Re: NIH as publisher

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

> government should always be doing.  The critics of NIH here are simply
> rehashing the same old argument that government funded agencies should
> never ever compete with the private sector. But I think this ideological
> line has finally spent itself and it's time to move on. We see where this
> position has gotten us so it's quite refreshing to see a public agency
> take on projects of this sort.

The same old argument being that public funding of projects which compete
against existing markets being, at least in theory, an inefficient use of
tax revenue?  That's what I sometimes hear argued, that when a government
funded agency comes into existence its financial decisions start to get
driven not by market demand but by political manipulation and sheer
inertia.

I guess an interesting question would be: Given an org like PubMed, what
is the breakdown of citation counts?  Is 80% of it highly cited? More?  
Less?  I know PubMed is *very* popular with researchers, but I don't think
I've read articles which explain if the popularity stems from the fact
that all that data is in one searchable location or if the popularity
stems from PubMed being superior in other areas.

If the only reason for PubMed popularity is the fact that all that data is
in one place, what does that say about using public funds to run a big
search engine?  I know the NLM budget runs into the hundreds of millions
of dollars per year, but I don't know how much of that goes to running
PubMed.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars?  Millions of dollars?

Depending on the answers to those kinds of questions, one wonders if it
might be feasible to replace PubMed with something like Google Scholar...

> What's the difference between this issue and what Reed Elsivier and the
> publishing industry did to PubScience?  I don't see any.

You mean how PubSCIENCE was discontinued?  I know Reed Elsivier and others
complained about it, calling for it to be shut down, but I don't recall
reading about why it *was* shut down (I can't imagine a handful of
publishers had the clout to just tell the DOE what to do).

Jim

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James A. Robinson                       jim.robinson@stanford.edu
Stanford University HighWire Press      http://highwire.stanford.edu/
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