Open Access News

The AAP/PSP has launched PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine).  I’m quoting today’s press release in its entirety so that I can respond to it at length:

A new initiative was announced today to bring together like minded scholarly societies, publishers, researchers and other professionals in an effort to safeguard the scientific and medical peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed government interference with the scholarly communication process.
 
The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine is a coalition launched with developmental support from the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to alert Congress to the unintended consequences of government interference in scientific and scholarly publishing.
 
The group has launched a website at http://www.prismcoalition.org, where it articulates the PRISM Principles, an affirmation of publishers’ contribution to science, research, and peer review, and an expression of support for continued private sector efforts to expand access to scientific information.
 
“We are enthusiastic about this initiative and the potential of our new website to educate policy makers and citizens about our efforts to increase access to information, to alert them to the very real threat to peer review that ill-considered government interference represents, and to explore the ways in which we can safeguard peer review as a critical component of scientific integrity,” said Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of AAP.  “Only by preserving the essential integrity of the peer-review process can we ensure that scientific and medical research remains accurate, authoritative, and free from manipulation and censorship and distinguishable from junk science.” 

Recently, there have been legislative and regulatory efforts to compel not-for-profit and commercial journals to surrender to the Federal government a large number of published articles that scholarly journals have paid to peer review, publish, promote, archive and distribute.  Mrs. Schroeder stressed that government interference in scientific publishing would force journals to give away their intellectual property and weaken the copyright protections that motivate journal publishers to make the enormous investments in content and infrastructure needed to ensure widespread access to journal articles.  It would jeopardize the financial viability of the journals that conduct peer review, placing the entire scholarly communication process at risk.
 
“Peer review has been the global standard for validating scholarly research for more than 400 years and we want to make sure it remains free of unnecessary government interference, agenda-driven research, and bad science,” said Dr. Brian Crawford, chairman of the executive council of AAP’s Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division.  “The free market of scholarly publishing is responsive to the needs of scholars and scientists and balances the interests of all stakeholders.”
 
Critics argue that peer reviewed articles resulting from government funded research should be available at no cost.  However, the expenses of peer review, promotion, distribution and archiving of articles are paid for by private sector publishers, and not with tax dollars. Mrs. Schroeder pointed out that these expenses amount to hundreds of millions of dollars each year for non-profit and commercial publishers.  “Why would a federal agency want to duplicate such expenses instead of putting the money into more research funding?” she said.
 
The PRISM website includes factual information and reasoned commentary designed to educate citizens and policy makers, to dispel inaccuracies and counter the rhetorical excesses indulged in by some advocates of open access, who believe that no one should have to pay for information that is peer reviewed at the expense of non-profit and commercial publishers.
 
Featured on the PRISM website are backgrounders on peer review, dissemination and access, preservation of the scholarly record and new approaches publishers are taking along with discussion about the risks of government intervention to the sustainability of peer review, copyright infringement, the possibility of selective bias in the record of science, federal budget uncertainties and inefficient allocation of government funding that duplicates private sector investments. Importantly, the site has information to assist the public in making their concerns known to Congress.
 
“We want to share as much scientific and medical information as possible with the entire world.  That’s why we got into this business in the first place,” Mrs. Schroeder said.
 
Anyone who wishes to sign on to the PRISM Principles may do so on the site.

Comments.

1. Pat Schroeder and Brian Crawford defend peer review when it is not under attack, and they attack public access to publicly-funded research without showing that it would undermine peer review.  As they have many times before, they cloak their concern about publisher revenue with concern about the “integrity” of scholarship and peer review.  This is straight out of the playbook of the PR consultant Eric Dezenhall, who advised the AAP “to equate traditional publishing models with peer review.” 
2. But asserting that traditional toll-access (TA) publishing equates with peer review, or implying that OA will undermine peer review, doesn’t make it so.  I’ll have more to say about this in the September issue of SOAN, next week.  [PS update, 9/2/07:  My SOAN response is now online.]  Meantime here are some point-by-point responses to the press release.
3. “Recently, there have been legislative and regulatory efforts to compel not-for-profit and commercial journals to surrender to the Federal government a large number of published articles that scholarly journals have paid to peer review, publish, promote, archive and distribute.”  The word “surrender” here is false and dishonest.  Recent legislative and regulatory efforts have encouraged free online access to peer-reviewed manuscripts within 12 months of publication.  A few efforts, which have not yet passed, would require this kind of free online access.  But every one of these efforts (1) has applied to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition, and (2) has been scrupulous to avoid amending copyright law or interferring with the transfer of copyright.  Under these policies, researchers may still hold copyrights to their writings, may still transfer their copyrights to publishers, and publishers may still hold and exercise those copyrights.  (The OA policies have not changed existing law that publications by government-employed researchers, as opposed to government-funded researchers, are uncopyrightable.)  These policies don’t require publishers to surrender their articles or their copyrights.  If authors transfer copyright to publishers, which is still the custom, then publishers remain the exclusive rights holders for the life of copyright.  The policies only require that the version on which they may hold copyright coexist with a free online copy of an earlier version, starting 6–12 months after publication.
4. “[OA policies] would jeopardize the financial viability of the journals that conduct peer review, placing the entire scholarly communication process at risk.”  As usual, this is unargued.  If we look at existing evidence, as opposed to existing fear, then we have to come to the opposite conclusion.  Physics is the field with the highest level and longest history of OA archiving, and in physics TA publishers have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving.  In fact, two publishers of TA physics journals, the American Physical Society and Institute of Physics have launched their own mirrors of arXiv, the premier OA archive in the field.  Yes, it’s possible that the consequences of high-volume OA archiving in other disciplines will differ from the consequences in physics.  But why not start with the evidence, or at least acknowledge the evidence, before turning to unargued fear-mongering?
5. “The free market of scholarly publishing is responsive to the needs of scholars and scientists and balances the interests of all stakeholders.”  Calling the current system a “free market” is another distortion.  (So is the claim that it balances the interests of all stakeholders, but I’ll leave that to one side here.)  Most scientific research is funded by taxpayers.  Most researcher salaries are paid by taxpayers.  Most TA journal subscriptions are paid by taxpayers.  And publishers receive both the articles and the referee reports as donations from authors and referees.  Publishers don’t actually say that government money and policymaking should keep out of this sector, because that would really undermine their revenue.  What they want is government intervention in all these areas except public access to publicly-funded research.  What they want is the present arrangement of government subsidies for the work they publish, government subsidies for their own subscription fees, volunteer labor from authors and peer reviewers, double-payments from taxpayers who want access —and the label “free market” to wrap it all up in.
6. “Why would a federal agency want to duplicate such expenses instead of putting the money into more research funding?”  Another distortion.  Some publishers are providing OA to some content when it's sufficiently old. But this is a far cry from providing OA to virtually all publicly-funded research within 6–12 months of publication. If the AAP is saying that the voluntary efforts of publishers will approach what the proposed OA policies would mandate, then the duplication argument starts to make sense.  But in that case they have to stop arguing that OA to publicly-funded research would kill their revenues, kill their journals, and kill peer review.  They can't have it both ways.
7. And what about government spending money on OA archives instead of research?  It’s true that government OA policies have costs, and at research funding agencies these costs may reduce the overall research budget.  But put the costs in perspective.  The US spends about $55 billion of public money every year on unclassified research without the tiny investment needed to make the results available to all who could use, apply, build on, or benefit from them.  How tiny?  The cost of implementing the NIH's policy is $2-4 million/year, or about 0.01% of its $28 billion/year budget.  It’s a bargain, and the alternative is to undermine our investment by locking away expensive research where few can use it.  Studies by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan have shown that diverting a bit from the research budget in order to make all funded research OA hugely amplifies the return on investment:  Quoting Houghton and Sheehan:  “With the United Kingdom's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and Development] at USD 33.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 1.7 billion; and...With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion.”
8. “We want to share as much scientific and medical information as possible with the entire world.”  This is clearly not true.  They want to sell as much as they can and only permit sharing that does not jeopardize sales.
9. “[T]he expenses of peer review, promotion, distribution and archiving of articles are paid for by private sector publishers, and not with tax dollars.”  This is almost true.  The costs of facilitating peer review by unpaid volunteers are paid by the journals.  But (as noted) public subisidies for research, researchers, and subscriptions all benefit journals and help pay these costs.  Moreover, the NIH pays $30 million/year directly to TA journals in the form of page and color charges —about 10 times the amount needed to provide OA to the agency’s entire research output.  But like the publishers, let’s suppose that these subsidies didn’t exist.  The OA policies are still a good balance of public and private interests.  Publishers provide the costs of peer review and taxpayers provide the costs of research, which are often thousands of times greater than the costs of peer review.  Here’s how I finished the argument in an article earlier this month: 

   But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then the right question is not which side to favor, without compromise, but which compromise to favor.  So far I haven't heard a better solution than a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. This compromise-by-time is buttressed by a second compromise-by-version:  publishers retain control over the published edition for the life of copyright while the public receives OA to the peer-reviewed but unedited author manuscript.  Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that there should be no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.

Update.  I was so busy responding to the press release that I failed to point out that the PRISM home page makes another Dezenhall argument:

What’s at risk

Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by: ...opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record; ...

(According to Nature, Dezenhall also advised the AAP “to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship’”.) 

The Orwellian censorship argument doesn’t need or deserve an answer.  But if you want one, here’s how I answered it in SOAN for February 2007:

[FRPAA, like other OA mandates,] only applies to articles that have already been published in peer-reviewed journals....[I]t's about archiving copies, not manipulating originals.  Hence, the possibility of censorship doesn't come up.  The originals will be in libraries and independent web sites around the world, wherever the publisher's market reach, distribution system, and preservation back-ups have managed to place them.  If some of the published originals are not in fact copied for OA archiving, or if some copies are removed after deposit, that would be regrettable (and violate the policy).  But it would not affect the originals at all.  It would not delete them from libraries and independent web sites around the world, shrink the range of their distribution, change their access policies, or reduce their visibility.  To use the word "censorship" to describe the incomplete copying of literature already published, distributed, stored, curated, and preserved in independent locations is incoherent newspeak.  Or (to play along), if occasional non-archiving really is a kind of censorship, then publishers who want to defeat an OA archiving mandate like FRPAA want systematic non-archiving and mass censorship.