This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.
Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
> Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
THIS. Especially for things like the NEC and other building safety regulations. Then move on to ISO/ANSI/IEC/etc standards.
I should add that India does this for some IEC documents and other standards under open information acts.
While you're at it, make textbooks free. And movies. And games. Who is going to pay for standards development? How will it maintain a stable funding mechanism? I refer you to recent developments with the US government.
Specially the ones with force of law
I agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model.
Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.
> The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for?
The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems.
It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.
That's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.
> It is astonishing to me that they are not.
If you'd like the public to somehow pick up the tab for drafting them, sure.
The standards that already exist? Is there some special meaning of "drafted" here?
Isn't the main cost on the participants in the consortium anyway? I.e. effort amd time.
At the same time, NIH just announced that all grants involving foreign researcher are shut.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...
>Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.
No more collaborations for US researchers.
That's absolutely insane and isn't even the craziest thing to come from HHS this week.
This comment has a lot of FUD. No collaboration? All grants involving foreign research are shut?
A novel use of an LLM, for what it’s worth, is checking for another analysis - one that has enough context to peer over a partisan wall.
So, for a counter perspective, it doesn’t seem like the FUD is warranted.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6814329d-10b0-8008-8c25-e76892212d...
My reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.
We had some papers published under NIH grants at my last job. Our papers went public right away. Although the publishers charged the lab an extra fee because of free requirement.
As others pointed out reviewers often aren't compensated.
Pubmed is an amazing resource.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
The annotate a lot of the papers with this “Mesh” terms, which is a controlled vocabulary used to help index all those papers. They update with new annotations daily.
Peer review is not supported by publishers. Many editors are unpaid too.
I specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.
The "infrastructure" is terrible software called Editorial Manager. It doesn't have any document annotation or collaboration features. It merely allows documents to be uploaded and downloaded, and is a pain to work with.
The peer review process is almost entirely coordinated by unpaid associate editors. They make initial manuscript assessments, solicit reviewers, and moderate the review and response process.
"journal staff moving papers through the peer review system" may happen at a small number of prestige journals such as Advanced Materials, but for most Q1 journals it is all volunteer work. That is the business model that makes companies like Elsevier billions.
Infrastucture is not the same as software. I was mostly referring to the human infrastructure (although editorialmanager is not free and until someone makes an open source alternative the supscription fees do support that license). And I would argue that the existence of a small number of prestige journals with scientific staff makes the entire system worth it, even if it means we have to deal with the existence of Elsevier and the like.
prestige journals are good for careers, but are they good for science? I don't think I've ever read a CS or math paper in Nature or Science that's blown me away. all the classics are on arxiv.
The value of good editorial staff may very well be less important in some fields. In the biomedical field subject-matter expertise still matters a lot in terms of discerning good research from seemingly good research. Which also means that prestige journals won't make research any more groundbreaking but if functioning properly should enrich for papers that are less likely to be junk science. I'd also argue that generic journals like Nature and Science are so unfocused that their staff probably provides little to no additional expertise and they rely entirely on peer review. Whereas staff at more specialized journals with lower but still very respectable impact factors are probably doing more informed work to select for quality science.
There's no need for "prestige journals". I have nothing really against them, but if they shut down today it wouldn't harm scientific progress at all.
platforms in general seem to be a pathological edge case for capitalism. capitalism is healthy when companies have to compete and innovate, rather than sitting on their assets like feudal lords. academic publishers and social media sites are almost pure rent-seeking, up there with patent trolls and private equity firms.
your reading is incorrect. they're not announcing the removal of the 12 month embargo, they're moving it forward to the 1st of July
the subscription fees are a parasitic joke in the first place. science should be free, now and forever, and peer review is generally done on a voluntary basis anyway
Moving forward the removal of the embargo. But my point is that access to federally funded science was free prior to anyone coming up with a plan to remove the embargo. You just needed to wait up to a year before a paper was put on pubmed central. This removal of the embargo is hardly a meaningful change in terms of access but one that erodes the institutions that ensure peer review happens. It is easy to say peer review is largely based on volunteers, but if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now. At least you can put peer reviewer on your academic CV. The paid journal staff do much less glamorous work but still serve a role in keeping peer review running.
the current journal system works like this:
- the govt (i.e. taxpayers) and universities pay for research to be done
- once the research is done, the universities pay journals to review and publish their work
- the journals then get academics to review the work
- the journals do not pay the reviewers for this
- the journals then charge exorbitant fees for the universities and members of the public to view the work that they as a collective paid for
- from which exactly none of those fees go back to the original creators or funders of the research
-- so in conclusion, the journals get paid from both sides, supplier and consumer, at no point paying anything to the funders or creators of their product, except perhaps in tax. their sole costs are administrative, and maybe some printing, if they even still bother to do that
these institutions deserve to die. they are cancerous parasites leeching the veins of science, extracting money at every opportunity, taking funding from research, all for the sake of a service that can largely be boiled down to prestige for a price
>if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now
this simply isn't true. there is a growing movement where academics do this very thing, founding their own fairer journals that aren't owned by Elsevier
Peer review need not be synchronous.
This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
Yes, it depends on what you're doing; for general paper discovery / search tasks, title abstract can be enough (which is also why Springer and Elsevier have been pulling even their abstracts from sources like OpenAlex).
But for something like that you need full texts to look into results sections. I'm very curious how you're dealing with information contained in tables, or if you're dealing with snippets of text from the full-text alone. Have you poked around Elicit yet?
I've recently had this problem where the important information (number of study participants, and how many were filtered out during which step) were only encoded in figures, not in the text. Maddening.
Do you know of any ready to use alternatives to title and abstract screening? Wondering about it since I'm in the weeds of doing so.
what do you mean exactly? I was suprised how with grobid many of at least the arXiv papers are easily converted to xml for better processing than PDF.
Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.
grobid is a wonderful resource, patrice did an awesome job (I used it at my previous job at scite.ai)
that's exactly what I needed!
As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...
Sci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century.
And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
Scihub is the best. They are doing a huge service to humanity.
Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.
Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.
So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?
I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that Elsevier is a Dutch company had something to do with it.
Is there an actual court order in effect, or is it some kind of tacit agreement between ISPs?
I've also had some trouble accessing them in Denmark. They're still available on Tor though.
they also had a telegram channel which sent you the papers.
Is Anna's Archive also blocked?
I recommend a good vpn, such as Mullvad.
But I agree, countries should not allow this kind of authoritarian practices.
Turned off how? Like a Chinese firewall kind of thing? Are you not able to simply VPN around the block?
If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results."
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
What goes to government should benefit the people, not the mythical entity
Have the new generations forgotten how to praise an accomplishment even when it was realized by their enemy. “Give the devil his due”. Partisan myopia has reached an intellectually crippling height in the US. As a scientist who has worked in academia for decades, there is no equivocation in me about praising this move. So many times has my progress in research be speed-bumped by a paywall. Rejoice in the purple between red and blue.
I didn’t realize the NIH still existed. I thought Musk fired all the government scientists and researchers.
This is an absolute win. Publicly funded research should never be behind a pay wall.
yeah this is finally the way it should be. always wondered why stuff paid for by taxes got stashed behind paywalls for so long. feels like common sense, even if it took forever
Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.
> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.
Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.
Consider that a lot of NIH research funding has already been cut.
They effectively ended research they didn't want to release, wasting funding already provided, while counting it as wasteful spending.
That it survived two administrations in the current climate is a miracle to be thankful for
you'd be surprised at how many policies survived two administrations. the real big one (unless I'm missing something or there have been CIA covert ops) is "not invading any new countries" (yemen conflict started under obama)
Seems like it'll stick around too. It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.
The difference is that while indirect costs are critical to research in most cases, journals are the poster child when it comes to skimming research funding.
They provide little to no real value beyond a CV trophy and only carry out the bare minimum to coordinate peer review. Their largest impact is siphoning tens of thousands of dollars from labs, and millions from cash-strapped university libraries.
Even if the current administration wasn't attacking university funding, the publishing system is in desperate need of reform.
> It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.
Though arguably orthogonal with their goal of financially starving the research institutions, too.
This - Open Access has been around for a while. Battarchya is claiming he's removing the 1 year delay but I've def seen things published and openaccessed ASAP before so I'm not super familiar on the specifics.
The change is that now all NIH-funded research must be open access.
How about NIH funded drugs, can they be "paywall-ed" ?
NIH doesn't do mass production. It may not even do the research necessary to get synthesizing at scale working.
Until the NIH becomes a drug production company, the drugs themselves are, by necessity, "paywalled".
I guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?
Yes, this same guy is helping "to cut more than 40% from NIH’s 2026 budget and pare its 27 institutes and centers down to just eight." - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-def...
He has already fired over a thousand NIH employees and frozen or cancelled billions in grants in his first couple months on the job.
While we're talking about NIH, here's a fun game: try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box. Play around and see how many Forbidden Words you can discover!
I've found so far: 'gender', 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion', as expected. Not: 'equality', 'socioeconomic', 'minority', 'ableism'.
Spanish is uncensored: Not censored: 'diversidad', 'equidad', 'genero' Censored: 'inclusion' (ha, same word as in english, duh) (Also 'inclusión', surprisingly)
It really doesn't seem to be a broad sweeping thing, mostly just 'DEI' terms forwarded in apache or something, which makes sense. That gender is included seems to be an outlier. (Though would be curious to see if you found any others)
'pregnant people', 'transgender', 'nonbinary', and 'racism' are others I found
Very interestingly, I tried to write "gender" and mistakenly wrote "gendea". The search engine, trying to be helpful, gave me: "No results found for 'gendea'. Showing results for gender"
And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!
Note that the top result has actually been deleted though: https://www.nih.gov/nih-style-guide/inclusive-gender-neutral...
Typing "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.
Yes you can also just put "gender" in quotes and it works. Or you can spell it wrong - transgender is blocked, but you can do transgendr and it will correct your spelling and return results. Of course, some of the pages it returns have been deleted.
Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.
It's entertaining to see the early 2000s name "disemvoweling" return with a new purpose!
So it's not just censorship it's bottom of the barrel dumb censorship too.
The anti-intellectual crusade isn't hiring the best and the brightest to man the trenches, but they don't have to.
> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box
Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.
It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.
For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.
If you had an NIH grant, and then they cancelled the grant, does that count?
...if there's any left: