White House Unveils Long-Awaited Public Access Policy - ScienceInsider

"In a victory for open access advocates, the White House science office today released a long-awaited policy aimed at sharing the results of federally funded research with the public. The policy will require that science agencies make papers that they fund freely available online within 12 months after the results appear in a journal. The policy follows several years of consultations and a petition to the White House from open access advocates last year. It appears to have found a middle ground between the two sides in a decadelong debate over so-called 'open access'—the issue of whether and when scientific papers funded with taxpayer dollars should be available, for free, to the public. Traditionally, publicly funded scientists have published their work in scholarly journals that charge fees for access to the papers. That system has broken down in recent years, however, with the advent of digital technologies and new research funding models. Many journals and scientific societies have resisted complete and immediate open access, arguing that it will destroy the revenue streams they need to survive. The new federal directive is a 'landmark' and a 'watershed moment,' declared a press release from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an open access lobbying group. The Association of American Publishers, which has called some public access mandates illegal and said they threaten the viability of journals, said the directive "outlines a reasonable, balanced resolution of issues around public access to research funded by federal agencies ...'  NSF and other agencies issued statements supporting the policy but not specifying how they will comply. The details "could vary by discipline, and new business models for universities, libraries, publishers, and scholarly and professional societies could emerge," NSF's statement says.  Myron Gutmann, head of NSF's social, behavioral, and economic sciences directorate, says that some NSF divisions are 'experimenting with things,' but that officially NSF doesn't have any agency-wide plan in the works. 'You could imagine an approach with a repository like PubMed Central; you could imagine a distributed approach with a database linking to outside things. You could imagine a hybrid. But we haven't gotten that far,' Gutmann says. Catherine Woteki, undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Research, Education, and Economics division, says her agency hopes to learn from NIH's experience with PubMed Central. 'There is software we might be able to adapt for our purposes,' she says.  The Association of American Publishers praised the directive's emphasis on working with publishers and the fact that the 12 month embargo is only a guideline that agencies can 'tailor' for particular scientific fields or for their mission. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which has been critical of many open access efforts, also likes the fact that the directive calls for linking to a paper in the journal's own archive. That is important because it draws readers to society Web sites with information such as notices of meeting as well as advertising. It could also save money, Frank says. 'You don't have to create a PubMed Central,' he argues."