Public Access to Scholarly Publications: Public Comment | The White House

“On November 3, 2011, OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy] released a Request for Information (RFI) soliciting public input on long-term preservation of, and public access to, the results of federally funded research, including peer-reviewed scholarly publications as required in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. Below are the public comments received by OSTP during the comment period... The comments are presented individually, in chronological order, in the table below. Click on a name below to see that person's comments... “ Comment #226 was written by Maximilian Haeussler, PhD , Post-Doctoral Scholar in text mining and genome analysis, CBSE, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA. Excerpts from Dr. Haeussler’s comments read as follows: “As soon as scientific results are openly available, research groups like the one where I work and IT companies will use the opportunity to digitize, index, analyze, reformat the information in them and make them better accessible... Without open-access, any data mining is impossible. My example: Nature Publishing Group, which manage less than 5% of biomedical articles, has today sent me a quote on $85.000, for merely allowing me to run my software on their articles (the access is already being paid in millions of dollars by the UC library system)... I know that Springer, Elsevier and Nature Publications, among the biggest publishers, all outsource typesetting and sometimes printing to India. These are mundane tasks and require no special protection or justify why publishers claim intellectual property. Publishers have not contributed any significant intellectual input. Taxpayers fund the scientists, scientists produced the research and scientists act as peer-referees for publishers... I don't know of any innovative search or analysis functions of existing closed-access publisher archives. Elsevier has started sending their full content to interested researchers like me, but we are still at their mercy and they can cancel the project at any time...More common open-access would lower library costs extremely. But publishing has a price and publishing costs should be an accepted part of federal research budgets... I do not see a justification why taxpayer-funded research would be published as closed-access to subscribing University libraries and only be available to taxpayers after a 1 year period...”