Open Access News

Question: I'm also concerned that the policy could place researchers in a difficult position. It's up to researchers to negotiate with publishers to get permission to post the articles in the NIH database. Since participation is voluntary, publishers might pressure researchers not to release their work at all, or to wait a full 12 months. Do you share this concern? How will you know if this pressure is taking place?

Answer: We will be gathering statistics on grantee participation rates and their specified embargo periods. An NIH Public Access Working Group of the NLM Board of Regents has been established and includes representatives of various stakeholder groups that will advise the NLM Board of Regents on implementation and assess progress in meeting the goals of the NIH Public Access Policy. The above statistics will be presented to this Working Group and, if it appears necessary, the Working Group may suggest modifications of the policy to ensure that the public archive is sufficiently timely and comprehensive.

Question: Finally, could you provide this subcommittee with a report, as soon as possible after December 1, 2005, on how many eligible articles were deposited in PubMed Central during the first six months of the policy and what the average embargo period was. Additionally, we would like to know how many articles are in the pipeline awaiting posting. Lastly, do you have any way of tracking through PubMed the number of articles supported with NIH funds but not submitted to PubMed Central? In other words, will you be able to provide both the numerator and the denominator of the equation that will demonstrate success of your policy?

Answer: We estimated that the results of NIH-supported research were published in approximately 60,000 to 65,000 articles based on the number of articles published in the last several years that contained an NIH grant number within the text. We will estimate participation by comparing the actual number of papers deposited in the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system for a given interval with the historical average. For example, 5,000 deposited articles per month would indicate approximately 100% participation. By the close of the calendar year sufficient data should be available to make an assessment of the degree of participation. Statistics for the distribution of the embargo periods requested by authors will be readily available from the submission system.

1. Robin Rice, The Internet and democratisation of access to data. Excerpt: 'It seems that the social sciences have been simply evolving steadily since the advent of computers and networking, compared to other disciplines which have been revolutionised (think of biology-human genetics, particle physics, or astronomy)....[T]he problem of access for research data is more than discovery; the user requires tools to make the data usable, and fairly intimate knowledge of how the dataset was collected, variables derived, etc. There is also a tension between protecting the subjects' confidentiality, and releasing as much demographic background on the respondents as possible to maximise the re-usability of the data....The world of open access publishing and digital repositories seems to be the most important new trend in democratising access to data....Recent funding by JISC toward the development of institutional repositories does reflect some level of national commitment [in the UK] to open access and institutional repositories. Although it is early days, this could be the beginning of a thousand flowers blooming, and a sea-change in the work of social science researchers, librarians and archivists, as universities rise to the challenge of 'curating' their own scholarly assets, including perhaps, the actual or derived datasets upon which published research papers are based. Is there any chance of this becoming a widespread trend with only a smattering of project-based funding? Is it even desirable, compared to providing additional funds for centralised, domain-specific trusted repositories such as the UK Data Archive?'

2. Melanie Wright, How has the internet changed the way we access data? Excerpt: 'Calling it a revolution is cliche, but there is hardly a better word for it. And as in radical political change, alongside structural, organisational changes come attitudinal changes. User expectations are light years from where they were in 1996. In data services, there are in my mind, three major influences which have caused a paradigm shift in user expectations and therefore in the way data services do their business. These three influences neatly fall into the three fundamental services provided by data centres such as the UKDA: finding data, accessing data, and using data. And they are: Google, Amazon, and GUI menu-driven analysis software (SPSS for Windows)....Some might view these three influences and say, this is how the internet has destroyed data services — dumbing down our search tools, pandering to the lowest-common-denominator naive user, enabling far too many people to conduct far too many risky and suspect analyses on data they aren’t trained to understand, and increasing the risk of confidentiality breaks and disclosure logarithmically. Others might say, the internet has been the greatest boon imaginable, allowing more socially relevant data and information be disseminated to more people, enabling more 5-star research to be conducted, upon which more evidence-based policy is evolved, allowing for a more enlightened and better world.'

Question: But why are you proposing that making research results accessible to the public is "recommended?" If this is such a good idea – and I think it is - why isn't it required?

Answer: The voluntary nature of the Policy was established to encourage investigators to deposit their manuscripts in NIH's public archive. We believe this approach will ultimately result in broader participation. The Policy-related submissions will directly benefit NIH-supported investigators because recent studies have shown that freely available articles get cited more in other research publications. An increase in the number of citations helps improve the professional standing of investigators. Due to these benefits we anticipate that authors will decide to participate and to choose the earliest release dates. I also believe that the voluntary nature of the final policy permits sufficient flexibility to accommodate the needs of different stakeholders and leaves the ultimate decision in the hands of scientific investigators who are in the best position to judge the circumstances and the time frame under which their work may be made accessible to the public at large. Therefore, we believe that by having a Policy that provides maximum flexibility, authors will respond with maximum participation.

Question: A year's delay after publication in a journal strikes me as a very long time, given the pace of biomedical developments today. How much time do you expect most participating researchers to let go by between publication and release of the study publicly?

Answer: The Public Access Policy strongly encourages all NIH-funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed author's final manuscripts available to other researchers and to the public at the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) immediately after the official date of final publication. At the time of submission, authors are also given the option to release their manuscripts at a later time, up to 12 months after publication. NIH expects that only in limited cases will authors deem it necessary to select the longest delay period. [...]

Question: What rates of participation and time delays would you consider a success?

Answer: [...] Rather than specifying a particular target number, we will be looking for an increasing number of manuscripts to be submitted over time and a decreasing delay period. [...] We hope that secondary effects of the Policy might also be viewed in terms of "success." Since the Proposed Policy's release in September 2004, we have heard that an increasing number of publishers, within and outside of the United States, are considering changes to or adoption of Open Access publishing models. For example, in January the Nature Publishing Group altered its open access model to increase accessibility to its publications.

Comment. Kudos to Sen. Durbin for asking just the right questions. Unfortunately, the NIH responses are very inadequate. (1) If the criterion is still "maximum participation", then requiring deposit will clearly bring us closer to the goal than making deposit discretionary. (2) It's true that early OA will increase author impact and authors have this incentive to deposit their work and to request early release. But the NIH is ignoring the evidence that nearly every publisher with a policy on NIH-funded authors requires authors to demand a six or 12 month embargo on public access. (3) The NIH is ignoring the fact (shown by the same evidence) that publishers are taking steps to control author decisions. The NIH request is addressed to authors, but publishers can refuse to publish any article unless the author agrees to the publisher's terms. (4) While many publishers have responded to the NIH policy, virtually none have supported it in the ways the NIH claims here. They agree to let their authors deposit their postprints in PubMed Central, but only the American Diabetes Association (among non-OA publishers) lets its authors comply with the NIH request to deposit the postprints "as soon as possible" after publication. All the rest so far insist on embargoes, including the new policy of the Nature Publishing Group cited here by the NIH.)

The Scripps Research Institute received a $10.4 million grant for similar research. See today's press release: 'A group of researchers at the La Jolla, California, and Palm Beach County, Florida, campuses of The Scripps Research Institute has been awarded a $10.4 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish The Scripps Research Institute Molecular Screening Center. This is a pilot program to discover small molecule tools for translating basic biomedical discoveries more quickly into medically relevant applications....[A]ll the chemical structures and biological data generated by the network screening centers will be deposited into a government-owned database called PubChem, which is a component of the NIH Molecular Libraries and Imaging Roadmap Initiative and maintained by the National Library of Medicine.'

(PS: The list focuses on open alternatives to "mainstream media", and therefore omits the work being done on open access to scholarly media and research literature. This focus is understandable, since there's a lot of exciting work going on in open news and entertainment. But it's also regrettable, since there's a lot of exciting work going on in open science and scholarship. Moreover, the movements are kin, support one another, overlap in many of their tools, actions, and beneficiaries, and gain from the synergy of their common interests. Note to Always On and Technorati: Next year, widen your vision.)

(PS: I can't tell whether INASP is providing free or merely inexpensive access to this content. INASP usually provides free access. But if this access were free, I'd think the press release would say so.)

Here are two good comments to get the conversation going:

From DocBug's Owning David, June 20, 2005: '[A]s academics Koller and Levoy understand how the free sharing of history, art and scholarly data contributes to society as a whole, but they also recognize that without some assurance that this data is not shared freely, the authorities who control access to the original works won't allow any sharing. The museum would also like to see the data shared with fellow researchers, but don't want to see it used to make replicas without their approval and license fees....What Koller and Levoy are protecting are not the museum's property — the 3D models of David belong to the public at large. What they are protecting is a business model, one that is based on preventing the legitimate and legal sharing of information. Their opponents in this battle are neither thieves nor pirates, they are merely potential competitors for the museum's gift shop, or customers the museum fears losing.'

From Ernest Miller's Free the David, June 20, 2005: 'Piracy!? Theft!? I do not blame the authors of the paper, who are forced to agree with the relevant authorities in order to gain access to the works in the first place (and it is better that the works are scanned than not at all). I do blame the cultural authorities who dare to claim a gatekeeper function to the digital reproductions of these works that are the cultural heritage of the world. These works are not "owned" by their representative cultural institutions, but held in trust for all mankind: a position of responsibility with a duty to preserve our common cultural heritage. A secondary duty is to provide open access to these works, consistent with the duty to preserve....When digital scans can provide everything but physical access, the true pirates and thieves are those who would deny such access. They may do so out of a misguided belief that they require such control in order to fund themselves, but this only means that they are essentially holding access to our cultural heritage hostage.'

Related: See my take on whether the contract allows Michigan to offer open access to the public-domain books Google digitizes from the Michigan library.

(PS: The ACS is spinning the House action as well as it can --Chemical & Engineering News is published by the ACS. Because the ACS asked the House appropriations committee to defund PubChem and the committee refused, most observers think House action is a defeat for the ACS. For example, see Bobby Pickering's story in IWF, Eric Wills' story in CHE, or Jocelyn Kaiser's story in Science.)

Whereas connecting users with the information they need is one of a library's most essential functions, and access to information is one of librarianship's most cherished values; and

Whereas scholars and funders of research desire to share their research results and enhance the impact of their research; and

Whereas the scholarly publishing industry has been experiencing a cycle of price increases above inflation rates, leading to library cancellations, leading to further price increases, and so forth, with no relief in sight, and has thus negatively impacted access to research; and

Whereas the Open Access alternative involves making peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles freely available over the web through open access journals and/or author self-archiving; [...]

Be it resolved that the CLA formally declare its commitment to Open Access by signing the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities; and

Be it resolved that CLA implement Open Access as expeditiously as possible, and CLA Executive Council report back to the next Annual General Meeting with regards to progress.

Update. The day before the CLA adopted its resolution, the Canadian Association of College and University Libraries (CACUL), adopted a nearly identical resolution. The chief difference is in the final sentence. Where the CLA resolves to implement OA "as expeditiously as possible", CACUL resolves to implement it "to the greatest extent possible with regards to its own publications and communications." CACUL is a division of the CLA.