Open Access News

The public-access policy of the National Institutes of Health marked its first anniversary last week, and all involved in the debate agree that it has failed to create free online access to the biomedical literature.  Open-access proponents are rejoicing because that failure has created new momentum to strengthen the policy. That momentum further worries the policy's early detractors -- mostly publishing groups that fear a loss of revenue if the contents of their journals are free online. They are lobbying to keep things just as they are.

"All we've seen this year," said Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, "is one step after another to strengthen" the policy....The NIH estimates that fewer than 4 percent of eligible manuscripts were uploaded [to its OA repository in the past year]. "It's an abysmal failure," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition....In November the majority of an NIH working group suggested that the policy be made mandatory....In February, the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the NIH and runs the repository, recommended the same changes to Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH. At a Congressional hearing in April, Dr. Zerhouni said: "It seems like voluntary is just not enough of an incentive."...

Observers expect the NIH policy to become mandatory, but the publishers hope to keep the maximum delay at 12 months. Such a plan, said Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, "gets the system to work without jeopardizing a very important component of the dissemination of scientific information: the journals." He says that some publishers have already lost subscriptions after experimenting with a six-month model. Oxford University Press, for example, examined the number of subscribers between 2002 and 2003 for 28 journals. Two journals that put their contents online free after six months lost 6.1 percent of their subscribers; those that did so after a year or longer lost fewer subscribers.

Gary Ward, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Vermont, says that figure does not mean much. "If you look at industry averages" of circulation decline, he said, the 6-percent decrease "is well within what's been happening to other journals." Mr. Ward is treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology, which publishes the research journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, and he also serves on the NIH working group. In 2001 the journal made its contents free online two months after publication....The gamble proved a wise one, he said: Subscriptions have increased since 2001. Individual subscriptions have increased sharply, and institutional subscriptions -- the all-important library presence -- have increased at about the same rate as they did before the open-access decision, Mr. Ward said.  Mr. Suber, of Public Knowledge, commented: "The evidence today suggests that the fears are not justified."...

Momentum continues to build outside the NIH, and outside the United States, for mandatory posting of manuscripts in centralized free online repositories. In April, the European Commission released a report calling for a "guarantee" of free access to all publicly sponsored research (Chronicle News Blog, April 19). But that report was not binding; nor was a draft policy of Research Councils UK, an umbrella organization of Britain's public research institutions, which called for mandatory participation last June (The Chronicle, June 29, 2005).

Then, in early May, came a stateside whopper: Two senators introduced a bill that would require every federal agency that sponsors more than $100-million annually in research to establish an online repository and make its grantees deposit their articles within six months of publication (Chronicle News Blog, May 3). The bill, which is sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, would apply to 11 agencies, including the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.

"It's very depressing -- it's huge!" said Ms. Schroeder. Of course, open-access proponents are delighted. Passage of the bill would also help answer questions about how open access affects subscriptions.  "The only way to get empirical evidence outside physics is to stimulate high-volume open-access archiving [outside physics] and monitor the results," Mr. Suber said. "Let's do that and be prepared to make changes if we see harm."