Open Access News

It had to happen.  After 125 university presidents and provosts have publicly endorsed FRPAA, the DC Principles Coalition found 10  who oppose it.  From today's announcement:

Senior academic officers from 10 institutions issued a letter to Senators John Cornyn (TX) and Joseph Lieberman (CT) expressing their concerns about the provisions of S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006." These institutions, which collectively make nearly $3 billion in annual research investments, expressed their concerns that mandating a six-month public release of journal articles would negatively impact the academic community and the publishers that disseminate their work.

In signing the letter in opposition to S.2695, Dr. Robert Rich, Senior Vice President and Dean, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, expressed his concern that "the legislation would damage the special relationship between scholarly societies and academic communities who work in partnership to ensure that these communities are sustained and extended, science is advanced, research meets the highest standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely information." Rich also expressed concern that "S.2695 would divert scarce Federal dollars away from research in order to provide a service already provided to the public by society publishers."

The nonprofit publishers comprising the DC Principles Coalition are among those who are able to provide public access to literature either immediately or within months of publication without government mandate through corporate and academic subscriptions. According to Martin Frank, Ph.D., Executive Director of the American Physiological Society (APS) and a member of the Coalition, "a six-month release mandate may force some journals to shift to a publication model requiring authors to pay for their publications through their Federal grants, diminishing funds available for research to benefit the public good."

Issued on September 22, 2006, the letter reads:

Dear Senators Cornyn and Lieberman:

The undersigned senior academic officers write to express our concerns about S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006."

We agree that the broadest dissemination of scientific literature is good for research. However, mandating a six-month public release of journal articles would have negative unintended consequences for the academic community. The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record, potentially undermines the publisher peer review process, and is not a smart use of funds that could be better used for research....

Even when federal funds support the research reported in journal articles, these funds do not cover the costs associated with turning raw data into archived scientific manuscripts. The cost of peer review, copy editing, formatting, printing, online publication, search engine development, and permanent archiving ranges from $2,500 - $10,000 per article.

At present, publishers cover these publication costs through the sale of subscriptions. A Federal policy mandating public access after six months would threaten the financial viability of many of these journals through the loss of subscription revenues, forcing them to identify other means to cover costs.

One such means is to shift the costs to the scientists/authors. This is the business model currently used by the Public Library of Science, for example, which recently increased fees to $2,500 per manuscript. These fees either come from the author's Federal research grant--thereby decreasing the amount available for research--or from the university, which could ultimately lead to higher institutional costs than those needed for journal subscriptions.

In fact, some studies have already shown that research intensive universities would have to pay considerably more to gain access to the same amount of research under an author- pays model than a subscription model....

Comments.

1. Although the letter opposes the OA mandate in FRPAA, the primary objection seems to be the six month embargo.  This is consistent with the recent pattern of publisher lobbying against the NIH policy:  many publishers are signaling that they can live with mandated OA if only the embargo stays at 12 months.
2. The objection to "free posting of unedited author manuscripts" is deceptive.  All the manuscripts in question have been peer reviewed but not all have been copy edited.  If the danger is that the articles are untrustworthy, then the publishers are complaining about their own peer review procedures.  If the danger is that copy-editing adds a crucial layer of fact-checking, then FRPAA gives publishers the right to replace the author's final manuscript with the copy-edited published edition.  Publishers here are complaining about their own choices.
3. The claim that "some studies have already shown that research intensive universities would have to pay considerably more to gain access to the same amount of research under an author- pays model than a subscription model" is also deceptive.  There are precisely three studies of this kind, and all three of them falsely assume that 100% of OA journals would charge author-side fees (when fewer than half do so now) and all three of them falsely assume that universities would pay 100% of these fees (when funding agencies already pay a large percentage of them and would continue to do so).  For more details, see my article on this point in SOAN for June 2006.
4. The other publisher arguments are all old and familiar.  See my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's version of the publisher argument against FRPAA.
5. The signers of today's letter are senior administrators at University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Children's Memorial Research Center at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and University of Tennessee System, the University of California at Davis, and the Oregon Health and Sciences University.  If you work at one of these institutions, let your administrators know that the signing individual does not speak for the faculty or for the research interests of the institution itself.