Open Access News

Advocates of open-access publishing say that research funded with taxpayers’ money should be freely available to all, without having to pay ever-increasing subscription fees for scholarly journals. Scientific publishers, however, assert that without those fees to pay publishing costs, many journals could fold and the quality of the science could suffer.

The current NIH open-access policy encourages, but does not require, researchers funded with NIH money to submit their papers to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online system, within one year of publication in a scholarly journal. That policy is not rigorous enough, says Peter Suber, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based open-access advocacy group.

Suber notes that an NIH progress report to Congress in January stated that among its funded researchers, the rate of compliance with the policy is less than 4 percent. Furthermore, he says, the 12-month lag time before the information is freely available is too long compared to the time frame in which medical and even biological research advances are made. The new bill [FRPAA] would address these issues by requiring that all federal agencies with budgets larger than $100 million make their funded researchers’ articles available within six months....

But some publishers are less sure that scientists understand the issues clearly - particularly when it comes to transferring costs. “The real issue, to my mind, is: What is the effect on science of having no charge to the user or subscriber?” says Fred Spilhaus, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, which publishes several peer-reviewed journals.

The peer-review process, where research articles are sent to other researchers for anonymous review before acceptance, can be expensive for publishers, Spilhaus says. If readers choose not to subscribe because they can read journals for free, peer-review costs and other costs of publication would have to be transferred somewhere - most likely to the authors, he says. Such a system also means journals could end up competing for authors’ submissions and money, rather than selecting authors on the basis of their research. “That’s very bad for the science itself,” he says.

Framing the question as a funding issue is misleading, however, Suber says. Subscribers are not likely to cancel their subscriptions, he says, as they would want to maintain access to other journal material, such as news stories, editorials and non-federally funded research articles, which would not be part of the federal archive. The Association of College and Research Libraries, which represents a primary group of subscribers and supports the new bill, has also stated that it does not see why libraries would cancel subscriptions. Furthermore, the current issue is one of open-access archiving, six months after the initial publication, not first-time publishing....