Open Access News

Excerpt from the letter to WHO accompanying the draft treaty: 'A trade framework that only relies upon high prices to bolster medical R&D investments anticipates and accepts the rationing of new medical innovations, does nothing to address the global need for public sector R&D investments, is ineffective at driving investments into important priority research projects, and when taken to extremes, is subject to a number of well-known anticompetitive practices and abuses. Policy makers need a new framework that has the flexibility to promote both innovation and access, and which is consistent with efforts to protect consumers and control costs. To this end, a number of experts and stakeholders have proposed a new global treaty to support medical R&D....The current draft R&D treaty seeks to stimulate discussion, noting of course that the development of a treaty is a democratic process involving negotiations between member states with input from civil society. The draft treaty text is a work in progress, representing a collaborative effort with contributions from many persons over the past two years....The draft treaty proposes adoption of a best practices model for the support of open access biomedical research, and obligations that research supported by public funds enter open access archives.'

Excerpt from the draft treaty:

13.1 Obligations to provide incentives for open access research

The CMI [Council on Medical Innovation] will appoint a committee on open access research (COAR). The COAR will adopt best a practices model for the support of open access research. Within [5] years, every member will adopt procedures concerning obligations for research supported by the public sector to be made available to the public through open access archives or repositories.

(Disclosure: I participated in drafting the OA-related parts of the draft treaty and signed the letter to the WHO.) For more details, see the CPTech page on the treaty.

Update. See Richard Epstein's response to Boyle's article. Excerpt: 'James Boyle’s informative column on databases is right to point out the advantages of the free flow of basic information collected by government sources. But it is also critical to understand that the implicit trade-offs behind this calculation apply not only to data but to all forms of intellectual property, which can be either privately owned or placed in the public domain....It is, also, I think important to remember that a regime of public domain information is not a form of "socialism", benign or otherwise. Socialism champions the collective ownership of the means of production, which might describe the European control over its data. The public domain connotes no collective control over information or anything else. Each person can use what he or she will, no questions asked....[T]he case for putting information in the public domain seems a lot stronger [than the analogous case for patentable inventions]. Data is of great value is in the use of other commercial endeavours. Open access allows individual firms to collate the data in ways that might command a premium, while leaving others access to the raw materials. That's the approach taken with the human genome, and it seems to work here. It is nice to know that the United States has done something right. Let's hope that the European Union sees the light on this one.'

(PS: Congratulations to Blackwell for undertaking this helpful experiment. Springer deserves credit for being the first TA publisher to adopt this model across the board (July 2004). See Springer's Open Choice program. But Blackwell deserves credit for charging a lower processing fee and spreading the model to society journals.)

I thank Walt for this endorsement of my newsletter, though with regret if it means that he'll be writing less about OA in the future: "I’m probably not the first to suggest that SOAN is effectively the medium of record for OA, but it's true --and in my experience, Peter Suber's clear advocacy does not cause him to cover OA-related issues in a prejudicial or biased manner. If you care about Open Access, you should be reading SOAN. If you’re reading SOAN, you don’t need a redundant summary from Cites & Insights."

ARIIC recognises that:...open access to the outcomes of research will enhance the profile of universities and national research programs, contribute to the further advancement of knowledge, and recognise the public contribution to the funding of research. [...]

ARIIC declares it will work towards: [1] building the infrastructure, such as institutional repositories, that will advance open access. [2] raising awareness of the principles and practice of open access publishing within Australian research institutions. [3] implementing public policies that ensure fair use of copyrighted information for educational and research purposes. [4] cooperating with Australian governments to improve access to scholarly information, and to maximise the amount of information in the public domain.

The ARIIC definition of OA (footnote 2) follows the Bethesda Statement as modified by the Wellcome Trust Position Statement.

• Barbara Gastel, Open Access and Science Editor
• Plenary Presentation: The Access Issue: Publishing at a Critical Juncture
• Evolving Roles in Access: Researchers, Librarians, Publishers, and Users

(PS: Some quick replies. (1) Where access to priced literature has increased, it is due to bundling, not to lowered prices. (2) The access crisis is due to high prices, not to inadequate library budgets. Even if library budgets kept pace with inflation, journal prices have risen four times faster than inflation for more than two decades. (3) OA is the only scalable way to increase access. As the volume of published knowledge continues its explosive growth, even low-priced journals would inevitably put the sum-total of knowledge beyond the reach of the wealthiest institutions. (4) Elsevier has lobbied fiercely against mandated OA to publicly-funded research, but it would like to see a government mandate on how much universities should spend on Elsevier's product. Which is the better role for government: to share publicly-funded knowledge with the public or to raise taxes and coerce universities to enrich companies that sell publicly-funded knowledge back to the public?)