Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, November 03, 2008

More support for the Conyers bill from STM

STM has released its October 30 letter to the members of the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property --the committee holding the September hearing on the Conyers bill.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (“STM”) thanks your Committee for taking on the important task of protecting the work done by the many thousands of journal editors, publishers and publishing staff, in providing high-quality peer-reviewed and edited academic and scholarly journals through the introduction of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 6845)....

NIH’s mandatory deposit policy is unique with respect to government funding agency policies internationally. Issues concerning public funding and the dissemination of research results have been raised in numerous countries. To our knowledge, the proposals and policies of government agencies and private research institutions abroad do, in contrast to the NIH policy, support publishers and copyright models and recognize the importance of the investment and support both peer review and the need for high quality. Most of the research agencies that have adopted public access policies have flexible rather than mandated policies and exceptions are provided with respect to periods for postings, depending on the policies of individual journals. In addition, other agencies facilitate publisher compensation by allowing authors to include public access charges in their grants or charge back to the agency for public access....

Representatives from our association attended the hearing on H.R. 6845 which took place on 11 September 2008, and some comments were made by two of the witnesses, Dr Zerhouni of the NIH and Heather Joseph of ARL/SPARC, which we feel must be addressed.

The first concerns peer review. The sense of community and obligation on the part of the reviewers is a key factor in the unquestioned success of this system. However, the significant investments that publishers make in integrated and efficient systems for enabling, managing, and facilitating the submission, peer review, editing, web-posting, and interrelating of manuscripts are an integral part of this process and just as vital to the foundation of scholarly communication as peer review itself. The process of peer review is not “free” to anyone, but rests on a system of interdependent activities and value-given-for-value-received relationships that includes financial investments made by publishers.

The second issue we wish to address is interconnectivity and the use of the Internet. We agree with Dr Zerhouni’s statement that “…the connectivity of all available electronic sources of scientific information and their efficient exploitation with the new powerful engines of software that are used in the modern search engine technologies… is what 21st century science and health require…” The information that apparently was not shared at the hearing is that scholarly publishers have likely invested more money, more time, and more resources on web-related platforms, databases and projects that enable greater linking and connectivity than any other industry or Federal agency of which we are aware. As a result of these investments, more content is available to more people in more ways than at any time in human history....

Comments

  • See my analysis of the Conyers bill (in SOAN for October 2008) for a detailed rebuttal of the STM arguments.
  • Most of the points the STM adds in this letter were also added by Martin Frank, in a supplement to his testimony at the hearing.  My response to Frank's supplement also responds to the STM supplement.  But in particular I want to point out the error in the STM claim that the NIH policy is uniquely radical:
  • The NIH is not the only funder whose OA mandate makes no exception for dissenting publishers.  In my October article I list seven other funders whose policies are equally uncompromising:  the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), Cancer Research UK, Department of Health (UK), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US), Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), Medical Research Council (UK), and the Wellcome Trust (UK).  In the same article, I discuss the differences between policies that create loopholes or opt-outs for dissenting publishers and policies, like the NIH's, which do not.
  • There is an important sense in which the NIH policy is unique, but it cuts against the STM argument.  The NIH is the only medical research funder with an OA mandate, public or private, in any country, using an embargo longer than six months.  From this perspective the NIH policy is uniquely easy for publishers to accommodate, not uniquely difficult.
  • "[O]ther agencies facilitate publisher compensation by allowing authors to include public access charges in their grants...."  Also untrue.  One only has to read the policy FAQ (Question E3).  The NIH will pay reasonable publication fees at both OA journals and TA journals.
  • "The process of peer review is not “free” to anyone...."  Neither Zerhouni nor Joseph said it was free.  Everyone acknowledges that managing peer review has costs.  This is a straw man.  But as long as STM is bringing it up, TA journals are compensated by their subscribers for the costs of managing peer review.  If STM wants to say that the NIH policy endangers its subscriptions, it will have to produce evidence.  (See my article from September 2007, sections 5-10.)  If it wants to say that the NIH policy should not apply to peer-reviewed manuscripts, when the costs are borne by others, then (as I put it in my October 2007 article), it's forgetting "the timeline of events and the role of publisher consent. It's not the case that publishers invest in peer review and then learn after the fact, helplessly, that the NIH will host copies of the peer-reviewed manuscripts.  NIH-funded authors ask publishers in advance whether they are willing to publish under the terms required by the NIH.  The decision is up to the publisher."
  • "[S]cholarly publishers have likely invested more money, more time, and more resources on web-related platforms, databases and projects that enable greater linking and connectivity than any other industry or Federal agency of which we are aware. As a result of these investments, more content is available to more people in more ways than at any time in human history...."  This may be true, but it's beside the point.  We want OA for publicly-funded research not because access to other literature is declining or because publishers aren't spending enough, but because this research is publicly-funded, because taxpayers deserve access to it, because OA maximizes the return on our common national investment, because OA maximizes the usefulness of research, and because this is a large and important body of knowledge critical for healthcare and research progress in many different fields.