Publishers and consumers of scientific journals reach consensus on ‘open access’

A committee of individuals drawn from all sides of the ongoing debate over free access to the peer-reviewed scientific literature has urged each federal agency that funds research to quickly develop and implement its own policy for providing the material to the public for free. In a consensus report commissioned by the House Committee on Science and Technology , the group known as the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable left the divisive issue of “embargoes"—the post-publication period when journals restrict access to scholarly articles to their subscribers—and their duration, up to individual agencies. While an embargo of up to 12 months will suffice for journals in many science disciplines, the committee said, a longer duration may be needed for those of other fields, particularly for humanities and social sciences.

The panel’s membership included librarians, university provosts, academic researchers, and publishers (including Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today), and was chaired by John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. The roundtable report also reaffirmed the necessity for peer review, and emphasized that the various public-access databases should be built to be interoperable from the outset. The Office of Science and Technology Policy should guide the development of federal-wide standards to ensure development of interoperable navigation tools and other applications, and an advisory committee on public access should be created to guide OSTP.

Withheld endorsement

The roundtable’s consensus, however, was marred by the decision of two of its 14 members to withhold their endorsement. Mark Patterson, director of publishing for Public Library of Science (PLoS), a publisher of open-access online journals, said the report “stops far short of recognizing and endorsing the opportunities to unleash the full potential of online communication to transform access to and use of scholarly literature.” Patterson argued that the public should get “comprehensive public access to the research that they paid for, with no delay and no restrictions on reuse.” The other dissenter, Y.S. Chi, vice chairman of publishing giant Elsevier, complained that the recommendations included “an overly expansive role of government.”

Since April 2008, all peer-reviewed articles that are published from research funded entirely or in part by the National Institutes of Health are required to be made available for free no later than one year after their publication in a scientific journal. That work is deposited in the PubMed Central database operated by the NIH’s National Library of Medicine. The open-access mandate was enshrined in an NIH appropriations bill after a years-long struggle between journal publishers and open-access proponents. The requirement has not yet spilled over to apply to research that is funded by other agencies, such as NSF, Department of Energy, NASA, or Department of Defense.Many scientific societies depend on their journal publishing for much, or most of their revenues. They have argued, with limited success, that libraries would likely drop their subscriptions if they could simply obtain the articles from the free repositories that are operated by federal agencies. Open-access mandates, of course, would apply only to that body of work that is publicly funded.

House S&T Committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) said the roundtable’s recommendations “strike a good balance by allowing public access to the results of research paid for with federal funds, while preserving the high quality and editorial integrity of scholarly publishing so critical to the scientists and seasoned science writers on whose expertise we all depend.” A committee staffer said a hearing on open access could be held in the spring. But the panel’s attention has turned to renewing the America COMPETES Act, the multifaceted 2007 law that aims to restore US competitiveness, which is set to expire on 1 October.

The roundtable released its work a few days before the 21 January close of a public comment period on OSTP’s own review of the open-access issue. Officials at OSTP said that once they have completed their analysis of the more than 400 comments that were submitted, their findings will be presented to an OSTP-led interagency committee on information and innovation. That group could then develop policy recommendations calling for agency actions. The officials did not provide a timescale for the completion of that process.

OSTP’s review occurs in the context of Obama’s directive—issued on his first full day in office—for agencies to take steps wherever possible to improve openness and transparency in their operations.

In the Senate, a bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373) , introduced in July 2009 by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) would require that agencies provide free access to the articles from research they sponsor within six months of their publication in a journal. But that bill has yet to have had a hearing, despite having been referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which Lieberman chairs. No comparable measure has been introduced in the House.

David Kramer