Open Access News

(PS: Note to Red Hat. This is a case of good guy v. good guy. Don't make us take sides. And don't make us associate Red Hat with a company that takes out a trademark on a name with pre-existing usage in a similar arena and then tries to assert a right to its exclusive use. Is that in the spirit of OS?)

1. The report is based in part on a survey of the 200 universities that received the most federal research funding in the year 2000. Here's how the report describes the results (p. 12): "Among the 171 university respondents to our survey, 91 universities (53 percent) supported posting the grantee''s final technical reports on the agency''s Web site, and 31 universities (18 percent) opposed posting the final technical report, while 49 universities (29 percent) either were uncertain or did not respond. Primary advantages that universities cited for posting final technical reports on an agency''s Web site include facilitating the access of other scientists to research results, facilitating collaboration among scientists, providing prompt dissemination of research results, and providing a public record if the results of a research project are not published. Primary disadvantages that universities cited for posting final technical reports are the potential for (1) an invention to be prematurely disclosed, (2) a scientific journal to reject a manuscript because it views posted reports as publications, (3) proprietary information to be disclosed, (4) research results to be prematurely disclosed, (5) incomplete or misleading report results to be prematurely disseminated, (6) an investigator to be to harassed by opponents to the research, and (7) universities to incur added administrative costs in complying with agency requirements."

2. I've said that the report endorses open access for the usual good reasons, in addition to the help it could provide in preventing financial conflicts of interest. Here's how it describes the rationale for open access (p. 16): "A fundamental principle of scientific research is that wide dissemination of research results is vital for validating these results and advancing the field of science. Posting final research reports, or similar information, on federal agencies'' Web sites can advance scientific research by providing other scientists with timely access to research results and facilitating collaboration. Posting this information also provides access to members of the public interested in the research and a public record if the results of agency-funded research are not published, thus maximizing the benefit of the federal investment. For these reasons, five federal agencies, including Energy and NASA, already routinely disseminate research results through their Web sites. While posting research results might create concerns in some fields, such as biomedical research, these concerns are less applicable for Education, which like Energy and NASA, has a specific statutory requirement to widely disseminate research results."

If you're looking for ways to generalize from the ED to other federal funding agencies, then look at why the Education Sciences Reform Act requires "wide dissemination" for education research. The statute gives the Institute of Education Sciences the mission "to provide national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education...in order to provide parents, educators, students, researchers, policymakers, and the general public with reliable information about the condition and progress of education...." The good news is that Congress has already adopted a policy about education research that it could well adopt for almost any other kind of research. The bad news is that some federal funding agencies might think that they have to wait for Congress to act.

I'm still reading the report, but haven't yet found a reason why it singles out the ED from all the other federal agencies that fund research. Nor does the ED site have a press release on the subject. However, the GAO report does offer a helpful table of Agencies That Post Research Results on Their Web Sites (bottom of page 10). The table lists the Departments of Agriculture (annual and final technical reports), Defense (final technical reports), and Energy (final technical reports), the National Center for Environmental Research (annual and final report summaries), and NASA (abstract of final technical reports). Another table on page 8 summarizes the policies of eight federal funding agencies on "disseminating research results".

The primary purpose of the GAO report is to urge all federal agencies that fund research to agree on a common policy for preventing financial conflicts of interest. It recommends open access to education research partly on the merits (the usual good reasons, p. 16) and partly as one among other tools for reducing conflicts of interest. But if open access is good for the usual reasons, and will also help reduce such conflicts, then why limit it to ED-funded research? For that side of the story, see Eugene Russo, Uniform conflict rules needed, The Scientist, November 19, 2003. According to Russo, the report authors hesitated to make a general call for open access when they saw the "minefield of concerns" it raised. Excerpt: "On the issue of open access to government-funded data, report authors had a very negative reaction from biomedical researchers at Emory University when they proposed posting all results on the World Wide Web, Cheston said. Among the major concerns were protecting patentable information, avoiding rejections from prestigious journals as a result of premature data release, and ensuring that findings have been properly vetted by peer review so that neither researchers nor the public are misled. The GAO did recommend, however, that the Department of Education post the final technical reports of the research it funds on its Web site."

• Eva Müller and three co-authors, The DiVA Project - Development of an Electronic Publishing System
• A.R.D. Prasad, A Digital Library of Library and Information Science
• Derek Law, The eIFL Project: Sustainable Delivery of Electronic Information to Libraries in Developing Countries
• Emma Beer, Changes at the Arts and Humanities Data Service