White House announces new US ‘open access’ policy
February 25, 2013
Lots of new accelerating science discoveries, but you can’t see them for a year unless you make the big bucks. Is this stifling progress? (Credit: iStockphoto)
The White House said Friday that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be available to you, but only after a year’s delay.
“The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for,” the memo said.
But that doesn’t mean fast access. And the policy would, strangely, only apply to Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures.
In contrast, FASTR (‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research’), introduced in the U.S. Congress on Feb. 14, would require public access to papers just six months after publication.
Big publishing teams up with big government to block access
The debate over access to federally funded studies has been simmering for years, NBC Cosmic Log explains. “Some in the scientific community have argued that such studies should be made freely and publicly available immediately because taxpayers have footed the bill for the research. Others have voiced concern that a government requirement to distribute the studies at no cost would deal a blow to the scientific publishing industry.”
“We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost,” Holdren wrote in his response to the online petition.
“This policy reflects that balance, and it also provides the flexibility to make changes in the future based on experience and evidence.”
However, continues Cosmic Log, one of PLOS’ founders, biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California at Berkeley, delivered a sharper response in a Twitter comment: “That anyone is celebrating 12-month embargoes with no reuse rights to publicly funded research just shows how much further there is to go.” He called the White House directive a “massive sellout of public interest to publishers.”
It took substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public to even get to this point. More than 65,000 of them recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.
Comments (15)
by Stevan Harnad
THREE CHEERS AND EIGHT SUGGESTIONS
The new US OATP Presidential Directive requiring the largest US funding agencies to mandate OA within 12 months of publication is a wonderful step forward for the entire planet.
Here are some crucial implementational details that will maximize the mandates’ effectiveness.
(1) Specify that the deposit of each article must be in an institutional repository (so the universities and research institutions can monitor and ensure compliance as well as adopt mandates of their own).
(2) Specify that the deposit must be done immediately upon publication.
(3) Urge (but do not require) authors to make the immediate-deposit immediately-OA.
(4) Urge (but do not require) authors to reserve the right to make their papers immediately-OA (and other re-use rights) in their contracts with their publishers (as in the Harvard-style mandates).
(5) Shorten, or, better, do not mention allowable OA embargoes at all (so as not to encourage publishers to adopt them).
(6) Implement the repositories’ automated “email eprint request” Button (for embargoed [non-OA] deposits).
(7) Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review, research assessment, grant application, or grant renewal.
(8) Implement rich usage and citation metrics in the institutional repositories as incentive for compliance.
If this is all done universally, universal OA will soon be upon us — and a global transition to affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (instead of today’s premature, double-paid Fool’s-Gold), plus as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide — will not be far behind.
by asiwel
This is an interesting list of good suggestions. I would suspect that #7 would be most controversial and might more or less eliminate the need for #2 and #3. I further suspect that it is a matter of prestige and university tenure that causes many researchers to seek publication in “highly-refereed” journals. Most large annual professional conferences (AERA, for instance) now offer means of electronically pre-publishing papers and presentation materials in conference and member libraries. Further, you can always publish for free in places like arXiv.org or ERIC, etc. An advantage often is that you don’t necessarily need to follow APA or other stylistic guidelines – you can do your own formatting and editing, as good as any journal. But the paper is there for reference and anybody to read. Often this is satisfying enough as a contribution to the knowledge base (while allowing one to get on with one’s research).
by Dr. X
Most peer review publications in the world are published in US. Right now if you are working in any field and a foreigner, you had to buy a lot of US papers subscriptions. Pay $$$.
With this initiative anyone will get free access to US papers, while American researches/scientists would still had to pay for foreign papers.
by eldras
Long needed. Not clear how fast the future is changing. If its double exponential growth as The Law of Accelerating Returns indicates, machines will soon be able to do blindingly fast R&D and they will publish to order on your communication device.
by Gorden Russell
Right, asiwel. If the publishers go out of business, who will perform the peer reviews? Who will publish the papers? If they are just published online by their authors, how will you know what you’re getting when you find these papers? We’ve all had online searches turn up poorly written papers by high school students.
by Dennis R.
Peers will perform the peer reviews– same as always Gorden. Journals can still publish works but they won’t have the monopoly– or the pricing power– that they now maintain.
Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the history and emergence of the movement towards open publishing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
My own take on the “open access” policy is that it really isn’t open. I would argue that’s it’s a compromise that gives up too much. But it’s a huge improvement over the current system.
by asiwel
I am not really opposed to this sort of “open access” policy either. I have always been fortunate to be able to access through university libraries. I really don’t like the very idea of me having to pay some journal a per-page rate just because it thinks it has deigned to publish a paper .. quite the contrary, I think I’m doing it a favor by submitting. But that is just personal. Having served on editorial boards and review panels, I know that there are legitimate costs that go beyond voluntary services and someone must provide these … or there is no journal, or website, or NGO, no newspaper (with independence of advertisers), etc. Even blogs and sites like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc., cost money. The Elsevier episode not withstanding, the idea of open publishing is a good one for many other reasons as well .. and so was/is Google’s book scanning project. And the public I think does deserve access. The politics of this may well be working out .. slowly.
by Mike
Then are they also available to non-citizens who did not pay for them? Not that they shouldn’t be. Just wondering.
Speaking of the right of citizen access to things they paid for, that would be all the actions, memos, phone calls, and conversations of public officials, unless public safety is directly and obviously at risk. Secrecy should be very rare. Right now its ubiquitous.
by Dennis R.
I’m sure there are some who would argue that they shouldn’t be available to non-citizens. American science for Americans! (oh, wait, that might include Canadians, mightn’t it?)
As far as open records go, there’s a debate here in Wisconsin about open records law. You can ask for the records, but you’re currently charged for the redaction that takes place. So one could argue that what one gets for open records requests isn’t all that open.
by Bob Vasquez
This is a step in the right direction, viz., that all federally-funded studies should be fully accessible to the public (taxpayer) immediately. So, in my judgment, this is one small step for “taxpayer-man-and-woman”.
by Bri
It really is a parasitic business model that should be circumvented.
by Walter Baltzley
Please explain to me exactly what “…valuable contributions…the scientific publishing industry provides”? In this electronic era, I see publishers as middle-men who skim profit off others efforts and hinder the overall advancement of society.
by Locke
My thoughts exactly.
To me this seems like just a way to appease an existing industry instead of taking a chance on new innovation.
by asiwel
All the economic issues aside (and there are many – public pays for research, yes-in its own best interest, but not for all the rest, etc), the “scientific publishing industry” performs many valuable services, including content organization and topical focus, peer review, editing, archiving and bibliographical services needed for information retrieval and reference. It provides an “end-point” .. a product as it were or a node .. for research activities that represents a specific (written) “contribution” to the knowledge base. I could go on, but I really have not meet in my life scientific journal editors or “publishers” who “skim profits off others’ efforts” to any great extent. One can not really say that about some other types of journalistic or literary endeavors or about lobbying or advertising/marketing in general …
by Dr. X
Publishers provide/pay for peer reviews. Plus they do preselection, ranking importance of the paper in particular field. Publishing in Science or Nature is much harder then in no name journal.
If everyone would be their own judge of how important paper is and select reviewers by themselves, we will get situation were 99% of papers on the market would be published by scams.