January 10, 2012
Category: Science education
Many of you may remember a time when music-stealing was rampant on the internet. Apple changed this situation by establishing a new kind of marketplace.
Now people pay for music and download it from iTunes.
What if there were a third party group, with an iTunes-like model, where scientific publishers would make papers available for purchase? Could this kind of model work?
Two arguments support this idea.
1. Volume sales
2. The cost of creation
Volume sales
Volume sales work like this. Let's say a publisher sells 10 papers at $30 each. This brings in $300.
That same publisher could also bring in $300 by selling 100 papers at $3 each.
They could earn the same of money but get materials out to more people.
Will the volume be there? The experiment hasn't been tried.
The cost of creation
Many people have noted that most of the cost of creating a scientific publication is funded by taxpayers through government grants. The recording industry lacks that support, yet it seems to have survived the iTunes pricing model.
I made a table below that compares some aspects of the recording industry with scientific publishing (you can click the image to see a larger version).
Granted recording artists and scientists, and their funding sources have different goals. In the case of the scientific research the goal is to advance knowledge. One would assume that access to knowledge is an important part of making this work.
Certainly, a system where small companies and individuals rely on friends with library subscriptions is one way to get papers, but wouldn't a system that's less dishonest be a better one?
Posted by Sandra Porter at 12:11 PM • 27 Comments
January 9, 2012
Category: PubMed • Science education • biotechnology
The Backstory: As it stands today,when one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides the funding for a scientific research project, and those results are published, they must be made freely available to public, within a set period of time. The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded everything about the research except for the final publication, and so they have already paid for access.
The Research Works Act (#RWA), HR 3699, is a bill in the House of Representatives that would roll back this requirement. If it passes, taxpayers will most likely have to pay exorbitant fees for access to publicly-funded research. I'll explain why in a moment.
The Research Works Act will harm science education because students and instructors at small colleges and community colleges generally lack access to scientific journals and we will no longer be able to afford to use scientific literature in our courses.
How much does it cost?
One commenter on a my earlier post about the effect on science education noted that students and others would still be able to purchase research articles if RWA passes.
I thought, dear readers, you might like to know what that privilege is likely to cost.
What does a personal subscription cost today?
Today, a one year personal subscription to Science costs $149 for a member and $75 for a student. A personal subscription for one year of Nature costs $199. We subscribe to both and pay $350 a year for the privilege.
The problem is that working in science, and learning about science, requires looking at papers from multiple journals and multiple years from those journals.
Access to one journal is rarely sufficient.
Let's look at the subscription costs for some other journals.
Two other journals that I frequently use are Nature Genetics and Nature Biotechnology. These cost $225 per year and $250 per year, respectively.
Here are the yearly subscription costs for a few of the other Nature journals:
$503 Acta Pharmacologica Sinica
$586 American Journal of Hypertension
$319 Asian Journal of Andrology
$865 Bone Marrow Transplantation
$99 BoneKEy Reports
$474 British Dental Journal
$569 British Journal of Cancer
$542 Cancer Gene Therapy
$417 Cell Death and Differentiation
$417 Cell Research
At $865 per year, a personal subscription to the on-line only version, of Bone Marrow Transplantation would be hard for me to justify. But then, I'm not an M.D.
Now, consider Nature has 91 publications, with many subscription costs over $300 per year for each journal. I've been told that library subscriptions are more costly than personal subscriptions. Is it really that surprising that our libraries say no?
What do individual articles cost?
Could we get by with having students read individual articles?
I looked up the prices for individual articles from some of the journals that I use.
The table below shows the costs to purchase a single article from 14 different journals.
Out the 14 journals, 9 of them charge $30 per article or more. I looked at multiple Nature journals since the prices for each journal subscription varied so widely.
Many times when we have students research a topic, we want them to look at multiple articles from multiple journals. Students might need to look at ten papers to complete an assignment.
We also tend to have students investigate different topics. This means that we can't just give every student the same set of articles. Each student needs to get multiple articles from multiple sources, and each article could cost $30-35 at today's prices. Today, we can make do by having students stick to open access articles. RWA will kill that option.
If papers were priced more reasonably, like songs in iTunes, we instructors would find RWA less alarming. But as it stands, if publishers charge the all articles with the prices they're using now, it will kill our ability to use the literature in the classroom.
Posted by Sandra Porter at 1:19 PM • 45 Comments
January 6, 2012
Category:
The C.R.E.A.T.E. strategy is an approach to making biology teaching a better model of biology, the science.
From the C.R.E.A.T.E website,
...C.R.E.A.T.E. teaching focuses on on authentic published work--peer reviewed journal articles--with students reading either series of papers produced sequentially from individual labs or series of papers from different labs focused on a single line of research.
This summer and next, the National Science Foundation is funding two identical workshops designed to help instructors learn how to use the C.R.E.A.T.E. strategy.
These will be held in June 2012 and 2013 at Hobart College and William Smith College, in Geneva, New York. All expenses will be covered except for travel.
If you're interested, APPLY NOW The deadline is January 15, 2012.
You can download the pdf application form and more information from this page.
C.R.E.A.T.E. stands for:
Consider
Read
Elucidate the hypotheses
Analyze and interpret the data and
Think of the next
Experiment
The timing of the workshop announcement a little ironic, since New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is co-sponsoring a bill (HR3699 The Research Works Act (click the "Bill pdf" link at the site to download the bill) that will make it much more difficult for students to access this valuable resource.
Posted by Sandra Porter at 7:05 PM • 0 Comments
Category: PubMed • Science education
This morning, I learned that congress wants to reverse the advances made by NIH and go back to restricting access to scientific publications. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (California) are co-sponsoring a bill to restore the limits on public access to NIH-funded research.
I've written many times before (here, here, here, and here) about the challenges that community college faculty and students have in getting access to scientific papers.
In an era where the economic benefits of educating students in science are well-known (1), the idea of crippling science education by cutting off access to the primary literature is puzzling. If anything, I would expect congress to support science education by asking the National Science Foundation (NSF) to follow NIH's lead and require that publications from NSF funded research be made open access, too.
Instead, bill H.R. 3699 will roll back the NIH Public Access Policy and block similar policies at other federal agencies. The effects would be horrific.
Maloney and Issa might not be aware of this, but faculty and students at 1,167 community and technical colleges will be negatively impacted by this bill (2). Many community college faculty rely on open access materials. Not only are these publications important tools for keeping our understanding current, we rely on these publications to help educate our students.
How we use primary literature in biotechnology education
Unlike the faculty in research universities, many of the instructors in community college biotech programs are scientists with backgrounds in the biotech industry. These instructors routinely assign scientific papers as part of their courses since they are training biotechnology technicians and industry technicians are expected to be able to read this type of literature.
Industry advisory boards also encourage the use of primary literature. At Austin Community College (Texas), students use research articles to design and write experimental protocols. At Shoreline Community College (Washington), students in the Molecular Biology course give presentations on research papers. I also refer students to the primary literature in my bioinformatics courses. And I draw extensively on primary literature when I design instructional materials and learning activities.
Our educational practices will be severely impacted by restricting access to the literature. If we're required to purchase individual articles, often priced at $30 each, we will either have to end these practices or consider becoming Internet pirates sailing on the good ship Napster.pdf.
Some of my experiences with the problems of accessing primary literature
Twenty years ago, as a new college instructor, I was thrilled when PubMed became free and my students could start reading abstracts on-line. I still spent hours photocopying and organizing papers for student presentations and research projects but having access to abstracts was a great beginning.
Not only did I want students to learn how to scientific papers, I wanted them to understand the difference between the primary literature and the articles you might read in the newspaper or popular magazines like Discover or Wired. I wanted students to see for themselves how some details might get left out, how the same details could be presented in different ways and multiple groups might arrive at different conclusions.
My instructor colleagues and I were especially happy when NIH began to require that NIH-funded research be open to the public. Now, we could get papers ourselves and we could start requiring our students to read papers, too. Even some of the high school teachers I know started asking students to use PubMed and skim papers on topics like genetic disease.
Doing the hard thing isn't always easy
In the days when research papers were pay per view, many of us shied away from assigning primary research. After all, it's not realistic to expect students to spend $30 to download a single article, when we know large numbers of students skip buying textbooks because of the cost.
What? Why didn't our students go to the library? Community colleges don't carry many journals since subscriptions are often too expensive. As a faculty member, we were told not to request journals since our library was prohibited from ordering them.
A science instructor's task is made even harder since research articles are notoriously hard to read. Nevertheless, as instructors, we have an obligation to help students develop their reading skills. When our students don't have access to the materials we want them to ready, this goal gets all the harder to achieve.
An unequal education for all?
Restricting access to the primary literature will have a negative impact on access to science education. According to the American Association for Community Colleges, 43% of all undergraduates attend community colleges. For the minority students, who attend college, these numbers can be even higher (2). Consider as well, that students, including those who become science teachers, take many of their science courses at community colleges.
What benefit could there possibly be to society for congress to take away what might be the only chance these students have to learn how to read and critique scientific papers?
If we want to promote STEM education, why handicap faculty and students by prohibiting access to the tools?
References:
1. Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadell, 2010 21st Century Skills
See http://vimeo.com/17092060 for a great talk on STEM by Charles Fadell.
2. American Association of Community Colleges 2011 fact sheet (pdf)
More information:
Learn more about the role of community colleges in science education:
1. Linnea Fletcher and V. Celeste Carter, 2010,
The Important Role of Community Colleges in Undergraduate Biology Education. CBE Life Sciences Education.
2. George Boggs.
Growing roles for science education in community colleges. Science 2010;329:1151-1152.
Jonathan Eisen has a nice summary of links regarding HR3699.
And the White House has a request for information (RFI) on public access. If you want to respond to this, please hurry. The deadline for commenting is Jan. 12, 2012.
You can find a summary of the RFI here.
And the entire RFI here.
Added:
- Janet Stemwedel has posted a great article at #SciAmBlogs summarizing the meat of the bill:
"The Research Works Act: asking the public to pay twice for scientific knowledge."
- An interesting conversation on the bill between @timoreilly and congressman @DarrellIssa was posted by Alex Howard (digiphile) at Storify.
Posted by Sandra Porter at 5:10 PM • 14 Comments
December 6, 2011
Category: Genomics • Next Generation DNA sequencing • Science education
In simple Mendelian genetics, a single change in one gene can produce a large change in mortality. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) will be funding genomics studies on Mendelian traits using a similar strategy.
NHGRI will fund a small number of centers, dominant centers you might say, and look for large changes. The sequencing centers that will benefit are the Broad Institute, Washington University, and Baylor College of Medicine. For the next four years, the big three will be dividing $86 million a year according to a press release from NHGRI. I'm not sure what algorithms predict a larger return from funding a smaller number of researchers, but the future looks like fun for those on a small budgets who can figure out how to slurp up the data and quickly spit out results.
Studies on Mendelian disorders will benefit from the proposed funding plan as well. According to the NIH press release, only half of the estimated 6,000 rare diseases, inherited in a Mendelian pattern, have been linked to a genetic cause. Although each disease is rare, in combination, these diseases affect approximately 25 million Americans. Today's DNA sequencing technologies offer an unprecedented ability to find the basis for these diseases, particularly when the genomes of entire families are compared.
Which brings us to clinical sequencing and new interesting issues.
Earlier genetic tests raised all kinds of ethical controversies. Does everyone have a right to be tested? Should test results be shared with one's family? Should parents be allowed to test children? Should someone have a right to know, to not know, etc. Identifying all the stakeholders and their issues can make your head spin.
And those tests typically looked at single genes.
Today, when we sequence a genome, we will find much more information about many thousands more genes whether we want it or not. Genome sequencing is like remodeling. A simple quest to check out a foundation always goes along with the chance of finding water leaks or ant colonies.
We could sequence a genome from a cancer patient for example, to determine the best drug for treatment, and uncover an undiagnosed predisposition to some other bad news of kind of trait. What doctor wants to share the news that they can cure someone's cancer but that early Alzheimer's gene they found, uh sorry, maybe you want to look into assisted living?
Many of us see enormous potential in genomic sequencing. But, in the end successfully using genomics will require us to go well beyond the work of developing the technology to prepare genome sequencing for the clinic. We're going to have to prepare the clinic for genome sequencing.
Posted by Sandra Porter at 3:39 PM • 5 Comments
November 28, 2011
Category: Bio-Link • Science education • biotechnology
Like everything else, if we want to know what's going on, we have to ask.
So, it's time once again for the 2011-2012 National Biotechnology/Life Sciences Program Survey.
Yes, indeed.
Federal and state agencies will use the results to determine how best to support programs like yours. This study will also help prospective students and industry employers find your program. Survey results will be available to you to help with program planning, grant activities, and more.
We only want one person from each biotechnology / biomanufacturing / bioscience program to complete the survey. If you are not the right person to complete the survey, please get your college's biotechnology/life sciences program administrator to spare 15 minutes and fill this out.
We think the survey will take 15 minutes or less to complete.
Your participation is crucial to ensuring that the results accurately represent this important industry. Whether or not your college currently offers a biotechnology/life sciences program, your input is essential. The survey includes programs that are in the planning stages, as well as ways that colleges incorporate these subjects into other courses.
The survey asks about:
· Program characteristics,
· Student demographics, and
· Degrees and certificates awarded.
To start the survey, please click on the link below.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BioLinkNationalSurvey
This survey is being conducted by Bio-Link's Independent Evaluator, the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center at Washington State University (WSU-SESRC). To request a paper version of the survey or to complete the survey via telephone, please contact Candiya Mann, Project Director, at candiya@wsu.edu
Posted by Sandra Porter at 11:12 PM • 2 Comments
November 25, 2011
Category: Bio-Link • biotechnology
What roles should community colleges play in training the bioeconomy workforce of the future?
Send your answers to bioeconomy@ostp.gov by Dec. 6th.
One night towards the end of October, we happened to meet with someone who could tell us more.
We asked him about a request for information (RFI) soliciting input on the bioeconomy, that some of us saw posted on the Federal Register web site.
"What could information could we provide?," We asked (a little skeptically).
"Does the Whitehouse really want our input on ways to stimulate the bioeconomy and build the bioscience workforce?"
Read on »
Posted by Sandra Porter at 2:37 PM • 7 Comments
October 2, 2011
Category: Genetics & Molecular Biology • Genomics • Next Generation DNA Sequencing
For the past few days I've been avidly following Daniel MacArthur's tweets from the Personal Genome Conference at Cold Spring Harbor(@dgmacarthur #cshlpg).
The Personal Genomics tweets aren't just interesting because of the science, they're interesting because MacArthur and others have started to take on the conventional dogma in genetic ethics.
For years, there has been a strong message from the clinical genetics and genetics education community that genetic information is dangerous.
Read on »
Posted by Sandra Porter at 5:56 PM • 14 Comments
May 6, 2011
Category: Bio-Link • Biotechnology • Science education • biotechnology
"It's all about saving Aunt Millie"
Bob Swanson
Co-Founder of Genentech
I just learned today that Jim DeKloe, who wrote this post as a guest author a few years ago is giving a webinar on May 11th on protein purification from industrial enzymes to cancer therapy.
Jim's webinar, offered through Bio-Rad, has two sessions at 3 pm Eastern and 7 pm Eastern. Registration is free and you can register HERE.
Jim is one of the most inspirational educators I know and he's the sort of person that reminds you why educating students about biotechnology careers is important. His moving story is one that always reminds me that there's more to biotechnology than just the science.
Read on »
Posted by Sandra Porter at 3:23 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science education • biotechnology
The National Science Foundation recently announced an ambitious plan to transform biology education across the United States called "Vision and Change." Funding for this mission is being provided by a new NSF grant program called "TUES" for Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science.
This finding may have been a surprise to some, but two year colleges have a disproportionate impact on biology education in the U.S. (1, 2). At least half of the country's biology students are enrolled at two year colleges. Additionally, community colleges often provide the only college-level biology courses for the nation's high school biology teachers. Community college biotechnology programs, in particular, are also leading providers of professional development opportunities for high school instructors.
One of the challenges, however, in transforming a practice as extensive as college biology teaching is building cohorts and getting seed money out to the people who can implement this change. This is even more difficult with two-year college faculty because community colleges and community college faculty lack the grant-writing experience and support found at the R1 universities. Their goal is to educate students, not bring in grant funds.
The NSF is working to help community college faculty learn how to write grants and get more funds to make transforming biology education go beyond an appealing vision.
If you are a faculty member at a two year college, the NSF is sponsoring a workshop from July 19-22nd in Reno, NV and will provide up to $750 to help with travel expenses and lodging.
Apply here.
References:
1. Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, A Call to Action. 2011. www.visionandchange.org
2. Fletcher LA, & Carter VC (2010). The important role of community colleges in undergraduate biology education. CBE life sciences education, 9 (4), 382-3 PMID: 21123677
Posted by Sandra Porter at 12:36 PM • 3 Comments
I am a digital biologist, teacher, and entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (
DigitalBio RSS feed
