Open Access News

The drive for open access at the California stem cell agency moved forward last week with a presentation by University of California officials to the agency's Intellectual Property Task Force.

Following the Thursday session, Ed Penhoet, chair of the Task Force, said the group had heard "strong sentiment" for open access as described by the UC officials. But he noted that UC itself has not implemented open access policies even after three years of discussion. One UC official said he expected they may be approved next spring. Penhoet said CIRM will continue to work on the issue.

Open access means faster dissemination of research, more use of the information by other scholars and a reduction in cost to readers, according to the open access advocates....

Francisco Prieto, a CIRM Oversight Committee member, said that sharing of research and transparency is a "bedrock principle" at CIRM. He said that open access is becoming "the standard" and that "perhaps we should push it."

John M. Simpson, stem cell project director for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumers Rights, said, "We're paying for it. We ought to be able to see it."

But Oversight Committee member Duane Roth said the marketplace seemed to be dealing with the issue of open access. He said he was "not sure CIRM should be doing something NIH isn't." ...

One faculty member from UC Berkeley noted that young researchers in his lab opposed open access policies because of the likelihood that they would limit their ability to have their research published in the top scientific journals. Publication in such journals is the key to securing good faculty positions, they said....

Our comment:...In addition to Crow, John Ober, director of policy, planning and outreach, Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California, and Lawrence Pitts, professor, Department of Neurological Surgery, UC San Francisco, and former chair of the UC Academic Senate appeared before IP Task Force. The UC Berkeley faculty member that we mentioned got away before we could get his correct name. For more on open access and CIRM, see "fading print" and "call for open access."

Comments.

1. To Duane Roth, who "said the marketplace seemed to be dealing with the issue of open access...[and that] he was 'not sure CIRM should be doing something NIH isn't.'"  First, the marketplace cannot create a public policy to provide open access to publicly-funded research.  The call here is for just such a policy.  Second, since May 2005 the NIH has encouraged open access to all NIH-funded research, even if it hasn't required it.  Third, every oversight body with responsibility for the NIH policy, from its own Public Access Working Group to the NLM Board of Regents and Congress itself, has recommended that the NIH convert its OA encouragement to an OA mandate.  Fourth, the NIH Director, Elias Zerhouni, testified before Congress on April 4, 2006, that "it seems the voluntary policy is just not enough" to achieve the agency's goals. CIRM should learn from NIH's mistake, not repeat it.
2. To the Berkeley professor who "noted that young researchers in his lab opposed open access policies because of the likelihood that they would limit their ability to have their research published in the top scientific journals."  Your students are uninformed.  First, if they are talking about their preprints (manuscripts not yet peer reviewed or published), only a small and diminishing minority of journals will refuse to publish articles that have circulated as preprints.  Second, your students seem unaware that all OA journals and 70% of non-OA journals give blanket permission for their authors deposit their peer-reviewed postprints in OA repositories.  In short, publishing in top journals and providing OA to the same work is seldom a trade-off.  I cover both misunderstands and several others in my article, Six things that researchers need to know about open access.