November 02, 2008
Thanks for the informative NIH Access Battle
Posted by: Yasmeen : Category: General
Dear ER,
Your blurb was very informative and I agree, access to the public is a good thing. It can demonstrate progress and reassure skeptics that scientists are not using funding and research simply for themselves and not the public good. My only caveat to this is that can other groups copy and steal information? I know its unethical but we know people have done it in the past and well, human nature is a strange thing.
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 am
[...] Thanks for the informative NIH Access BattleDear ER,. Your blurb was very informative and I agree, access to the public is a good thing. It can demonstrate progress and reassure skeptics that scientists are not using funding and research simply for themselves and not the public … [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Hello Yasmeen. I think that’s an excellent question. I don’t believe that the open access policy would lead to a greater amount of ’scooping’. In general one would only have to worry about scooping before publishing a paper, or if it was something to be commercialized before filing patent rights.
The way the open-access policy is set up now one only has to deposit their manuscript in PMC within a year of PUBLICATION. Anyone interested in scooping data would want it BEFORE the data is published. If someone performed nine months of research, wrote the paper up, submitted, corrected, and finally had the research published then it should be attributed to the authors at that point. Now that the article is published the timer starts ticking for the one year deadline.
Furthermore, this policy should mostly benefit those from smaller institutions or individuals interested in research. Full time research scientists and corporations can’t afford to wait up to a year to find out what the latest information is. Both will maintain their individual journal subscriptions or site licenses.
Basically, as far as I understand the Public Access Policy should not affect the security of an authors data.
November 5th, 2008 at 12:01 am
[...] Thanks for the informative NIH Access BattleDear ER,. Your blurb was very informative and I agree, access to the public is a good thing. It can demonstrate progress and reassure skeptics that scientists are not using funding and research simply for themselves and not the public … [...]