Research Works Act - seriously?

I am not a fan of the academic publishing industry, and have written before on the need for more openness in the publishing process. My position is very simple: it is not ethical for taxpayers to be forced to buy access to scientific articles whose research was funded by the taxpayer.

I am very dismayed at the introduction of the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation designed to end the NIH Open Access policy and other future openness initiatives.

Sigh... even in academic publishing, we're socializing the risks and privatizing the gains. Here, I agree completely with Michael Eisen's statement in the New York Times:

 "But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public."

As this bill was written by representatives taking money from the publishing industry, perhaps we should include lawmakers in that group as well.

Is the academic publishing industry evil?

Like most people, I didn't think much about the profit model for academic journals until I was publishing in them. Even after going through the process a few times, I am still struck by a feeling that academic journals are the toll trolls on the road of knowledge dissemination.

While a non-academic journal such as The Atlantic or the New Yorker pays its authors for content, academic journals get massive amounts of content volunteered to them. While non-academic journals pay an editor to hone and perfect the content, academic journals have volunteer peer reviewers and volunteer action editors doing this work for the cost of a line on the academic CV. Both types of journals offset some publication costs with advertising, but while non-academic journals sell for ~$5 per issue and under $50 for a year's subscription, an academic journal will charge $30-40 per article and thousands for a subscription. This means that the tax payer who funds this research is not able to afford to read the research.

Let's say you're an author, and you're submitting your article to a scientific journal. It gets reviewed and edited, and is accepted for publication by the action editor. Great! Your excitement gets diminished somewhat from two documents that get sent to you: one that signs over your copyright to the journal, and a publishing bill based on the number of pages and color figures in your work (often a few hundred dollars). Now, if you want to use a figure from this article again (say, for your doctoral dissertation), you must write the journal to get permission to use your own figure. Seriously. Other points against academic journals can be found in this entertainingly inflammatory piece.

But what about open access journals? Good question. These journals exist online, and anyone can read them, which is great for small libraries struggling to afford journal costs and citizens wishing to check claims at the source. They're not so great for the academic, who gets slapped with a $1000-2000 fee for publishing in them. As inexpensive as online infrastructure is these days, I would love for someone to explain to me how it costs the journal so much just to host a paper.

I was excited to read this interview with academic publishers Wiley and Elsevier on these issues. However, I find most of the responses to be non-answer run-arounds. A telling exception to this is in the first question "what is your position on Open Access databases?". Wiley responded:

"The decision to submit a manuscript for publication in a peer-review journal reflects the researcher’s desire to obtain credentialing for the work described. The publishing process, from peer review through distribution and enabling discovery, adds value, which is manifest in the final version of the article and formally validates the research and the researcher."

(Emphasis mine).

In other words, we do this because there is a demand for our journal as a brand. You, researcher are creating the demand. However, I do hold out hope that as more publishing moves online, more researchers and librarians realize that there are both diamonds and rough in all journals, and this will wear away at brand prestige, allowing the illusion of "publisher added value" to wear away.

Proposed changes to IRBs

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are committees formed within universities and research organizations. Their job is to review proposed research that uses human subjects, evaluating it for ethical treatment of the human participants. It's an important job given the rather spotty history we have with ethical research (see here, here and here among others).

However, there is a wide range of activities that count as human subjects research, ranging from experimental vaccine trials to personality tests, from political opinions to tests of color vision. Currently, all of this research is broken up into two groups: "regular" human subjects research, which is subject to a full review process and "minimal risk" research, which is subject to a faster review process. Research is defined as minimal risk when it poses no more potential for physical or psychological harm than any other activity in daily life.

My research falls into the minimal risk category. My experiments have been described by several subjects as being "like the world's most boring video game". Outside of being boring, they are not physically harmful, and there is no exposure of deep psychological secrets either. No matter. Each year, researchers like me fill out extensive protocols detailing the types of experiments they propose to do, detailing all possible risks, outlining how subject confidentiality will be maintained, etc. And each participant in a study (each time s/he participates) receives a 3-4 page legal document explaining all of the risks and benefits of the research, which the subject signs to give his consent.

This does seem to be overkill for research which really doesn't pose any sort of physical or psychological threat to participants, and I applaud new efforts to modernize and streamline this process. (Read here for a great summary of the details. Researchers: you can comment until the end of September, the Department of Health and Human Services is soliciting opinions on a bunch of things).

Among the changes are moving minimal risk research from expedited review to no review, and eliminating the need for physical consent forms (a verbal "is this OK with you?" will suffice). These are both good things that would improve my life substantially. However, I believe that standardizing IRB policies across the country would do the most good.

I am currently at my 4th institution and have seen as many IRBs. Two of them have been entirely reasonable, requiring the minimal amount of paperwork and approving minimal risk research across the board. The other two, however, have been less helpful. As Tal Yarkoni points out, "IRB analysts have an incentive to be pedantic (since they rarely lose their jobs if they ask for too much detail, but could be liable if they give too much leeway and something bad happens)". However, I think it goes beyond this. In some sense, IRBs feel they are productive by showing that they have stopped or delayed some proportion of the research that crosses their desks.

I have had an IRB reject my protocol because they didn't like my margin size, didn't like my font size, and didn't like the cute cartoon I put on my recruitment posters (apparently cartoons are coercive). I've had an IRB send an electrician into the lab with a volt meter to make sure my computer monitor wouldn't electrocute anyone. My last institution did not approve an experiment that was a cornerstone of my fellowship proposal as it required data to be gathered online (this is very common in my field) and I couldn't guarantee that someone outside of my approved age range (18-50) was doing my experiment. Under the current rules, I couldn't just use my collaborator's IRB approval as all institutions need to approve a protocol. However, another of the proposed changes will require only one approval.

I'm very optimistic about these proposed changes... let's hope they happen!