Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, May 20, 2006

More on the FRPAA

Britt Peterson, Taking aim at scientific journals, Seed, May 19, 2006. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt:
You might think that the results of publicly-funded taxpayer research would be freely available to the citizens who footed the bill in the first place, but you would be wrong --and perhaps in the mood to remedy the situation. That's the logic that motivated John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to introduce...the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006...."Tax payer-funded research should be accessible to tax payers," said Sen. Lieberman in a press statement at the bill's introduction....

Many journal publishers say that open access of the sort laid out in the Cornyn-Lieberman bill would make subscription-based publications redundant, rendering moot the valuable process of selection, editing and peer review for which publishers are currently responsible. "You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater," said Rene Olivieri, CEO of Blackwell Publishing...."There needs to be an income stream from the core scientific community, the libraries, the research institutions, and let's not forget, a lot of the subscriptions are paid for by corporations and scientific laboratories within the private sector. If you give it away for free the income stream dries up. The system of control and value-adding just withers away."

Olivieri served as co-author on a study released last week --sponsored by Blackwell but carried out by independent researchers-- that found scientists rank lack of access 12th in a list of annoyances contributing to a lack of productivity; red tape and lack of funding topped the charts....

According to Gunther Eysenbach, a professor in the department of health policy at the University of Toronto, the main weakness of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act is its inefficiency. It would force authors who have already published their work in open access journals, like the family of journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), to go through the motions of republishing in the federal repositories....For Eysenbach, who recently published an article in PLoS about the benefits of open access publishing, the speed of accessibility is far more important to scientific process than any concerns relating to the viability of the scientific publishing industry. "Open access really accelerates the scientific process," he said. "I know few people who wouldn't prefer to have a cure for cancer or for AIDS in 15 years instead of in 20 years."

Comment. Olivieri is assuming (1) that FRPAA will undermine subscriptions, and (2) that without subscription-journals, nobody would perform peer review. There's no evidence for either contention and good reason to doubt both. For more details, see my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's objections to FRPAA. Also see my comments on the report Olivieri co-authored last week.

Eysenbach is right that when articles are OA from journals, there's little or no urgency for them to be OA from repositories as well. However, there are still some reasons to deposit them in repositories, e.g. for the security reasons that lead PLoS and BMC to deposit their OA articles in PMC, or for the processing and integration with OA databases provided by the NIH. If FRPAA isn't revised to handle cases in which articles are published in OA journals, then repository managers who think it's important to have certain articles on deposit can harvest them from the OA journals in which they were published.