Open Access News

Joan Leach, Hurdles for free debate charter, ScienceAlert, May 29, 2008.  Excerpt:

...[Australia's Senator Kim Carr] seems to be favouring a policy of “open access” to scientific publications for Australia [in addition to “outreach” to the lay public]....This sounds sensible but there’s a sting in the tail that is illustrated by US experience. Under direction from Congress, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires all grantees to engage in “outreach” – they can’t use the money for, say, better lasers.

NIH grantees must make the papers they publish freely available to the public. The NIH runs Pub Med Central (PMC), a free digital archive of journal literature from the biomedical and life sciences. All articles in PMC are free. PMC says it “aims to fill the role of a world-class library in the digital age. It is not a journal publisher.”

Prof Mary Ganguli, a psychiatrist who researches dementia at the University of Pittsburgh, has related her experience. Despite being a world-class researcher at a world-class institution, she has been the victim of the unsupported communication mandate that tells researchers to do something without monetary support.

For Ganguli this means putting her papers in prestigious journals on PMC, but the journals dislike this intensely. Why would other researchers looking for Ganguli’s work pay the journal for an article that they can already get for free?

To counter this, the journals levy a fee on researchers. Ganguli reports: “My tier one journal charges 1500 pounds sterling; I have not seen a figure lower than US$600 at any journal yet”.

Researchers eventually charge such fees to their grants, so eventually the taxpayer will pay twice for the research. Then, there are questions about protection of copyright and intellectual property, the foundation for potential commercialisation....

Comments.  This may be the highest concentration of misunderstandings about the NIH policy I've ever seen.

• "US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires all grantees to engage in “outreach” – they can’t use the money for, say, better lasers."  Both assertions are untrue.  The NIH requires OA to the results of NIH-funded research, not "outreach".  It also requires grantees to spend their research funds on research, including equipment, even if it allows them, optionally, use grant funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
• "Mary Ganguli...has been the victim of the unsupported communication mandate that tells researchers to do something without monetary support."  This seems to refer to the NIH policy requiring deposit in PubMed Central.  But the deposit is a 5-10 minute operation which doesn't require monetary support, any more than submitting a report at the end of the grant period (a much more time-consuming process) requires monetary support.  Moreover, a growing number of journals will deposit the article on the author's behalf, lifting this chore from the author's shoulders altogether.  But for grantees who don't publish in those journals, and who demand monetary support for this little chore, we should remember that they got a large research grant for their trouble. 
• "For Ganguli this means putting her papers in prestigious journals on PMC, but the journals dislike this intensely."  Some do, some don't.  Publishers who do dislike it pretend to speak for all publishers, but that pretense is self-serving and untrue. 
• "Why would other researchers looking for Ganguli’s work pay the journal for an article that they can already get for free?"  We should be clear:  researchers looking for someone's work can find and retrieve it more easily when there's an OA copy in a repository like PubMed Central.  So Leach's objection here is about publisher revenue, not about researcher productivity.  Now if journals dislike the NIH policy enough, they can refuse to accept work by NIH-funded authors.  But so far, none have done so.  The NIH policy doesn't affect the freedom of authors to submit work to the journals of their choice and doesn't affect the willingness of those journals to publish their work.  And it hugely increases the visibility and impact of their work.  On the larger, implied objection that the NIH policy will undermine journal revenue, see my detailed response in an article from September 2007 (esp. Sections 4-10).
• "To counter this, the journals levy a fee on researchers."  This sentence creates two false impressions:  that journals are converting to OA in response to the hated NIH policy, and that OA journals always charge author-side fees.  I don't know of a single journal that disliked the NIH policy so much that it converted to OA in response.  But journals do convert to OA all the time, for other reasons.  When they do, some charge author-side publication fees and some don't.  Leach doesn't seem to realize that OA journals use many different business models, and that charging a publication fee is just one of them.  Nor does she seem to realize that the majority of OA journals charge no fees at all or that more subscription-based journals (both by numbers and percentages) charge author-side fees than OA journals.
• "Researchers eventually charge such fees to their grants, so eventually the taxpayer will pay twice for the research."  This sentence creates four false impressions:  that all NIH-funded authors publish in OA journals, that all OA journals charge author-side fees, that all fees are paid out of research grants, and that it is OA (rather than the absence of OA) which causes taxpayers to pay twice.  On the last of these:  When authors of articles based on publicly-funded research publish in conventional, subscription-based journals, then taxpayers must pay twice to see them --once for the research grant and once for the subscription or pay-per-view fee.  When the same authors comply with the NIH policy, taxpayers only pay once, since those taxpayers can see the authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central without charge.  If some of those authors publish in fee-based OA journals and NIH pays the fee, then taxpayers are still paying just once, since the NIH does not allocate new funds to pay the publication fee, but merely allows grantees to use already-allocated grant funds for the purpose.
• "Then, there are questions about protection of copyright and intellectual property, the foundation for potential commercialisation...."  Here Leach is replacing an objection with a vague allusion to an objection.  What copyright questions concern her, exactly?  Under the NIH policy, authors must retain the right to comply with the policy and may transfer all other rights to the publisher.  Publishers may exploit those rights, including commercial exploitation, to the fullest.
• NB:  I haven't seen the statement by Mary Ganguli which Joan Leach summarizes here.  All my responses are directed to Leach's summary.