Open Access News

John Willinsky, The Publisher's Pushback against NIH's Public Access and Scholarly Publishing Sustainability, PLoS Biology, January 27, 2009.  Excerpt:

The dying light of the George W. Bush presidency was marked by, among other things, a legislative move to derail recent gains in the federal government's opening of science. In particular, the innocuous sounding “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (HR 6845) introduced into the House by John Conyers, Jr. (DEM-MI), on 9 September 2008 was poised to shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, as well as forestall the spread of this open-access spirit to other areas of federally sponsored research and scholarship. Hearings were held, but the bill did not make it through the House. End of story? Not quite....

What is strangely amiss in the publishers' support for outlawing the NIH Public Access Policy is that they support the upshot of this initiative with their own current copyright policies.  While a growing number of open-access journals provide immediate access to the published version, even subscription-based publishers had originally been happy enough to grant authors the right to do what they were already doing, which was putting PDFs of their articles up on their websites....Now, as indicated by their support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, publishers are taking a stand against archiving. As the International Association of STM Publishers recently put it, “publishers do not believe that self-archiving offers a sustainable alternative for scientific publishing”.

One reason for the publishers' change of heart is that archiving is catching on, amid growing public expectations that research is a public good that should be made freely available online....

In testifying last September in support of the bill...,Martin Frank, Executive Director of the American Physiological Society (APS), insisted that the issue was not access rights but revenue streams....

Frank's stance makes it clear that access itself it not the issue. After all, APS's 17 journals already make their contents free after 12 months,...exceeding the terms of the NIH mandate (as APS makes the final published version freely available)....What matters, then, as Frank pointed out, was that APS “can modify [its current free access policy] should 12 months prove disadvantageous to the Society's business model”....

For STM publishers, the NIH mandate “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”. But is the opposite not true? To insist that the current publishing economy must be sustained places the system at risk, and all the more so amid the current economic downturn, which is bound to affect research library budgets in the coming year. The point has been brought home by Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), who testified in opposition to the Fair Copyright bill on behalf of the leading research libraries, which can not sustain subscriptions to as many journals as they would like: “This situation [in which libraries can afford access to only a portion of the literature] is exacerbated by the continued rapid escalation in price of journal subscriptions, which puts libraries in the position of having to cancel subscriptions”.

[T]he real battle for the future of science is not about NIH's provision of delayed access to author's drafts. It is about efforts to protect unsustainable revenue streams amid the capitalization of a public good to a degree that arguably undermines what is basic to the progress of science and useful arts. If the publishers' exclusive ownership of this body of work enables them to charge what they will, on their own terms, then what is at risk is the delicate-at-best balance between public interests in such learning and private investments in bringing it to the widest possible audience....

Publishers, who could once count on no one giving a second thought, least of all researchers, to transferring to them the copyright for the entire research corpus, article by article, should have sufficient vision to see that a new civil rights issue is emerging over access to, as well as control over, such knowledge....

PS:  Hear, hear.  See my article from October 2008, analyzing the Conyers bill in detail and showing the false assumptions in the rhetoric of the publishing lobby in support of it.  Also see my point by point rebuttal to the STM briefing document.