The National Institutes of Health (NIH)is distributing a memo about their new public access policy. In a nutshell, all peer-reviewed manuscripts supported in any way by
NIH must be submitted to PubMed, a publicly accessible database. The full text of these papers will be available to the public 0-12 months after receipt.
I have mixed feelings about this. Scientific information should be disseminated as widely as possible, and the current journal system keeps a lot of scientific work in the almost exclusive hands of researchers at major universities. On the other hand, I'm a little nervous about the antecedents of this decision...
As the fundamentalists have gained more and more power in the political sphere, attempts have been made to override peer-review and
de-fund studies that are politically unpopular. In 2003, Rep. Toomey (R-PA) proposed an amendment to specifically revoke funding from five projects that had to do with sex and AIDS research. This amendment was defeated by TWO votes (if you'd like to see how folks voted, the list is available
here).
These studies were picked from a list of studies that had been culled from the NIH Grants database by the Traditional Values Coalition.
So, forgive me if I think that this new policy of openness is the result of conservatives wanting ammunition for their fundamentalist anti-science agenda. The timeline stinks.
The positive side to this, however, is that research is not on the side of the Religious Right. People like James Dobson and FoF repeatedly claim that research shows that families containing a biological mother and father are consistently found to be the best for children, and use this to attack gay marriage. As a matter of fact, study after study has shown that the children of gay couples are no worse off in any measurable way than the children of straight couples. When I've tried to make posts to this effect here, I've had to paste excerpts from the simplified abstracts of the actual studies, as access to the studies requires a subscription, and even the abstracts are copyrighted. This new policy will enable more effective rebuttals to these kinds of attacks.
This may end up as a case of winning battles and losing the war, though. As science is used more and more as a weapon in ideological battles, science will be viewed more and more as an ideological enterprise. We already see claims of "liberal academia," and worse than the risk of politically-oriented funding is the risk that the public will stop trusting even the most rigorously executed research.
This new policy of openness could be a wonderful thing. I welcome increased public awareness of scientific findings, unfiltered by the media. Unfortunately, even science writers often oversimplify or even misunderstand vital points in scientific research. Reading a technical manuscript without having extensive background in the (sub)discipline can be quite difficult. I'm afraid that wider availability might lead to less, rather than more, understanding of research findings. This might be a chicken and egg problem, as you can't teach folks how to interpret studies without exposing them to a variety of studies.
The point of this is, within the next year, public debate on a wide range of policies should see an explosion of arguments citing primary sources. This should be especially true in the blogosphere, which I expect will jump all over the expanded PubMed database. This is an invitation and a warning -- the data is about to hit the fan.
