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Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Publishers oppose FRPAA

The Association of American Publishers issued a press release yesterday opposing FRPAA (the Cornyn-Lieberman bill). I'm pleased to reprint it in full so that I can answer it in full.
Professional and scholarly publishers firmly oppose S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006" introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The proposed legislation would require the majority of recipients of U.S. federal research agency funds to make their findings free within six months of publication. Publishers argue that the legislation, if passed, will seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process, and is a duplicative effort that places an unwarranted burden on research investigators.

According to the publishers, the provisions of S.2695 threaten to undermine the essential value of peer review by removing the publishers' incentive and ability to sustain investments in a range of scientific, technical, and medical publishing activities. The proposed legislation comes at a time when increased public access to government-funded research is already occurring in a voluntary and highly effective manner through a variety of publisher-initiated mechanisms and cooperative approaches.

"Full public access to scientific articles based on government funding has always been central to our mission. Competition demands it and timely access to quality peer-reviewed journals is fundamental to the scientific process," said Dr. Brian D. Crawford, chairman of the Professional Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP-PSP), and a Senior Vice President with the American Chemical Society. Americans have easy access to scientific and medical literature through public libraries, state universities, existing private-sector online database, as well as through their professional, academic, or business affiliations, low-cost online individual article sales, and innovative health literacy initiatives such as patientINFORM.

"The Cornyn-Lieberman bill would create unnecessary costs for taxpayers, place an unwarranted burden on research investigators, and expropriate the value-added investments made by scientific publishers --many of them not-for-profit associations who depend on publishing income to support pursuit of their scholarly missions, including education and outreach for the next generation of U.S. scientists," continued Dr. Crawford. "If enacted, S.2695 could well have the unintended consequence of compromising or destroying the independent system of peer review that ensures the integrity of the very research the U.S. Government is trying to support and disseminate."

Dr. Crawford explained that publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in publishing and disseminating peer-reviewed journals. These investments ensure the quality of U.S. taxpayer-supported scientific research by subjecting all articles to a rigorous technical review by experts in specialized fields prior to publication and pay for the development of technological innovations that enable broad web dissemination. "Mandating that journal articles be made freely available on government websites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments," explained Dr. Crawford. He said publishers are concerned that S.2695 would result in a significant loss of revenue from subscriptions, licensing, and individual article sales, thereby making it difficult for them to sustain and recoup the investments they make in support of scientific communication. The proposed bill was introduced on the first anniversary of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) adoption of its Public Access policy, which encourages the posting of journal articles based on NIH-funded research within 12 months of publication on its existing PubMedCentral database -- a policy that gained PSP/AAP member publisher support and yet remains in its early stages of government-led implementation. A departure from the NIH's voluntary approach, the Cornyn/Lieberman bill would mandate that 11 federal agencies create new systems and data repositories to enforce internet posting of government funded research within six months of publication. As the NIH's implementation of the policy has not yet progressed to the point where its impact can be assessed, publishers view the introduction of the Cornyn-Lieberman proposal as premature.

"No evidentiary record exists, and no impact studies have been conducted, to document the long-term cost to tax payers of government agencies developing yet another system to promote public access. Moreover, no consideration has been given to what the impact of this government mandate will be on publishers and scholarly societies ability to maintain their broad base of library and other customers worldwide and invest in independent peer review systems." said Allan Adler, the Association of American Publishers' Vice President for Legal and Government Affairs. He cautioned, "Responsible major U.S. government policy revisions must be based on a solid, researched understanding of the long-range impact of any policy changes. This perspective is conspicuously absent from the proposed legislation, which would cause severe harm to the publishing community, scientific societies, and taxpayers."

Mr. Adler said that publishers and scholarly societies urge that an independent study be conducted to measure the potential impact that any changes to the existing NIH policy or the adoption of the proposed Cornyn-Lieberman legislation would have on scientific quality, the peer review process, and the viability of numerous journals and societies--as well as the additional costs that would need to be shouldered by taxpayers.

Comments. Let's look at the major claims here one at a time.

  1. On the feared loss of revenue, my response is two-sided. On the one hand, there are good reasons to think that the FRPAA will not harm subscriptions. On the other hand, if it does, the public interest takes precedence. The mission of the publicly-funded research agencies is to advance science and research, not to protect the revenues of private-sector businesses.
  2. The claim that FRPAA is "duplicative" 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.
  3. The claim that "[f]ull public access to scientific articles based on government funding has always been central to our mission" --if it refers to open access and not to toll access-- is simply false. It hasn't been the AAP/PSP policy and it's not its policy now.
  4. The claim that peer-reviewed journal literature is available in public libraries is generally false. Very few public libraries carry scholarly journals. FRPAA is necessary because even academic researchers don't have sufficient access to the literature through academic libraries.
  5. The claim that FRPAA would "create unnecessary costs for taxpayers" begs the question. The Senators, university and library groups, and scientists think this expense is necessary --even to give full effect to the existing investment in research. Only publishers with a conflicting economic interest think it's unnecessary. In any case, how much are we talking about? The NIH estimates that the cost of its public-access program (even at 100% compliance) is only $2-4 million/year, about 0.01% of its annual budget. By contrast, the NIH spends $30 million/year on page charges and other subsidies to subscription-based journals. It's unseemly --and imprudent-- for the private-sector beneficiares of this largess to complain that a comparative pittance spent in the public interest is wasted. They might trigger an inquiry showing that the subsidy to journals that lock content away from the public is the truly unnecessary cost for taxpayers.
  6. The claim that FRPAA would "expropriate the value-added investments made by scientific publishers" is false. FRPAA only applies to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. It's very true that peer review is added value, but the bulk of that value is added by scholars donating their time and labor. No other form of added value is at stake here. Publishers add value through copy editing and mark-up, but under FRPAA they retain the exclusive right to distribute the articles with those enhancements --not just for six months but for 95 years (the life of copyright).
  7. The claim that any threat to publisher revenue is a threat to peer review is an old canard. First, as noted, the critical parts of peer review are performed by uncompensated scholars. Second, peer review is performed by a growing number of high-quality OA journals, not just by subscription-based journals.
  8. The claim that the NIH policy will do fine without a mandate is wishful thinking, and the claim that we haven't given it enough time is false. After one year of operation, the compliance rate is below 4%. The glass isn't even half full. There's no room for hopeful spin here. Publishers want the voluntary policy to work well enough to head off a mandate, but when groups without the same axe to grind look at the evidence --groups like the NIH's own Public Access Working Group and the National Library of Medicine's Board of Regents-- they conclude that the voluntary policy has failed, that the failure is not due to insufficient information about the policy or technical difficulties in the submission process, and that a mandate is necessary to raise the compliance rate.
  9. The AAP calls for another study. But it knows very well that there's no empirical evidence, outside physics, on how high-volume OA archiving will affect journal subscriptions. And in physics, publishers themselves acknowleldge that OA archiving has not caused journal cancellations. In fact, two journal publishers in physics, the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, host mirrors of arXiv, the OA repository that is supposed to threaten them. The only way to generate the kind of evidence that the AAP wants is to stimulate high-volume OA archiving in fields outside physics --for example, by adopting the FRPAA-- and study the results. In the absence of that, the call for another study is just a delaying tactic.
  10. Moreover, Senators Cornyn and Lieberman are not acting in an information vacuum. There's ample evidence that the current subscription system is dysfunctional. When the University of California studied the evidence in 2004, it concluded that "[t]he economics of [subscription-based] scholarly journal publishing are incontrovertibly unsustainable."