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This pisses me off. They want to effectively paywall PubMed.

politics journals free access

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34 replies to this topic

#1 MrHappy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 06:56 AM


http://www.nytimes.c...d-for.html?_r=2

Research Bought, Then Paid For

By MICHAEL B. EISEN

Published: January 10, 2012

Berkeley, Calif.
THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.
But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.
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#2 absent minded

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 11:42 AM

maybe this is why terrorist attacks happen :sleep:

#3 churchill

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 11:46 AM

I think it is ridiculous, we get more cures by freeing information not be restricting it.
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#4 ScienceGuy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 12:40 PM

That seriously SUCKS! :sad:

Let's keep our fingers crossed that the bill DOES NOT pass.

Edited by ScienceGuy, 12 January 2012 - 12:41 PM.


#5 Ampa-omega

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 12:55 PM

That seriously SUCKS! :sad:

Let's keep our fingers crossed that the bill DOES NOT pass.

NEVER play with chance in these circumstances when dealing with greedy and dystopic individuals
i suggest you take this beautiful resource for whats its worth while you still can

#6 absent minded

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 01:14 PM

how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.

Edited by absent minded, 12 January 2012 - 01:16 PM.

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#7 ScienceGuy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 01:51 PM

That seriously SUCKS! :sad:

Let's keep our fingers crossed that the bill DOES NOT pass.

NEVER play with chance in these circumstances when dealing with greedy and dystopic individuals
i suggest you take this beautiful resource for whats its worth while you still can


I think you have a valid point there! ;)

#8 ScienceGuy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 01:53 PM

how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.


Hey absent minded,

Nice one! ;)

#9 Ampa-omega

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 02:00 PM

how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.


I think it could require a couple terabytes ,possible
but its still worth a shot with a couple gigabytes

its the search feature that made the site so special searching the files will be another problem to sort once you get all of them

Edited by Ampa-omega, 12 January 2012 - 02:03 PM.


#10 ScienceGuy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 02:05 PM

how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.


I think it may require a couple terabytes or possibly petabyte
but its still worth a shot with a couple 100 gigabytes

its the search feature that made the site so special searching the files will be another problem to sort once you get all of them


Petabyte? Anything to do with this guy?:
Posted Image

#11 Ampa-omega

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 02:09 PM


how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.


I think it may require a couple terabytes or possibly petabyte
but its still worth a shot with a couple 100 gigabytes

its the search feature that made the site so special searching the files will be another problem to sort once you get all of them


Petabyte? Anything to do with this guy?:


hahaha ,i did edit out the petabyte, but i am a bit cautious,
who knows how big the site is

#12 MrHappy

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 06:25 PM

I think it's time to contact your congressman and express your views on why stifling access to important, paid for by tax-dollars, research information is a bad idea and ask them to vote NO on the 'Research Works Act' / H.R.3699.IH:
http://www.usa.gov/C...t/Elected.shtml
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#13 maxwatt

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 06:57 PM

More traction contacting your senator; this sounds like one of those "destroy any public govenment program" memes that the tea-part house is in thrall too.

#14 churchill

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 08:52 PM

how many gigabytes i wonder would it take to download their entire database ...

http://www.httrack.com/ <---- downloads entire websites for offline usage.

I tried to download oxford's dictionary for ESL people... that took about 15 gigs if I remember right. But, the issue with it was I don't think the search function worked.


I am pretty sure that you would not be able to do that, you would either hit the download limit on your isp or they would throttle you at some point so it would take 1000 of years before you succesfully did it.
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#15 absent minded

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Posted 12 January 2012 - 09:52 PM

lol, it would be crazy indeed. Even if a longecity computer wiz modded the software so modulated downloading of data is possible (then playing lego afterwards) so that a bunch of members can participate and share some of their bandwidth on a daily basis.... it would overload the pubmed servers... ya think ??

Edited by absent minded, 12 January 2012 - 09:53 PM.


#16 churchill

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Posted 13 January 2012 - 02:45 PM

lol, it would be crazy indeed. Even if a longecity computer wiz modded the software so modulated downloading of data is possible (then playing lego afterwards) so that a bunch of members can participate and share some of their bandwidth on a daily basis.... it would overload the pubmed servers... ya think ??


I am sure you could write a distributed system running on 1000+ pc it could download it all then I guess you could use the same pc to host the information in a similar fashion to torrent. However I would imagine that it is not legal to do this, at the very least you would be breaking the terms of service of the website and I am sure if you did something like this without their backing they would try and get you. Also the issue is once you have all this data what do you do with it, how do you let people know you have it, and once the pay wall goes up the data will start to get out of date.

#17 MrHappy

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Posted 13 January 2012 - 07:29 PM

Here's the last person who tried that:
http://en.wikipedia....ki/Aaron_Swartz

On Tuesday, 19 July 2011, Swartz was charged by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.[8] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."[9] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[10]
Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on $100,000 bail.[citation needed] Prosecution of the case continues, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, resulting in a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million USD.[11] JSTOR put out a statement saying they would not pursue civil litigation against Swartz.[12]
Jerry Cohen of Burns & Levinson said the government's choice to pursue criminal charges when JSTOR and MIT had resolved their civil concerns with Swartz reflected a trend of increasingly-zealous prosecution in federal courts.[13]
On September 7, 2011, JSTOR announced that they released the public domain content of their archives for public viewing and limited use. According to JSTOR, they have been working on making those archives public for some time, and the recent controversy, involving, according to a press release, "an individual who was indicted for downloading a substantial portion of content from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites", made them "press ahead" with the initiative.[14]

Hopefully everyone is contacting their congressmen and senators...

#18 hooter

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Posted 14 January 2012 - 12:38 AM

god damnit pubmed is literally my favorite website

#19 AgeVivo

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Posted 14 January 2012 - 09:42 AM

the worldwide impact on emerging biotech startup trend could be non negligible...
... the US being among the first touched since biotech startups currently tend to develop more in the US than in many places

#20 hav

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Posted 15 January 2012 - 06:00 PM

http://www.nytimes.c...d-for.html?_r=2

Research Bought, Then Paid For

By MICHAEL B. EISEN

Published: January 10, 2012

Berkeley, Calif.
THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.
But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.


I wasn't aware that pubmed hosts full research papers. Looks to me that they just host the abstracts. Full text is usually not free and referenced by a link to a pay site. When the full text is free, there's an up-front link to it, but I think even that is usually off-site. Seems a little wasteful to require submitting the full paper if its not ever hosted NIH.

Although I've love to see a requirement that all research papers be made available for free to the public (me) on a government site, that might just be a windfall to the medical and research communities that can well-afford to pay for them. Maybe some sort of compromise requirement would work. Like limit copyright to research papers receiving government funding to 1 year after which they must be made publicly available for free by NIH.

Howard

#21 Mind

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Posted 16 January 2012 - 07:15 PM

If the research is taxpayer funded then it should be open and free for the public to read (PubMed)

If private parties paid for the research then they should retain the rights/decision to allow free access or not.
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#22 MrHappy

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Posted 16 January 2012 - 08:43 PM

I think, for the benefit of humanity that the abstract should be catalogued at pubmed and a link to the paywall, if it's privately funded. Everyone wins then.



#23 niner

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Posted 14 May 2012 - 09:17 PM

If the research is taxpayer funded then it should be open and free for the public to read (PubMed)

If private parties paid for the research then they should retain the rights/decision to allow free access or not.


I totally agree. Here's a question, though: If US taxpayers (or French, German, or Iranian) funded the research, should Chinese Biotech firms (or Korean or British) get to see the full text for free? Some people have a problem with that.

I don't have the data, but my gut sense is that a substantial majority of biomedical research is publicly funded, paid for by taxpayers all over the world.

One of the definitions of science is "Public Knowledge".

This bill sounds absolutely crazy. Who introduced it, anyway? Anyone know the current status?

Aside from idiot politicians, the real villains in scientific information hostage-taking are private scientific publishing houses like Elsevier. They take money without adding value, and need to be eliminated.

#24 Connor MacLeod

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Posted 14 May 2012 - 09:49 PM

The title of this thread isn't very accurate. PubMed is just a database of citations, about 21 million when I last checked. Some small fraction of these are linked to articles, I counted about 500K, available for free use (Creative Commons license) though PubMed Central Open Access. So the vast majority of articles in the PubMed citation database, say 97.5%, have never been freely available through NLM. Losing that 2.5% would be a bummer, but it's not as if the situation doesn't already stink.

By the way, for the script kiddies on this thread, if you look around a bit there's a link where you can download the entire PubMed Central Open Access collection of articles with a single click.

#25 Logic

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Posted 14 May 2012 - 09:53 PM

Join Avaaz!

Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/index.php

This organization recently stopped a bill allowing the US Govt to close any web-site it pleased from being passed.
I have contacted them about actioning this issue.

#26 Connor MacLeod

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Posted 14 May 2012 - 11:10 PM

> Some small fraction of these are linked to articles, I counted about 500K, available for free use (Creative Commons license) though PubMed Central Open Access...

I apologize; it looks like the Open Access subset is only a subset of the articles that are available through PMC. The Open Access subset is freely available as a single click download (see Section 5 at this link), while bulk automated download of other articles available on PubMed Central is a violation of their terms of service.

I'm not sure what percentage of citations in the PubMed database are linked to articles available through PubMed Central, but I'll check this out the next time I need to run through the citations.

#27 Logic

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Posted 17 May 2012 - 04:18 PM

I got this reply from Avaaz

Hey Neville,


Seems like you've got a pretty great idea for an Avaazy campaign! Would you be willing to start a petition on our new member generated petition site? Setting up petitions is super simple, and I'm here to help if you need assistance.

Here is the link to starting a petition: http://www.avaaz.org...t_a_petition_a/



Let me know if you have any questions or if you need any assistance!


Best,


Andrew

Should I?
Yes? No??

#28 MrHappy

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Posted 20 May 2012 - 10:57 PM

The research works act got shot down, so we're all good.. for now! :)

Edited by MrHappy, 20 May 2012 - 10:58 PM.

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#29 Mind

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Posted 25 February 2013 - 06:18 PM

Thanks for nothing Obama! (ok, maybe a couple of crumbs for us little people) http://www.kurzweila...n-access-policy


The debate over access to federally funded studies has been simmering for years, NBC Cosmic Log explains. “Some in the scientific community have argued that such studies should be made freely and publicly available immediately because taxpayers have footed the bill for the research. Others have voiced concern that a government requirement to distribute the studies at no cost would deal a blow to the scientific publishing industry.”



"Deal a blow to the publishing industry". Of course that is what should happen. They have been milking the taxpayer funded research, for profit, for decades. Obama lets the incestuous government gravy train keep rolling.

Edited by Mind, 25 February 2013 - 06:19 PM.

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#30 AgeVivo

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Posted 25 February 2013 - 09:57 PM

I got this reply from Avaaz

Hey Neville,


Seems like you've got a pretty great idea for an Avaazy campaign! Would you be willing to start a petition on our new member generated petition site? Setting up petitions is super simple, and I'm here to help if you need assistance.

Here is the link to starting a petition: http://www.avaaz.org...t_a_petition_a/



Let me know if you have any questions or if you need any assistance!


Best,


Andrew

Should I?
Yes? No??

Yes, you should!!!! Briliiant. I will sign there.





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