More Fuss about Public Access to Research

You may remember the fuss last year when the NIH Director, E. Zehouni suggested that all NIH research results would be posted to a public, free access internet location for public dissemination. Academics and their professional societies were in an uproar over this proposal and the lack of understanding of how important the publications were to association survival (financially). RSS is in the same boat even though not too many of our folks conduct research for NIH.

Now, a new proposal in the Senate is threatening to broaden the access and reduce the financial income to RSS as well as many other publishing organizations (see below). This proposal would apply to all federally-funded research and require that the reports (and journal articles) be released within six months of the initial journal publication for free access.

I have not read the draft legislation so I can't say what the provisions might be for who will bear the cost of "free access." However, I do know that the income of the RSS will be reduced substantially if all the articles we would have published in our journal were to become freely available to the public after RSS had gone to the expense of reviewing, editing, printing and distributing these articles. In most conversations I've heard about, policy makers say that the authors who would benefit most from the review process should bear this cost along with their institutions. However, I think they do not understand the way institutional budgets work and what resources might be available. I can see that future grants would be written in such a way to transfer this cost to the federal sponsor of the research--and, maybe, that is OK and proper. It does not however address the loss to the Society of this income stream of subscriptions to libraries and others nor the subsequent increase in membership fees to support the other things the organization does.

I encourage you to think about this and take action to let your congressperson hear from you as to how you think it would impact you and what you hold dear about the way things work.

A summary of the article published in the NY Times is pasted below.

Ken Pigg


May 8, 2006

Some Publishers of Scholarly Journals Dislike Bill to Require Online Access to Articles

By SARA IVRY <http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=SARA%20IVRY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=SARA%20IVRY&inline=nyt-per>
Scholarly publishing has never been a big business. But it could take a financial hit if a proposed federal law is enacted, opening taxpayer-financed research to the public, according to some critics in academic institutions.
The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, proposed last week by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/joseph_i_lieberman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , Democrat of Connecticut, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants. If enacted, the measure would require that the articles be accessible online without charge within six months of their initial publication in a scholarly journal.
"Not everybody has a library next door. I don't mean to be flippant about it, but this gives access to anybody," said Donald Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Cornyn. "The genesis of this was his interest in open government and finding ways to reform our Freedom of Information laws and taxpayer access to federally funded work."
Some members of the scholarly publishing industry are wary of the legislation. Howard H. Garrison, the director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, an organization whose members collectively publish approximately 60 journals, argued that the legislation would weaken the connection between the journals and their readers and that journals could lose subscribers and ad revenue if articles were available online.
"People won't be able to gauge how many people will be reading the articles and that has ramifications for advertising, promotion," he said. "Does it reach 1,000 scientists, 2,000 or 50? If the articles are on a government Web site, your readership may be halved."
Scientific data is easily misinterpreted, said Joann Boughman, executive vice president of the American Society of Human Genetics, publisher of The American Journal of Human Genetics. "Consumers themselves are saying, 'We have the right to know these things as quickly as we can.' That is not incorrect. However, wherever there is a benefit, there is a risk associated with it."
A year ago, the National Institutes of Health introduced a policy encouraging scientists who had received N.I.H. financing to submit published articles within a year to a central database at the National Library of Medicine. Fewer than 4 percent of researchers have complied.
Catherine McKenna Ribeiro, the deputy press secretary for Senator Lieberman, said mandatory compliance would "foster information sharing, prevent duplication of research efforts, and generate new lines of scientific inquiry." She said in an e-mail message that the bill would, in effect, allow agencies to better monitor what publications were a result of their grants.
Betsy L. Humphreys, the deputy director of the National Library of Medicine, said she was not surprised that researchers had not always complied with N.I.H.'s request. "I think it's like anything else in the lives of busy people who prefer to spend their time doing science," she said.