John Marburger, Creating the Infrastructure to Improve the Public's Health, OSTP, May 20, 2004. Marburger is the Director of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In this public lecture, he outlines some reforms for the management of federally funded research. He does not endorse or even mention OA, but he does say the following: "Most 'structured' output from federally sponsored research is in the form of peer-reviewed scientific publications. For clinical research, this is not an ideal form. Unfortunately, such publications are the coin of the realm in research universities, and efforts to change them tend to encounter obstacles at the institutional level. Some of the same cultural biases regarding appropriate research outputs may exist in the peer review process for evaluating clinical grant proposals. I am not sure what the cure is, but one symptom that needs to be addressed is the relatively lower impact of clinical research papers on clinical practice compared with the impact of basic science research papers on the course of scientific research. This is an important issue. Agencies can certainly encourage 'use of research' either by directly requiring it in the grant agreements, by establishing grant programs specifically for 'use' activities, or by less direct means. NIH, the Agency for Healthcare Quality Research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Veterans Affairs all have a responsibility to transfer knowledge across the health research and health care spectrum -- to identify bottlenecks and address them effectively." (PS: If the problem Marburger is describing here is that clinicians don't have subscriptions or institutional access to most peer-reviewed journals, then OA is part of the solution.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/26/2004 01:56:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
