional? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Reposted from 88 Proof Synth Bio Blog

Scientific American Oct 1953 - Evolution in Bacteria

DIYbio aims to be “the institution for the amateur,” developing and providing access to all of the resources a professional might have and an amateur might want, such as equipment, protocols, access to literature, etc. And we are collectively doing so in a distributed fashion right now.

But we are also doing something more, something that will occur slowly, over long time-scales. We are helping lay the foundations for cultural shift. We are laying the foundations for broad, deep, domestic understanding of science and technology.

We are proving that the cultural barriers to practice science in general, and biotechnology in particular, are imaginary. We are proving this by doing it ourselves. We are building a familiarity with the practice and product of science and slowly demonstrating that it can be a cultural activity like musicianship or cooking or solving sudoku puzzles. We are domesticating biotechnology.

As Sophia Roosth recently pointed out, we are proving that “the biological is not something cordoned-off in labs, but something quotidian, personal, and apprehensible,” that we are “intentionally destabilizing what it means to ‘do science’.”

Why is the domestication of biotechnology important? Listen to how W. Brian Arthur begins his recent book, The Nature of Technology:

We are attuned in the deepest parts of our being to nature, to our original surroundings and our original condition as humankind. We have a familiarity with nature, a reliance on it that comes from three million years of at-homeness with it. We trust nature. When we happen upon a technology such as stemcell regenerative therapy, we experience hope. But we also immediately ask how natural this technology is. And so we are caught between two huge and unconscious forces: Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one long, slow collision. The collision is not new, but more than anything else it is defining our era. Technology is steadily creating the dominant issues and upheavals of our time. We are moving from an era where machines enhanced the natural—speeded our movements, saved our sweat, stitched our clothing—to one that brings in technologies that resemble or replace the natural—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, medical devices implanted in our bodies. As we learn to use these technologies, we are moving from using nature to intervening directly within nature. And so the story of this century will be about the clash between what technology offers and what we feel comfortable with.

By domesticating biotechnology, we are helping society temper its natural mistrust of technology.

DIYbio is just one stone in this cultural foundation, set next to other DIY communities and Citizen Science projects and part of the broader resurgence of DIY culture championed by publications such as MAKE, President Obama, and perhaps the forebears of the internet itself.

Sophia Roosth, a doctoral student at MIT, presented a talk at The Kennedy School of Government STS seminar series on 9 Nov 2009 called “Crafting the Biological: Open-Sourcing Life Science, from Synthetic Biology to Garage Biotech.“

It’s a fantastic talk.  Sophia has been engaged in non-institutional biology at least since 2003, when she worked for Natalie Jeremijenko on the singular art / activist Biotech Hobbyist Magazine, and in her talk she presents her anthropological insight into DIYbio, richly contextualizing the social causes and effects of the movement.

Sophia talks about the practice of biology in terms of Knowing and Making. For DIYbiologists, she says:

“Knowing means a personal sort of knowledge, in which quotidian biologies like human bodies or the organisms you might encounter in a produce stand, for example, may be explored and modified. And Making is less about following engineering principles than it is about tinkering and making do, which I claim [DIYbiologists] do to destabilize what counts as legitimate scientific practice.” “Biology, Knowing, and Making, are all concepts up for grabs at this moment in the life sciences (and in this talk). If what historian Philip Pauly called the ‘engineering ideal for biology‘ unfolded in the 20th century within institutionally-sanctioned spaces, then in the 21st we are witnessing synthetic biologists and self-described biohackers recasting the bioengineering project as malleable and explicitly domestic. Think of the personal computing revolution, but for biology.”

And that’s all in the first 5 minutes! Check it out. It’s great. (mp3)