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Thursday, May 11, 2006

More on the publisher objections to FRPAA

Ted Agres, Publishers, societies oppose 'public access' bill, The Scientist, May 11, 2006. Excerpt:

A Senate bill that would require federally funded scientists to post their research papers freely on the Internet is drawing fire from many journal publishers and scientific societies. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S 2695), introduced last week, mandates that scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies make their research results available without charge within six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal....

Not-for-profit research societies generally depend on journal subscription revenue to support peer review, scientific outreach, and other activities. Many fear that if articles become freely available too early, they might lose significant revenue, impacting their ability to conduct peer review. For-profit journals also argue that they need subscription fees to survive.

The bill unfairly puts authors "between the agency that funds the research and the publisher" should the latter refuse to grant republication rights, said Martin Frank, coordinator of the DC Principles Coalition, a group of more than 100 scholarly and not-for-profit journal publishers that supports wide dissemination of research findings. Frank is also executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals.... 

[C]ompliance [with the NIH policy] has been extremely low -- less than 4% of eligible articles have been added to PubMed Central during the first eight months of the policy enactment, said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni in a January 2006 report to Congress. Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group, suggested that authors just didn't bother because the policy was not mandatory. "It's not as if the grantees thought it was a bad idea; they just have other things to do with their time," he said....

Howard Garrison, public affairs director for the Federation of American Scientists for Experimental Biology (FASEB), whose 21 member scientific organizations publish dozens of journals, critiqued this portion of the plan, arguing that Web sites and search engines from the private sector already catalogue publicly accessible papers. Stanford University's HighWire Press, for instance, links to more than 1.3 million full-text journal articles, most of which are available 6 months to a year after publication. Another free Internet site, patientINFORM, provides links to full text peer-reviewed biomedical journal articles as soon as they are published. "In times of scarce funding, we're not sure that duplication of effort really makes a lot of sense," Garrison said.

But the proposal has also drawn praise. "It's a very good piece of legislation," said Open Access Project's Suber. "It will vastly increase the return on U.S. investment in research by getting it into the hands of everybody who can build on it. Right now [the research] is locked up in subscription journals. By making research openly available, it makes it more usable," Suber told The Scientist....

Comments. Three quick responses.

  • Martin Frank's objection would carry more weight if publishers who disliked the FRPAA refused to publish federally-funded research. But he is a publisher and he's not refusing. So far, none of the publishers he represents on the DC Principles Coalition is refusing. So far no publishers anywhere are refusing. Until they do, authors have no dilemma.
  • BTW, I used the "author dilemma" argument myself as an objection to the NIH policy. The problem is that the NIH policy is a request, not a requirement. Hence, authors (grantees) are under pressure from their funding agency to comply, and to do so as soon as possible, but also under pressure from their publisher not to comply or to do so as late as possible. FRPAA avoids this problem by mandating compliance and imposing a firm deadline. Moreover, FRPAA uses a government license as the legal basis for disseminating the OA copies, not publisher consent. This is also part of the solution, since it reduces the publisher's bargaining power with authors. Publishers who dislike the policy gain nothing by pressuring their authors; they have to defeat the bill or refuse to publish federally-funded research. If Frank really wants to spare authors from the funder-publisher dilemma, he should aim the objection at the NIH policy and join the call for a mandate.
  • On Howard Garrison's argument that the FRPAA is a wasteful "duplication of effort", let me use the same reply I used when the AAP's Brian Crawford called it "duplicative": "The claim...is simply false. Some publishers are providing OA to some content when it's sufficiently old. But this is a far cry from providing OA to virtually all federally-funded research within six months of publication. If publishers are saying that over time their voluntary efforts will approach what FRPAA would mandate, then they have to give up their claim that this will harm journals. They can't have it both ways."