Open Access News

STM comments on U. S. National Institutes of Health Unfunded Mandate, a press release from the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), January 4, 2008.  Here it is in its entirety:

STM today expressed disappointment with the recent passage of legislation in the United States. This legislation (the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764)) includes provisions directing the National Institutes of Health to mandate that investigators who are supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health must deposit their manuscripts directly into the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

The legislation neither provides compensation for the added-value of services that these manuscripts have received from publishers nor does it earmark funds to ensure the economic sustainability of the broad and systematic archiving this sort of project requires. It also undermines a key intellectual property right known as copyright - long a cornerstone used to foster creativity and innovation.

STM believes that this legislation establishes an unfunded government mandate with an unknown impact on the advancement of science and puts at risk a system which has enabled more research to be available to more scientists in more countries than at any point in the history of science.

STM CEO Michael Mabe commented, "Other governmental bodies, such as the European Commission, have recognized the unique role and extensive investments made by scientific publishers in the organization of peer review, the management of publication processes, the production, access, distribution, preservation and digitization of scientific knowledge. They have called for an evidence-based approach toward questions like the broad and systematic archiving of scientific manuscripts to ensure that the current system of scientific publishing is not destabilized without reason. Regrettably, neither the acknowledgement of the key role that publishers play in the advancement of science, nor the commitment toward an evidence-based approach, nor the funding to support this broad mandate seems present in the current U.S. legislation."

Mabe continued: "STM publishers will, of course, comply with the laws of the nations in which they operate. At the same time, in order to fulfill their primary mission of maximizing the dissemination of knowledge through economically self-sustaining business models, they will continue a vigorous engagement with appropriate stakeholders on issues such as this where legislative change seems necessary or desirable."

Comments

• The STM paraphrase of the new legislation is inaccurate on one point.  The new law doesn't require deposit of manuscripts within 12 months of publication; it requires deposit immediately upon acceptance and free online release within 12 months of publication.
• The claim that the NIH mandate "undermines...copyright" is unargued.  It also flies in the face of the facts.  The STM (like the AAP/PSP in its response) overlooks a key clause in the new legislation:  "Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."  As I pointed out in my comment yesterday on the AAP/PSP response, "It's simply mistaken to say that the OA policy demanded by Congress requires violation of copyright.  It requires compliance with copyright."
• "STM believes that this legislation establishes an unfunded government mandate...."  It's true that the new legislation gives the NIH no new money specifically to implement this policy, although it does increase the NIH budget by 0.5% to $29.2 billion.  The NIH has already estimated to Congress that implementing the new policy, at 100% compliance from grantees, will cost $3.5 million/year.  That comes to about 0.01% of the NIH budget.  I call that a bargain, especially in light of the ways in which OA multiplies the value of valuable research.  Studies by John Houghton and others have shown that diverting a bit from the research budget in order to make all funded research OA significantly amplifies the return on investment: "With the United Kingdom's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and Development] at USD 33.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 1.7 billion; and...With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion."
• BTW, the $3.5 million/year that the NIH will spend to implement the OA policy is dwarfed by the $30 million/year it spends on page charges and other subsidies to toll-access journals.  The $30 million now pocketed by publishers like those represented by STM is also "unfunded".
• "Other governmental bodies, such as the European Commission, have recognized the unique role and extensive investments made by scientific publishers in the organization of peer review...."  This is true.  It's also true that other governmental bodies have already acted to mandate OA to publicly-funded research.  There are OA mandates now in place at public funding agencies in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, and the UK.  In many other countries there are policies in place that encourage without requiring OA to publicly-funded research.
• "[Other governments] have called for an evidence-based approach toward questions like the broad and systematic archiving of scientific manuscripts to ensure that the current system of scientific publishing is not destabilized without reason."  The most extensive government investigation into the costs and benefits of OA was undertaken by the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, and resulted (July 2004) in the strongest OA recommendations to date from any government panel, including a recommendation for an OA mandate to publicly-funded research.  See the voluminous oral and written evidence collected by the committee.  When publishers take on the question, they typically overlook the evidence that high-volume OA archiving in physics has not caused journal cancellations in the 15+ year life of arXiv, the evidence that high journal prices cause many more cancellations than OA archiving, and the evidence that libraries will have many incentives to continue their subscriptions even after funding agencies adopt strong OA policies.  They also tend to make evidence-free statements about the dire consequences of OA for peer review and copyright --just as the STM is doing here.  (For more detail on the evidence, including the evidence of publisher disregard for the evidence, see my article from September 2007.)
• "STM publishers will, of course, comply with the laws of the nations in which they operate."  I commend this statement, but it shows another misunderstanding of the new law.  The NIH policy will regulate NIH grantees, not publishers.  The question for publishers is not whether they will comply with a law addressing other actors, but whether they will continue to publish work by NIH-funded researchers, knowing that those researchers will be bound by a prior funding agreement to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central for eventual OA dissemination.