Open Access News

As presently drafted, the wording of the the timely and extremely welcome US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) stands to create needless problems for itself that could even make it fail under the already-gathering opposition from the publisher lobby. Yet the FRPAA's flaws are ever so easily correctable:

The gist of the problem is all there in this well-meaning quote by Senator John Cornyn (R, co-sponsor of the bill (with Senator Joe Lieberman, D: quotation is from Robin Peek's Newsbreak article in Information Today).

[Sen.  Cornyn]: "Making this information available to the public will lead to faster discoveries, innovations and cures..."

This same logic underlies the Bill itself.

The publisher lobby will (quite rightly) jump straight onto the two profound errors in this reasoning, and they will use it, for all its worth, against the Bill: (1) For most of the research literature, the [lay] public has neither the expertise nor the interest to read it.  (2) Making it accessible to the [lay] public, does not make for cures!

Yet the remedy is so absurdly simple: The pressing reason for making research accessible to everyone is not because the general public has a pressing interest in reading it, nor because the public’s reading it will result in cures. It is so that researchers -- those specialists by and for whom it was written, the ones with the expertise to use, apply and build upon it -- can access and apply it, to the benefit of the general public who paid for it....

The right way to put it is:

"Making this information available to all researchers who can use, apply and build upon it will lead to faster discoveries, innovations and cures, thereby giving American taxpayers a greater return on their research investment. As a side bonus, the tax-paying public too will have access to as much as they may feel they wish to read of the research they have funded."

Comment. (1) I agree with Stevan that the primary beneficiaries of FRPAA, and of every similar OA policy, are researchers, and that the benefits for lay readers are important but secondary. I've said so whenever the question has come up --for the NIH policy, the draft RCUK policy, the CURES Act, and now the FRPAA. (2) I also agree with Stevan that casting lay readers as the primary beneficiaries needlessly opens these policies to publisher objections. (3) However, I would distinguish the language of the sponsoring Senators from the language of the bill itself. The Senators may put researchers and lay readers on a par but there's nothing in the substantive provisions of the bill to support or require that emphasis. The problem is not with the bill but with some ways of pitching the bill. (4) I'm also more inclined than Stevan to be lenient with this way of pitching the bill, at least for the sponsoring Senators. The bill really will make publicly-funded research accessible to the taxpayers who paid for it, whether they are professional researchers or lay readers, and this really will benefit lay readers, whether these benefits are primary or secondary. It's natural, even irresistible, for an elected legislator introducing a new bill to point to every benefit for every constituent. If we had to choose, I'd rather see sponsors of good OA legislation be re-elected than to fine-tune their rhetoric in order to disarm every publisher objection. However, we don't have to choose. There are ways to point out the benefits for lay readers, and still put the accent on the benefits for researchers. (5) The FRPAA, like the NIH policy before it, uses the term "public access". In opposing the NIH policy, many publishers mistakenly assumed that the goal of public access was the goal of access for lay readers, and some are already making the same assmption about the FRPAA. We OA advocates shouldn't make the same mistake. "Public" doesn't mean "lay public" any more than it means "professional public". It means everyone.

Update. Stevan has posted a supportive response to my comment on several lists.