Re: NIH as publisher

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

This may be a resend, as I it the "enter" key accidentally before I was
finished.  But in any event I promise to shut up after this final comment
on this topic.

I think it is a very bad policy decision for governmental monies to be
used when other entities, including commercial organizations, can
reasonably provide the necessary services.  Publishing works.  It's not as
good as, say, the microprocessor industry, but it's better than, say,
health care.  I hasten to add that this is not the opinion of a
free-market conservative.  I would welcome greater governmental
involvement in many areas, more than most people.  My reasoning is based
on two points:  governmental attention is more usefully applied elsewere
(e.g., universal health care), and governmental involvement can lead
(leads inevitably?) to politicization.  The current furor at the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting should give us all pause.  When the
NIH proposes to assemble its database on Intelligent Design, we should not
be surprised.

In my consulting activity, I work with both commercial and not-for-profit
entities.  There is something to be said for both kinds of organizations.  
To generalize:  commercial entities do fewer things but do them better;
NFPs attract mission-driven personnel, who assure that the organization
rarely gets off track; nor does the management have to spend all its time
scrutinizing an NFP staff's expense accounts.  It is not true that one
kind of organization thinks long term, the other short term.  All
organizations require both strategic and tactical thinking, though not
every organization can tell the difference.

A recurrent theme among NFPs is the inability to measure activities.  
This is not just a matter of financial literacy (though I pray for a
school system that teaches people the difference between fixed and
variable costs); more fundamentally, it is an inability (cultural
contempt?) to quantify anything.  So an NFP runs a warehouse, but doesn't
know the cost of capital for carrying inventory.  Or an NFP develops a
plan for marketing a service to third parties, but doesn't think to
calculate the utilization rate of its professional staff.  Or an NFP
insists on expensing everything (that is, no capital budget) and thus
can't justify to itself even the most obvious investments.  Commercial
organizations make mistakes, but not this kind of mistake.

Publishing, which is a mature industry, lends itself to the techniques of
industrial production that began with Henry Ford.  This is simply not what
the government is good at.  (Authoring, as distinct from publishing, is a
different matter.  I can't shake certain Romantic notions of authorship.)  
Rather than point to all the "good" publishing that the government does,
let's try to imagine all the different ways those product and service
niches might have been filled by creative entrepreneurs.  Better a
thousand entrepreneurs than one government official, however talented.  
Reed Hastings gave us NetFlix, the government gave us the V-chip.

Signing off respectfully,

Joe Esposito


On 6/2/05, David Prosser <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Sorry, Joe, but I can't see what is so stunning about NIH's actions.
> Funding bodies have been compiling databases of useful information for
> researchers for years.  A classic example is Medline and PubMed -
> databases of abstracts that enable knowledge discovery.  More recent
> examples include gene sequence and protein structure databases.  These
> databases do not contain the results from just one funder, but from all,
> so making them more useful.
> 
> Why is it acceptable for NIH to spend millions of dollars on labs,
> researchers, chemicals, etc. in order to further research, but not to
> spend money ordering the results of research in such ways that make
> further research more profitable?  Why should NIH be allowed to fund a
> mass spectrometer but not PubChem?  Both are valuable research tools.
> 
> What is stunning to me is the idea that the NIH (or any public funding
> body) should limit its actions in supporting research to appease
> commercial interests.  If it is a choice between a funding body fulfilling
> its mission or maintaining publishing revenues are you suggesting that
> commercial considerations should always come first?
> 
> You might be interested in the views of a researcher on this.  I'm
> appending a note from Rich Roberts (Nobel laureate in Physiology or
> Medicine) which was posted to the SPARC Open Access Forum by Peter Suber.
> 
> David
> 
> David C Prosser PhD
> Director
> SPARC Europe
> E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk