PD Editorial: Taxpayer-funded research ought to be public

Last week, the Biden administration announced that Americans will get access to academic research that their federal tax dollars pay for. It’s about time.

Scholarly journals have run a racket for decades. Researchers who want their work published in a prestigious journal hand it over to publishers who charge exorbitant fees to libraries and anyone else who wants access to cutting-edge work.

Publishers got away with it because their print journals were the only game in town. Then the internet began to democratize information and eliminate paper publishing costs. It became a lot harder to justify keeping content, especially publicly funded content, behind steep paywalls.

The federal government spends more than $100 billion on science and engineering research annually. The people who pay for the research ought to have access to it. That, at least, is the principle of the thing.

But if we’re being realistic, most Americans aren’t about to cozy up by the fire with a glass of sherry and a copy of a NASA-funded paper titled “Large-scale solar wind flow around Saturn’s Nonaxisymmetric magnetosphere.” (Spoiler: About 20% more particles from the sun flow over Saturn’s poles than the rest of the planet.)

Other topics, however, might be far more popular. Early in the pandemic, papers that came out of research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have found a lot of readers. So, too, might papers about climate change.

More important, broad dissemination of research fuels the scientific process. When other researchers can easily access the most-recent findings in their field, they are able to discover fresh avenues of study. They may find new treatments for diseases and think of new ways to look at the universe.

All of which convinced the Obama administration to open access to federally funded research. A 2013 White House memo said the research and data had to be publicly accessible, but it allowed publishers to monetize them for a year. That meant time-sensitive findings — such as those released during the pandemic or involving climate change — didn’t get in front of everyone as fast as they could have, and the publishers maintained a stranglehold.

The Biden administration last week ended the delay. Under a new directive, all federally funded academic papers as well as the underlying data must be publicly accessible at the time of publication starting by the end of 2025.

The University of California system for a couple of years has helped its faculty secure open access with some journals. The reasoning is the same. California taxpayers subsidize the schools, so California taxpayers ought to see the research product.

UC’s stand against aggressive publishers includes not just scientific work but all research. Maybe people would like to read about philosophy, literature or the latest work on election security by renowned political scientists. The federal government doesn’t fund those so much.

Publishers still provide some value in distribution and peer review to keep out bad papers on cold fusion by a plumber working in his basement. But just as the music industry had to adapt to online distribution, so must academic journals change as more researchers and their funders don’t want their hard work and investment exploited to pad publishers’ profits.

The Biden administration, UC and other supporters of open access are pushing academic research in a more-accessible direction. That’s good news for human knowledge and for the taxpayers who’ve been paying the bills.

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