Open Access News

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Friday, May 12, 2006

More on publisher objections to FRPAA

Jocelyn Kaiser, Bill Would Require Free Public Access to Research Papers, Science Magazine, May 12, 2006. Excerpt:
A proposal to require federally funded scientists to make their accepted papers freely available online within 6 months of publication has reignited a bruising battle over scientific publishing. The bill [FRPAA], introduced last week by senators John Cornyn (R–TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D–CT), would make mandatory a voluntary National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and extend it to every major federal research agency, from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Department of Defense. Supporters argue that so-called public access should extend beyond biomedical research. “The ramifications for the acceleration of science are the same,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which represents libraries. Many publishers disagree, saying that there is no evidence of an unmet public demand for nonbiomedical papers. They warn that extending NIH’s policy to other disciplines could seriously harm societies that rely on journal subscription and advertising revenues to run their organizations....

Some publishers argue that there’s no evidence the public is as interested in, say, high-energy physics papers as in health research. “You’re just expanding this willy-nilly on the assumption that there’s the same clamor,” says Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, argues that if the bill became law, it could be especially damaging to “small niche area” journals in disciplines such as ecology that have not yet experimented much with open-access journals that recoup publication costs from authors rather than subscribers. Observers don’t expect the bill to be passed this year, but they anticipate a push to make the NIH policy mandatory. The 6-month deadline is also controversial: NIH Director Elias Zerhouni recently testified that he is sympathetic to publishers’desire for a 12-month delay. In the meantime, NSF plans to add citation data to the Web-based descriptions of each award in response to a February report by its inspector general that said “other science agencies have done much more than NSF” to tell the public what it gets for its money. The report said NASA and the Defense Department already make available the full texts of some journal articles.

Comments. A few quick responses.

  • "Some publishers argue that there’s no evidence the public is as interested in, say, high-energy physics papers as in health research." Publishers who say this are trying to divert attention from the primary purpose of the bill, which is access for researchers.
  • "Many publishers [say] that there is no evidence of an unmet public demand for nonbiomedical papers." Ditto. Publishers who say this are referring to the lay public, not the academic community, where the demand is great.
  • "Martin Frank...argues that...the bill...could be especially damaging to 'small niche area' journals in disciplines such as ecology that have not yet experimented much with open-access journals...." This is from left field. The bill does not presuppose that journals have experimented with OA, does not force or even ask authors to publish in OA journals, and does not regulate journals or force them to convert to OA.