Open Access News

Last week, US Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) proposed the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (PDF), a groundbreaking bill that will shake the foundations of scientific research publishing. The bill proposes that scientific articles based on research funded by the federal government must be made freely available to the public over the Internet within six months of publishing. If enacted into law, the bill would force scientific publishers to release the full text of articles that would otherwise be accessible to libraries and professionals who pay hefty fees for access....

"Unfortunately, as it stands now, most Americans have little - to no - timely access to this wealth of information, despite the fact that their tax dollars paid for the research," said Sen. Cornyn in a speech on the Senate floor. "Our bill simply says to all researchers who seek government funding that we want the results of your work to be seen by the largest possible audience. It will ensure that U.S. taxpayers do not have to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it, and a second time to read it."...

The bill would mark a sea change in the way scientific research is published. The majority of scientific publishers guard the copyright of their content very closely, often allowing only an abstract of the content to be made available for public consumption. For those people who wish to have the full text, they must either pay a small fortune in subscription fees or physically visit a research library that subscribes to the publication....

Not surprisingly, publishers are none too pleased. In today's New York Times, Howard H. Garrison of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology worried that the legislation could inflict serious economic damage on the publishing industry....Other publishers, such as Joann Boughman of the American Society of Human Genetics, take a different stance: that the public shouldn't necessarily be trusted to use this knowledge wisely. "Consumers themselves are saying, 'We have the right to know these things as quickly as we can.'" she told the Times. "That is not incorrect. However, wherever there is a benefit, there is a risk associated with it." The sentiment of this statement is as old as the printing press, when church leaders feared that giving the general public direct access to the Bible would undermine their authority and lead to the corruption of religious practices. It takes the position that certain types of knowledge should only be in the hands of those who have the training, the money or the power to utilize it; otherwise, the public will be at "risk," as suggested by Ms. Boughman. But knowledge does not belong to one class of people. Open access publishing recognize everyone's right to access knowledge in a time and manner of their choosing, without mediation by those who wish to control that knowledge. It will allow people to make more informed judgments on medical treatment, and assist others in improving their understanding of important research that was previously available only to those who could afford access.

Meanwhile, the predictions that this law will undermine the publishing industry may be premature. There are already numerous open-access publishers experimenting with new economic models, such as the journals of Public Library of Science. The Internet has already forced the broadcast industry, the newspaper industry, the telephone industry, even the movie rental industry to rework their practices. Why shouldn't the scientific publishing industry be expected to do the same, particularly when the end result will inevitably serve the public good?

Comment. Just one correction. Andy says, "[T]he bill would force scientific publishers to release the full text of articles that would otherwise be accessible to libraries and professionals who pay hefty fees for access." Not true. The bill applies to the peer-reviewed version of the author's manuscript, not to the published version, which may include extensive copy editing and mark-up. The bill's mandate applies to grantees or authors, not to publishers. Publishers are not forced to release anything, merely to coexist with free copies of different versions of a subset of the articles they publish.

This may seem like a fine point, but it has two important consequences. First, it's another reason to think that the policy will not, in fact, harm journal subscriptions. Researchers will still want access to the published versions and therefore libraries will still feel demand to subscribe. Second, it shows that the policy does not regulate publishers but only grantees, with whom the funding agencies have a contractual relationship. The FRPAA is too new for many publishers to have weighed in on yet. But in the debate over the NIH policy (different in many ways but similar in this respect), many publishers inaccurately claimed that it was an attempt to regulate publishing.