The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?

"This report examines the costs and benefits of increased public access, and proposals to either extend or overturn the NIH policy. It looks at increased public access to research results through the lens of “openness,” with a particular interest in how greater openness affects the progress of science, the productivity of the research enterprise, the process of innovation, the commercialization of research, and economic growth....This report finds that: Public-access policies should be judged by their impact on the society and the development and dissemination of high-quality scientific research and not by their impact on proprietary publishers, open-access publishers (publishers that rely on author payments rather than subscriptions) digital repositories or any particular means of disseminating knowledge. The NIH public-access policy has substantially increased public access to research results with benefits as described below that far outweigh the costs. Similar benefits can be expected from extending such a publicaccess policy to other major federal funders....No persuasive evidence exists that greater public access as provided by the NIH policy has substantially harmed subscription-supported STM publishers....The benefits of increased access are so great than any delay in availability of research should be minimized. A maximum six month delay, now employed by other government and private research funders has not been shown to have any negative impact; those who seek delay should bear the burden of proof that the benefits of delay to the development and dissemination of highquality research outweigh the costs....Digital depositories and other mechanisms for dissemination of knowledge provide high returns on investment; a solely private system would be unlikely to realize these returns...."