Democratize Federally Funded Research
The taxpayers pay for the research, they should be able to access it
On January 11, 2013 Aaron Swartz, age 26, hung himself in his apartment. He had spent much of the last few years of his life fighting the Justice Department, which had charged him with a laundry list of federal charges collectively carrying up to 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Swartz was an internet activist and like Edward Snowden, Swartz improperly accessed private data. But whereas Snowden’s hack presented a massive national security threat, Swartz’s didn’t. So what important trove of information did Swartz hack into to warrant DOJ spending years chasing him down in such a way as to ultimately drive him to suicide?
He improperly accessed and downloaded about five million articles from JSTOR.
The upcoming anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death creates the perfect opportunity for Congress (given the administrative state seems intently opposed to doing so) to require all federally funded research to be made publicly available, free of charge.
The federal government spends upwards of $168 billion annually on research and development efforts across all agencies. Much of this happens in the way of funding private researchers who in turn submit their papers to prestigious journals for publication. In a properly functioning representative governmental system, the idea the government acts at the behest and to the benefit of the body politic is axiomatic. In such a climate, it is only rational for taxpayers to see the fruits of their tax dollars. There are some instances, such as national security, where perhaps the fruits of R&D should be shielded from public view, but that is the overwhelming minority of research. Writ large, the system by which the federal government funds non-defense R&D appears to benefit everybody but the taxpayer actually footing the bill.
Here’s how it works for the overwhelming majority of federally funded research. First, an agency cuts a check to a primary investigator (PI), often times a university professor or graduate student but sometimes a private company, to do a given study. The PI does the study and then turns around and often times submits it to journals for publication. This is particularly true of academics, who live by the directive to publish or perish. Journals turn around and charge hefty submission fees to authors as well as subscription fees to the general public to access the content. Sometimes, the journals then turn around and share their content with repositories like JSTOR. The journals get the revenue from both ends, the authors get the recognition their careers so desperately need, and the taxpayer takes the short end of the stick.
So what’s to stop Congress or the agencies from directing PIs to turn over their research for public dissemination? Nothing, if they had the political will. It is easy enough to attach a string to the initial grant obligating any research be turned over to the government for publication. But the journals own the universities — if they don’t do what the journals want they could theoretically summarily reject any submission from a given institution — and the universities in some states are massively influential over their state’s members of Congress. If Congress were to try to pass a law to democratize federally funded research, the journals would lose their exclusivity and thereby, their revenue stream.
True, publishing articles would cut out the journals as middle men and would spell the end of the academic journal industry. The idea that journals serve as important gatekeeping function for communal knowledge is increasingly incorrect and is not a reason to protect journals. However, purposefully using government to destroy an industry — by design or by implication — should rarely, if ever, be an aim of policymaking, and if it is, only for national defense purposes. This is not that. Congress should permit journals to retain a profit-making motive by keeping research behind a paywall for a certain amount of time, perhaps 12 months from date of publication. But when that time lapses, every article funded with federal dollars should enter the public domain so Americans see what sort of research their government is funding, and perhaps learn something along the way.
When the Framers met in Philadelphia, the farthest thing from their intent was to establish a government which would defend the special economic interests against the interest of the people at large. It would have been abhorrent to them to know the Justice Department was harassing and threatening somebody for something as benign as sharing knowledge that was already public (for a fee). For it to be so aggressive in its tactics as to drive an American to suicide would have been beyond comprehension. Democratizing federally funded research won’t bring Aaron Swartz back to life, but it’ll stop a future useless prosecution. What’s more, it’s just good policy.