Eight major North American library associations have released their July 12 letter to Sen. Susan Collins in support of FRPAA. The letter will soon be online here and here. Meantime I'm quoting from a copy that John Ober sent as an attachment to the ScholComm list. Excerpt:
We write in strong support of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S. 2695)....S. 2695 would promote widespread, affordable, and effective dissemination of scientific and scholarly research results. For this reason, we encourage the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to conduct hearings on S. 2695.
Federally funded research is a public resource collected at public expense. Importantly, increased access to this research accelerates the pace of discovery and innovation and fosters economic growth.
It is critical that this new research be readily available to physicians, researchers, and members of the public, including those who are unaffiliated with or working in locations remote from libraries that subscribe to in increasingly expensive journals and databases developed from federally funded research. Indeed, results of a recent Harris Interactive poll show that the majority of U.S. adults believe that federally funded research findings should be available for free to doctors and the general public....
[T]he Internet offers an unprecedented and cost-effective means to accelerate scientific advancement. S. 2695 recognizes this potential and helps to facilitate its realization. Its key beneficiaries include:
Scientists and scholars, whose research will be more broadly read and who will have fewer barriers to obtaining the research they need.
Funders, who will gain from accelerated discovery, facilitation of interdisciplinary research methodologies, preservation of vital research findings, and an improved capacity to manage their research portfolios.
Taxpayers, who will obtain economic and social benefits from the leveraging of their investment in scientific research through effects such as enhanced technology transfer, broader application of research to health care provision, and more informed policy development....
This legislation is not a threat to journals and the peer review process. The Federal Research Public Access Act contains two key provisions that protect journals and the peer review process:
A delay of up to six months in providing access to articles via the public archive (versus immediate access for journal readers).
Inclusion in the public archive of the author’s final manuscript rather than the publisher’s formatted, paginated version preferred for citation purposes.
In some disciplines, freely accessible online archives have proven to supplement journal readership, not replace it. In physics, for example....
If Congress were to pass S. 2695, the most significant day-to-day effect on investigators would be improved access to research and increased impact for their own work. A growing number of studies demonstrate that research is cited more often when it is openly accessible on the Web. The process by which investigators deposit their work is expected to be relatively simple. NIH, for example, estimates that submitting a manuscript to their archive usually takes an investigator just 3–10 minutes.
This legislation will not take funding away from research to any material extent. The NIH, for example, estimates that the cost of its public access program would be $3.5 million if 100% of the 65,000 eligible manuscripts were deposited annually. That is a tiny fraction (about 0.01%) of the agency's $28 billion budget. It is also a small fraction of the $30 million per year the agency spends on page charges and other subsidies to subscription-based journals....
The organizations signing the letter are the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA), and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
